Austria’s interior minister announced in a statement on Tuesday that the nation will convert the house where Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was born into a police station. The move came in part as a means of preventing the structure from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine, according to Reuters.
“The house’s future use by the police should send an unmistakable signal that this building will never again evoke the memory of National Socialism,” said Wolfgang Peschorn, Interior Minister of the Austrian interim government, in a statement quoted by Reuters.
The ministry statement said that the government is willing to invite architects from all of Europe to suggest redesigns for the 17th-century building, a subject of long dispute by its former owner, so as to turn it into a local police office by the first half of 2020.
Hitler, who ruled Nazi Germany in the period (1933-1945), initiated World War II (1939–1945) that killed over 75 million people.
