Razing Hitler’s House

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/opinion/razing-hitlers-house.html

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Shortly after Braunau am Inn, an Austrian city on the border with Germany, surrendered to the United States in May 1945, the Americans stopped a group of German soldiers from destroying the house where Adolf Hitler was born, which had served as something of a Nazi shrine during his dictatorship. Many in the city came to regret the American action.

Like other such sites associated with the Nazis, the nondescript three-story house at 15 Salzburger Vorstadt saddled the city and Austrian governments with a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t predicament: if they razed the house they would be accused of denying the past; if it remained standing it risked attracting unrepentant Nazis — as it did, in fact, for decades after the war.

The quandary has been far greater for the Germans, whose land is riddled with unwanted monuments to the Nazi past. In the first years after the war, the tendency in West Germany was to efface the past; in later years, partly at the prompting of Jews, the Germans acknowledged the need to maintain memorials of Nazi crimes. “Fight forgetfulness,” Elie Wiesel, the late Holocaust survivor and chronicler of Nazi crimes, exhorted German youths at a conference in 1987 on what to do with the Wannsee Villa, the Berlin mansion where the “final solution” was adopted by Nazi officials. “Reject any attempt to cover up the past.”

The authorities in Braunau am Inn, however, had another problem: the building was privately owned, and the owners refused to sell it. So for decades the city leased the house while pondering what to do.

Now, at last, following the recommendation of a historical commission “to permanently prevent the recognition and the symbolism of the building,” the Austrian government has decided to seize the house and either tear it down or totally rebuild it, and on Tuesday took the first step toward expropriating it.

At this point, that is for the best. Austria has long abandoned the noxious pretense of being the “first victim” of Nazi Germany. And the house in Braunau am Inn has only a tiny role in Nazi history. Hitler’s family moved out when he was only 3, he showed no later interest in his birthplace, and no terrible decisions or crimes are associated with it. Unlike the Wannsee Villa, say, there is no lesson for townspeople or visitors to absorb at 15 Salzburger Vorstadt, and there should be nothing there for neo-Nazis to venerate.