Braunau will never not be Hitler's birthplace
But locals disagree what this means for their town's identity
Long-term readers of ZEITGEIST may recall that I went through an Austrian phase a couple of years ago. I visited Vienna at the time, discussing East Germany with Austrians, and I found myself at the Austrian Embassy in London on several occasions, contributing to or listening to discussions on history and its implications. Those were fascinating experiences that highlighted the close intertwining of Germany and Austria, as well as the differences in their outlooks on 20th-century history.
On the whole, I would say that Austria takes a somewhat more relaxed and distanced stance regarding the two world wars, Nazism, and the Cold War, while seemingly drawing much of its current-day identity from pre-1914. In Vienna, it’s perfectly possible to sip a Wiener Melange coffee as a horse-drawn carriage clatters by while you think of Sissi, Franz and Habsburg pomp. In Berlin, you cannot escape the trials and tribulations of the 20th century. Its grey concrete landscape, with large gaps in between, the bitterly contested memorials, and the painfully neutral new builds remind you at every corner that this is a traumatised city.
But there is one historical figure, perhaps the most infamous one of them all, that forces both Germany and Austria to look in the same rear-view mirror: Adolf Hitler. Born on the Austro-German border, he became obsessed with Germany and eventually renounced his Austrian citizenship. He rose to rule Germany but annexed his native Austria, making both countries complicit in the horrors that followed. Austria as a whole may not have taken this history on as an integral strand of its modern-day identity in the way that Germany has. But there is one Austrian town that is confronted with Hitler’s legacy every day.
I received an email last week from Braunau am Inn, the birthplace of Adolf Hitler. Eight decades after the end of the Second World War, the email informed me, the town remains locked in a deep and complex struggle over how to reconcile its history with its identity, caught between efforts to “neutralise” its association with Hitler and calls to confront and build something meaningful from that legacy.
Braunau is a small, picturesque town on Austria’s border with Germany. Yet, for many outsiders, including tourists, its identity is centred around a single building: Salzburger Vorstadt 15, an unassuming but rather pretty yellow house near the town square. It was here, on April 20, 1889, that Hitler was born. Then, a humble inn, Hitler’s parents rented a flat there shortly before his birth. The family lived there only until their son was three years old before moving to other towns.
During the Nazi era, the building was turned into a propaganda site, and after 1945, it returned to private ownership. In the postwar years, Austrian authorities wrestled with how to handle the building, eventually leasing it to prevent its use by far-right groups.
Over the decades, the building changed hands and purposes many times, serving at various points as a library, a school, and a care centre for people with disabilities. Yet its very existence continued to provoke discomfort, with proposals ranging from demolition to conversion into a memorial. It’s a symbol of Austria's uneasy relationship with its Nazi past and the persistent question: what should be done about the place where Hitler was born?
In recent years, this question has taken on new urgency. In 2016, the Austrian government took possession of Hitler’s birth house to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi pilgrimage site. It later announced plans to remodel it into a police station, a decision intended to “neutralise” the building by turning it into a symbol of state authority. Some have argued that Braunau should do the same thing as a town: override its Hitler legacy and hope it will fade in the process.
Critics view the “neutralisation” approach as a form of historical erasure, arguing that it sidesteps moral and educational responsibilities. This tension between erasing and confronting extends into the very fabric of Braunau’s streets and public spaces. The town has found itself at the centre of heated debates over how it names its streets, what kind of memorials it displays, and how it speaks about itself in the shadow of Hitler’s birth.
One of the most visible symbols of this tension is the memorial stone that stands in front of the Hitler birth house. Installed in 1989, it was brought from the Mauthausen concentration camp quarry and bears a simple inscription that doesn’t mention Hitler by name: “For peace, freedom and democracy. Never again fascism. Millions of dead admonish.”
For many, the stone is a modest but essential acknowledgement of the horrors associated with Hitler’s legacy. Yet, it too has not been immune to controversy. At one point, the memorial was removed, sparking public outcry, before it was eventually returned to its original place. Its presence today feels loaded with meaning, a reminder of Braunau’s identity crisis.
Discussions have moved to the names of the town’s streets. One case that was brought to my attention was that of Dr. Kriechbaum-Stiege, named after Eduard Kriechbaum, a physician and ethnologist who held an important local office during the Nazi era. Historian Andreas Maislinger, a longtime advocate for active remembrance and the founder of the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service, has proposed renaming the street Ernest und Valerie Lowe-Stiege in honour of a Jewish couple who returned to Austria in the late 1940s and had two sons in Braunau. Maislinger argues that keeping the name of a figure associated with the Nazi period sends the wrong message in a town already burdened with symbolic weight. “Braunau needs a reframing,” he argues, not neutralisation.
However, not everyone agrees. Opponents of renaming argue that such actions are politically motivated, disruptive to local identity, or part of a broader trend of “cancel culture.” Some residents and politicians believe the best course is to downplay the connection to Hitler altogether, avoiding what they see as unnecessary provocation or the risk of attracting even more attention to a dark chapter of history. These voices call for a more “neutral” Braunau — one that focuses on being a normal town rather than a perpetual site of historical reckoning.
Yet for others, normalisation is not an option. They argue that the town’s identity, no matter how uncomfortable, is indelibly linked to Hitler’s birth. Rather than avoiding or obscuring this connection, they believe Braunau must actively reckon with it, using its unique position to educate, commemorate, and warn future generations. This view sees the legacy not as a curse, but as a responsibility.
The result is a town caught between competing impulses: to move on or to confront. This unresolved tension mirrors Austria’s own evolving reckoning with its role in the Nazi regime, a reckoning that, for decades, was avoided through the myth of Austria as “Hitler’s first victim.” When I was last in Vienna, earlier this year, I was told that a lot has changed on this in recent years. Austria will never be like Germany in its memory culture, but it’s begun to reckon with its Nazi past.
As for Braunau, it will never stop being the place where Hitler was born. That fact is immovable. But how the town chooses to live with it remains undecided. It’s not merely a debate about buildings or street signs, but about identity, values, and memory politics. As Austria continues to navigate the legacy of its darkest chapter, Braunau stands at the crossroads, not of history itself, but of how history is remembered, represented, and lived.
No doubt this will rumble on , always a tricky decision, I’m not really that happy when history gets buried or in some cases banned , years ago I visited monuments park in Moscow , they’ve put all their contentious statues in it ( I’m not suggesting the same for hitler ) so there are solutions and whatever the decision is it won’t please everyone, I’ve always found it puzzling that 2 of the biggest mass murderers in modern times we’re in fact both foreigners themselves, the other being Stalin who was born in Georgia 🇬🇪,
There’s no escaping that history I’m afraid. Best thing is to confront it, tell the truth, contextualise it. In the UK we have countless streets, public buildings and spaces named for men from our imperial past with all that entails. I don’t support name changes or pulling down statues; that just makes the iconoclasts feel better about themselves for a moment. Rather tell the story of the name, tell the truth for good or ill. There is just one problem. I’m neither historian nor academic and history is, as they always say, complicated. And the general public don’t like nuance. Good article Katja.