Residents of Hitler's birthplace tired of link

(22 Jul 2016) Adolf Hitler was born here but Ivonne Bekking gestures toward a nearby baroque church steeple when asked what she tells tourists looking for landmarks in her home town of Braunau am Inn in Austria.
Standing in front of the Renaissance-era building where Hitler spent his first three years, Bekking said that at school they were taught to always point in the direction of the church tower.
When asked where she's from, said Bekking, her answer is "the town with the third-highest church tower" in Austria.
Bekking's response speaks volumes. The townsfolk of Braunau am Inn are tired of being defined as in some way linked to the Nazi dictator just because he was born here 127 years ago.
But they are ambivalent about government plans to seize the building from Gerlinde Pommer, its reclusive owner, even though she has steadfastly prevented local and federal efforts to diminish its allure for Hitler admirers, including turning it into an anti-Nazi memorial.
Most people are against suggestions that it should be demolished.
German Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka floated that option this month ahead of government plans to put a draft law allowing the state to take ownership of the building to a parliament vote later this year.
Sobotka's ministry has rented the house since 1972 to make sure it does not fall into the hands of Hitler admirers. He describes razing the house as "the cleanest solution" in efforts to erase any memory of the dictator.
Taking that idea one step further, DOW, the government-supported anti-Nazi research centre, suggests that a supermarket be erected in its place, but zoning laws stand in the way of demolition.
The five-centuries old house is designated as a monument, not because of Hitler but for its historic and architectural value. Putting a wrecking ball to it would leave an ugly gap in the row of similar Renaissance-era buildings lining the cobble-stoned streets of this town of 16,600.
Beyond that, local politicians say that pulling the house down would send the wrong signal, signaling guilt about its existence among townsfolk.
The owner refused a request by Braunau officials to let the city mount a sign on the house warning of the evils of the Nazi past. But an inscription on a chunk of stone on public property near the building culled from the granite pits of the former Mauthausen concentration camp where inmates were worked to death calls out to passersby: "Never again fascism, millions of dead remind."
The building remains a draw for Braunau visitors - some ordinary tourists, others on a darker journey.
But not only townsfolk oppose destroying the house. Historians point out that it is one of the few remaining structures directly linked to Hitler.
A house in nearby Leonding, where he spent some teenage years, is now used to store coffins for the town cemetery. There, the tombstone marking the grave of Hitler's parents, a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis, was removed last year at the request of a descendant.
A school Hitler attended in Fischlham, also near Braunau, displays a plaque condemning his crimes against humanity.
The underground bunker in Berlin where Hitler committed suicide on 30 April 1945, was demolished after the war. It was left vacant until the East German government built an apartment complex around the site in the late 1980s. The apartments, which are still occupied, overlook the German capital's monument to victims of the Holocaust.
Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AP_Archive
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/APArchives ​​
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/APNews/
You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/e136d36d3b85a2c7bd16cba8dc6614a0

Видео Residents of Hitler's birthplace tired of link канала AP Archive