Austrian government to expropriate Hitler’s birth house

The Austrian parliament has voted in favor of expropriating the house where Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was born after years of legal wrangling over the issue.

Austrian MPs on Wednesday passed a bill allowing the government to seize the house in the northern town of Braunau am Inn, near the Austro-German border.

The owner of the house, Gerlinde Pommer, had refused to sell the building to the government despite repeated requests or to allow renovations in the dilapidated house.

Pommer, who is a local resident, will now be given compensation by the government.

The building had passed down to Pommer by her mother in 1977 and been in the family since 1912.

Officials said on Thursday that the building would now be given to a charity organization to support mentally-challenged people suffering from learning disability.

The 800-square-meter building, which served as a school and a library in the past, had previously been rented by the charity as a day center and workshop for people with special needs. But the charity organization was forced to relocate its operations years ago when the reclusive owner did not allow renovations in the 19th-century edifice.

The government then rented the building to prevent it from becoming a gathering site for neo-Nazis.

Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 to parents of insignificant status in a rented room on the top floor of the building. When he was three, his family moved to Passau, Germany.

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