Austrian government ordered to pay €1.5m to former owner of Hitler’s childhood house

Authorities fear empty house could be turned into neo-Nazi shrine

The former owner of Adolf Hitler’s house has been awarded €1.5m (£1.3m) by an Austrian court that ruled she was underpaid by the government which forced her to sell it two years ago.

Fearing the 3-storey property, where the fascist leader was born in 1889, would become a shrine for neo-Nazis, a compulsory purchase order was placed on it and Gerlinde Pommer was paid €310,000.

Ms Pommer inherited the building in Braunau am Inn, a small town on the border with Germany, in 1977. It has been in her family for more than a century.

However, Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann bought the house from the Pommer family in 1938 and turned it into a shrine for Hitler enthusiasts and tourists.

After the war it was returned to the family’s ownership, but since the 1970s the Austrian government has been the main leaseholder to ensure no contemporary followers of the dictator could use the property.

Although a large stone plaque outside explicitly states “never again fascism, millions of dead remind us”, neo-Nazis regularly make pilgrimages to the property and take photos in front of it.

Until 2011 the building housed a disability organisation, but when the authorities asked Ms Pommer to make the property more wheelchair friendly, she ended the lease. It has been unused ever since.

After several failed attempts to fully buy the house from Ms Pommer, the state eventually ordered the compulsory purchase of the building.

Ms Pommer first launched a legal challenge against the legislation, which allowed the government to buy the property, but in 2017 Austria’s constitutional court decided it was in the public interest to prevent the house being used to glorify Nazism.

At the time, the interior minister Wolfgang Sobotka said: “We will make sure that this building will never fall into the wrong hands to become a site of pilgrimage for those stuck in the past.”

Mr Sobotka had previously suggested it should be demolished entirely, but critics have argued this would amount to a denial of Austria’s role in the rise of Nazism.

Now a court in the northern Austrian town of Ried im Innkreis has ruled the government substantially shortchanged Ms Pommer, and accepted her valuation of €1.5m.

In an earlier hearing Ms Pommer’s lawyer, Gerhard Lebitsch, said the house was much more valuable than the state thought.

“The car park is the only parking spot in the downtown area that’s big enough to merit mentioning,” he said.