Charity to move into Hitler's birthplace: report

VIENNA: An Austrian charity plans to move into the building where Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was born and open a centre helping immigrants integrate into society, a newspaper reported Wednesday.

"If the conditions are acceptable, we are going to do it," Karl
Osterberger, head of the Volkshilfe non-governmental organisation, told the Kurier daily in an article to be published Thursday.

"Of course having a charity installed there would have a great symbolic effect," he said.

The listed building in the northern town of Braunau am Inn where Hitler was born in 1889 has been vacant for more than a year since the previous occupant, a workshop for the disabled, moved out.

Braunau's mayor Hannes Waidbacher ruffled feathers last year when he said he was open to the unremarkable yellow building being turned into flats. Currently it is privately owned with the interior ministry as tenant.

Other suggestions include turning the building, where Hitler lived until he was three, into a historical centre. Outside is a memorial stone warning about fascism taken from the quarry of the nearby Mauthausen former concentration camp.