VIENNA: A new row erupted on Tuesday over Austria’s plans to raze the house where Adolf Hitler was born, with experts saying they opposed the demolition only a day after a decision was announced.

After a lengthy legal battle with the current owner, Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka said on Monday the listed property in the northern town of Braunau would be “torn down” to stop it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine. A new building on the site would be used by a charity or the local authorities, he told Austrian media. Sobotka said the decision was based on recommendations from an expert committee.

But several of the panel’s 13 members denied on Tuesday that the commission had backed the push to bulldoze the yellow corner house where Hitler was born on April 20, 1889. “The demolition option had been explicitly mentioned in the [government’s] proposal and was not approved by us,” said Clemens Jabloner, the ex-president of Austria’s highest administrative court, in a joint statement with historian Oliver Rathkolb.

Instead, the committee had suggested a “profound architectural redesign”. “A demolition would amount to negating Austria’s Nazi past,” the pair said. Braunau mayor Johannes Waidbacher, another panel member, also said there had been “no mention of demolition” in the report.

Responding to the criticism, Sobotka on Tuesday insisted the main goal was to destroy any “resemblance” to the current house, “especially its outer appearance”. Whether this process would an involve an actual demolition could be discussed, he told journalists in Vienna. The government would put the new building design out to tender, Sobotka added.

Published in Dawn October 19th, 2016