Hitler's birth home
Hitler's birth homeReuters

The house in Austria where Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was born will be converted into a human rights training center for police officers, Austria’s Interior Ministry announced Wednesday, according to CNN.

The building in the northwestern town of Braunau am Inn will accommodate the facility along with a police station, for which the Austrian government disclosed plans in 2019.

The decision was made based on the recommendations of an interdisciplinary expert commission concerned with depriving the property of its “mythical appeal to extremist circles,” the ministry said in a statement quoted by CNN.

The conversion – which will cost an estimated 20 million euros – is expected to be completed in 2025, with the police moving in the following year.

Hitler was born in an apartment in the building on April 20, 1889 and lived there until his family left when he was three years old.

The government took control of the building in December of 2016, after MPs approved an expropriation law specifically aimed at the property.

The move came after years of wrangling with the owner of the home, Gerlinde Pommer, who had been renting the house to the interior ministry since the 1970s and refused to sell it or carry out essential renovation works.

Pommer later campaigned to be compensated in full for the loss of her property. A court subsequently ordered the Austrian government to pay Pommer 1.5 million euros.

Hitler's birth home has attracted neo-Nazis and other extremists for years, with extremists making the trip to take a picture in front of the building. Glorifying the Nazi era is a crime in Austria.