MAIL ONLINE: The owner of the house where Adolf Hitler was born wants to put it on the market with a likely asking price of over £2million.
But the local authority in Braunau-am-Inn, Austria, has vowed to try to find a way of blocking any sale because it fears it could land up in the hands of extreme right-wingers who would turn it into a grotesque shrine to his memory.
The mayor of Braunau, Gerhard Skiba, said ideally the town council would like to purchase it and so control its future fate.
But there is not enough money in the town coffers to buy the property, Salzburger Vorstadt 15.
He says he will appeal to the government in Vienna to help the town purchase the property if the owner goes ahead with the sale.
It was in a room on the first floor of the three-storey, 2,000 square foot house – the ground floor of which was a pub called Gasthof Zum Pommer – that Hitler’s mother Klara gave birth to her infamous son on April 20, 1889.
She and her husband Alois, a stern local customs official, rented a suite of rooms above the pub and continued to live in it until 1892 when they moved to Linz.
Alois, a drunkard, often availed himself of the beer on sale in the saloon downstairs before returning to the family home to abuse his timid wife 24 years his junior.
The house is still owned by the family after which the pub took its name. Owner Gelinde Pommer says she wants to sell because the tenants for the past two decades, handicapped people who worked and lived there under the care of a disabled organisation, are moving to more modern premises in January, and she no longer wants to have the responsibility for it.
She has not yet advertised it, but estate agents have suggested it will have an asking price of about £2million. She was not available to comment. >>> Allan Hall | Thursday, November 05, 2009
