Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By simmons on June 30, 2017

BERLIN The Austrian Constitutional Court said Friday that the government had acted legally when it seized the apartment complex in which Hitler was born, the latest and most likely last chapter in the long battle for ownership of the Nazi dictators birthplace.

The court said in a statement that a law passed late last year allowing the expropriation of the three-story building was in the public interest, commensurate and not without compensation, and therefore not unconstitutional.

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Austrian law prohibits the promotion of Nazi ideology, including Holocaust denial or the display of swastikas.

Seizing the building enables the government to prevent it from becoming a site for neo-Nazi activity, the court said, after hearing arguments following its decision to take ownership from Gerlinde Pommer, the longtime owner who had refused to sell the property.

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The owner argued that there are other possibilities to make sure there is no misuse of the house, said Wolfgang Sablatnig, a spokesman for the court, and representatives of Austria argued they do not want to let the house become a symbol for neo-Nazis, and the only way to make sure that there is no symbolic misuse is to seize it.

Pommer, whose home was seized in January, did not attend the hearing because of health reasons and to avoid the media, Sablatnig said.

Sablatnig said Pommer could appeal to the European Court of Human Rights or to an Austrian court with the aim of increasing her compensation for the home.

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Hitler was born inside the complex, in Braunau am Inn, near the Austrian-German border on April 20, 1889, in an apartment his parents had rented above a tavern on the first floor. Fearing that the structure would become a site for Nazi glorification, the Austrian government assumed its main lease in 1972.

Officials have tried to buy the building from Pommer on numerous occasions since 1984, but she has refused to sell, even when her last tenants left in 2011 after she forbade renovations. After negotiations to purchase the building stalled last year, the government passed the law permitting it to be seized.

Gerhard Lebitsch, the lawyer representing Pommer, argued that expropriation should not have been allowed for reasons of public interest, as the homes appeal as a pilgrimage site would remain even if the property changed hands.

A concrete purpose of expropriation is missing, Lebitsch said just before the hearing last week. The Austrian legislature has no concrete plans for a use of this house. The Republic of Austria rents the building for 45 years now; it would have been easily possible for the renter to practice a reasonable use in the past years and decades.

But Austrian officials contended that a long-term rental agreement would be insufficient. Far-reaching architectural transformations can only be made by the owner, Hermann Feiner of the Interior Ministry said at the hearing, according to the Austria Press Agency.

Read the original:

Austria's top court upholds seizing of Hitler's birthplace - The Boston Globe

Category: Holocaust Denial
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