Braunau has decided to rename two streets named after Nazis. Here’s what this means for Austria’s reckoning with its Holocaust history.
The Austrian hometown of Adolf Hitler has decided to rename two streets that commemorated Nazis following years of complaints by activists, officials said on Thursday.
Austria is regularly criticised for not fully acknowledging its history. Annexed in 1938 by Hitler’s Germany, it was only from the late 1980s that the country began to examine its own responsibility in the Holocaust.
Numerous places and streets throughout Austria have been renamed, including one in the city of Linz named after Ferdinand Porsche, the founder of the car company, because of his Nazi past.
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Secret vote to rename streets
Hitler’s hometown Braunau decided late Wednesday to rename two streets named after Hitler blockociate Josef Reiter and propagandist Franz Resl, municipal councillor Martina Schaefer told AFP.
“There was a secret vote regarding the Josef Reiter and Resl streets — 28 elected officials voted in favour and nine against,” said Schaefer of the opposition Social Democrats.
Braunau’s municipal government, led by the conservatives, which also rule the country, did not respond to AFP’s request for comment.
Activists welcome symbolic move
The Austrian Mauthausen Committee, which has long pushed for the streets to be renamed, welcomed a “decision with symbolic significance”.
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Reiter’s honorary citizenship in Braunau was “revoked on March 19 at our instigation”, committee board member Robert Eiter told AFP.
In 2016, the Austrian government bought the house in the small town on the German border where Hitler was born in 1889 and began transforming it into a police station to avoid it becoming a neo-Nazi pilgrimage site.
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The Mauthausen Committee, however, advocates for “a commemorative use of the house”, Eiter said.
Remembering Austria’s Holocaust history
The Mauthausen Committee, named after the former concentration camp, works to maintain the memory of the crimes committed during the Holocaust.
In total, 65,000 Austrian Jews were killed and 130,000 forced into exile during the Holocaust.
