The Austrian branch of the international committee of Mauthausen called his birthplace Adolf Hitlerthe Braunau, to rename two streets who honor Nazis and revoke the status of honorary citizen that he had awarded to a composer who was associated with the dictator. “It’s hard to believe: in Hitler’s birthplace, someone who was very close to him is still an honorary citizen!” said Willy Merney, president of the victims committee one of the most notorious concentration and extermination camps of the Nazi regime. This is the composer Josef Reiter (1862-1939), “a passionate National Socialist closely associated with the Führer”, he explained.
The organization also expressed its outrage that the name of the street honors his memory, while that of another street honors “fanatical Nazi and instigator of hatred against the Jews,” by Frank Wrestle. This is “an insult to the victims, which must be stopped immediately,” he added.
The Mauthausen Commission originally it was a network of resistance fighters. He was born in the concentration camp of the same name in 1944. He continues to this day to keep in touch with the survivors and organize memorial ceremonies, as reported by APE-MPE.
The municipality of Braunau, where Adolf Hitler was born in 1889, did not immediately respond when AFP tried to contact him. In 2016, the Austrian government bought the house where Hitler was born in the small northern town on the border with Germany, and in October started works to be converted by 2026 into a police station. It was intended to prevent the property from becoming a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis.
Austria is often criticized for how it deals with the issue of commemorating Nazi crimes. Earlier this year, a collective of creators demanded that five of the nine national anthems composed by the Nazis be rewritten, but to no avail. “Our anthem remains our anthem and we will not let anyone change it“, argued the right-wing president of the state of Lower Austria (east), Johanna Mikl-Leitner. The composer, a member of the Nazi party, was in favor of the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich.
In 2022, the city of Leeds decided to rename many streets, judging how their names were problematic, among them that of the street that honored Ferdinand Porsche, founder of the eponymous automobile industry, due to his Nazi past. The Alpine country for years portrayed itself as a victim of Nazism, fending off criticism that many of its citizens were complicit in Nazi crimes. It was not until the 1980s that she began to consider her own responsibilities for the Holocaust.
At least 65,000 Austrian Jews were murdered and another 130,000 forced into exile. The far-right FPÖ party – founded by ex-Nazis – has been part of three post-war governments and is currently ahead in voting intentions ahead of the 2024 parliamentary elections.
Source: News Beast
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