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Austria’s plans for Hitler’s birth house stir controversy
BERLIN (JTA) — Plans to turn Hitler’s birth house into a police station have turned a small Austrian town upside down.
The local administration of Branau announced Monday its concrete plans to put the building to practical use, promising to house a police training program on issues related to human rights.
But less than two months before the redesign is to begin, local citizens and leaders are not in agreement on the plan.
A filmmaker has suggested that Hitler himself wanted to have local officials move into the rooms where he was born in 1889 and spent the first months of his life. In a documentary he is releasing on Tuesday, Günter Schwaiger reveals a 1939 news report about Hitler’s order. The film “Who’s afraid of Braunau?” is to premiere on a screen in front of the three-story house, which is located on a corner near Braunau’s town square. The town has about 16,000 residents.
Schwaiger told the AFP that the police station will “always be suspected” of being “in line with the dictator’s wishes.”
The building, which was constructed in the early to mid-19th century, has become a site of pilgrimage for Hitler supporters, despite the fact that the Austrian government expropriated the house in 2017, reportedly in part to prevent the site from becoming a magnet for neo-Nazis.
“To stop those gatherings, the town placed a monument in front of the house, consisting of a block of granite from the Mauthausen concentration camp quarry, inscribed with a message in memory of the victims of fascism,” California attorney Cary Lowe, who was born in Braunau to Holocaust survivors, told JTA in an email.
“If the government implements the police station proposal, which includes relocating the anti-fascist monument, I fear that will just suppress the history of the place and trivialize the tragic events that flowed from there,” he said.
In May, it was announced that the long-planned police station would include the human rights training program, in an apparent nod to opponents.
Such a program would “do justice to moral, political and legal responsibility,” Oliver Rathkolb of the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna said in a statement issued at the time by Austria’s Interior Ministry. “We have to face our past and give this historically burdened place a life-affirming perspective.”
But the plan has not received wide popular support. A small majority of those surveyed by the polling firm Market Institut said they preferred to see an entity move in that would focus solely on National Socialism, remembrance, anti-fascism or peace. Very few agreed with the planned use by law enforcement.
“There is only one acceptable solution, and that is to realize a ‘House of responsibility’ project,” said retired historian Andreas Maislinger, who comes from the area. He has proposed that the site be used solely for the purpose of remembrance and tackling contemporary conflicts. “It would be a reframing of the whole town. Up to now, Braunau has only one thing it is known for – Hitler.”
As the discussion heated up recently, an Austrian artist collective called Total Refusal suggested that a controversial statue of Vienna’s wartime mayor Karl Lueger be picked up by helicopter and dropped over Hitler’s birth house.
Hannah Lessing, secretary general of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism, was on the jury that decided on the new use. She would rather have seen the place turned into a hub to help refugees.
“But I agreed to the police project, since they can also learn from history,” she told JTA. “Why not?”
“Hitler lived there exactly two months. So why is it so special? We already deal with Hitler on many levels, in organizations and museums.”
Austria’s interior ministry has estimated the redesign will cost about 20 million euros. It should be completed by 2025; the police station and district police headquarters should move in in 2026.
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The post Austria’s plans for Hitler’s birth house stir controversy appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Iran Says Eight Arrested for Suspected Links to Israel’s Mossad Spy Agency
The Mossad recruitment ad. Photo: Screenshot.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday they had arrested eight people suspected of trying to transmit the coordinates of sensitive sites and details about senior military figures to Israel’s Mossad, Iranian state media reported.
They are accused of having provided the information to the Mossad spy agency during Israel’s air war on Iran in June, when it attacked Iranian nuclear facilities and killed top military commanders as well as civilians in the worst blow to the Islamic Republic since the 1980s war with Iraq.
Iran retaliated with barrages of missiles on Israeli military sites, infrastructure and cities. The United States entered the war on June 22 with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
A Guards statement alleged that the suspects had received specialized training from Mossad via online platforms. It said they were apprehended in northeastern Iran before carrying out their plans, and that materials for making launchers, bombs, explosives and booby traps had been seized.
State media reported earlier this month that Iranian police had arrested as many as 21,000 “suspects” during the 12-day war with Israel, though they did not say what these people had been suspected of doing.
Security forces conducted a campaign of widespread arrests and also stepped up their street presence during the brief war that ended in a US-brokered ceasefire.
Iran has executed at least eight people in recent months, including nuclear scientist Rouzbeh Vadi, hanged on August 9 for passing information to Israel about another scientist killed in Israeli airstrikes.
Human rights groups say Iran uses espionage charges and fast-tracked executions as tools for broader political repression.
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Body of Idan Shtivi, Murdered on Oct. 7, Retrieved from Gaza in Special IDF Operation
Idan Shtivi. Photo: Courtesy of the family
i24 News – The body of Idan Shtivi, a 28-year-old murdered by Palestinian jihadists at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, was recovered in a joint operation by the IDF and Shin Bet in central Gaza, it was cleared for publication on Saturday.
Shtivi’s remains were returned to Israel alongside the body of Ilan Weiss, another hostage killed during the October 7 massacre.
“Idan Shtivi was abducted from the Tel Gama area and brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists after acting to rescue and evacuate others from the Nova music festival on October 7th, 2023. He was 28 years old at the time of his death,” read an IDF press release.
“Following an identification process conducted at the National Center for Forensic Medicine, along with the Israel Police and the Military Rabbinate, the Hostages and Missing Persons Headquarters notified his family.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Shviti “was a gifted student of sustainability and governance, and a courageous individual” who acted heroically on October 7, helping others flee.
“He was killed in the process and his body was abducted to Gaza by Hamas. My wife and I send our heartfelt condolences to the Shtivi family. So far, 207 hostages have been returned, 148 of them alive. We will continue to act tirelessly and decisively to bring back all our hostages—living and deceased.”
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Woman Stabbed at Ottawa Grocery Store in Latest Antisemitic Attack
A social media post by the alleged attacker, Joseph Rooke of Cornwall, Ontario. Photo: Screenshot via i24
i24 News – The stabbing of a Jewish woman at an Ottawa grocery by a man with a long history of antisemitic posts on social media, the latest antisemitic hate crime in Canada, sparked outrage and prompted condemnation from officials including the prime minister.
Both the victim and the attacker are in their 70s. The woman is reportedly in serious condition.
The suspect was identified as Joseph Rooke, who has authored a series of lengthy rambling screeds on social media, ranting against Israel and Jews.
“Judaism is the world’s oldest cult,” he writes in one post, going on to say “over time jews have become insidious in governments, businesses, media conglomerates, and educational institutions in order to do what they do better than anyone else. Jews are the world’s masters of propaganda, gaslighting, demonization, demagoguery, and outright lying. Using their collective wealth they have become masters of reprisal.”
“I am under no obligation whatsoever, legal, moral, or otherwise, to like jews and I do not. If that means I meet the jewish definition of an anti-semite, so be it.”
Canada has seen a steep spike in antisemitic attacks over the past two years, including a recent incident in Montreal where a Hasidic Jew was beaten in front on his children.
After Prime Minister Mark Carney condemned the incident, many, including former Israel’s ambassador the US Michael Oren, pointed out that Carney’s rhetoric and policies contribute to the increasing insecurity of Canada’s Jewish community through uncritical embrace of outrageous and easily disprovable allegations that Israel and its supporters were guilty of the worst crimes against humanity.