The building Adolf Hitler was born in near the Austrian border with Germany officially began a new life as a police station on Wednesday — a conversion Austria’s government hopes will prevent it from serving as a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis.

After years of debate about the large house in the town of Braunau am Inn, which was in private ownership and had housed a charity for handicapped people, Austria made a compulsory purchase in 2017, and announced in 2019 it would be remodelled and turned into a police station.