The building where Adolf Hitler was born, near the Austrian border with Germany, officially began a new life as a police station, a conversion Austria's government hopes will prevent it serving as a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis and far-right extremists.After years of debate about the large terraced house in the town of Braunau am Inn, which was in private ownership and had housed a charity for people with disabilities, Austria made a compulsory purchase in 2017 and announced in 2019 it would be remodelled and turned into a police station.Even before the conversion, the only sign of its historical significance was a rock on the pavement from the Mauthausen concentration camp with the inscription: "For Peace, Freedom and Democracy In the end, having a charity based there would have made it too accessible to the public, he said."I think it isn't a bad approach but whether it works as we all hope and expect, we'll have to wait and see," he said.There has been some opposition, including from the Mauthausen Committee, Austria's main Holocaust survivors' group, which has argued both that a police station is inappropriate and that more should be done to draw attention to Hitler's crimes."Every year at the Mauthausen concentration camp memorial there's a ceremony to say: never again