The EveryOne Group for International Cooperation on Human Rights Culture has asked the government of Israel to purchase an unlikely property — the house where Hiter was born in 1889.
The EveryOne Group hopes that the house, which has a $3.3 million price tag, can be turned into an art gallery commemorating the Holocaust.
The house on Salzburger Vorstadt Street, in the Austrian town of Braunau am Inn, has served as a library, school, bank, technical institute and workshop since the end of World War II.
If the state of Israel purchases the house, the EveryOne Group will donate to the new museum “about 200 works of art made by Jewish artists who survived the Holocaust or died in the death camps,” according to Roberto Malini, Matteo Pegoraro and Dario Picciau, co-presidents of the Milan-based international organization that works to defend human and civil rights.
The proposed collection was “built up year after year as we searched all over the world for traces of artists murdered by the Nazis, or by contacting the survivors,” the EveryOne Group said in a press release.
The house’s only visible Nazi insignia is on the iron gate outside, where Martin Bormann, Hitler’s party secretary, placed his initials after declaring the house a national monument.
Currently, the building houses handicapped people who work and live in the home under special care. The tenants will all be moving to a modern facility at the beginning of 2010, however, and owner Gelinde Pommer no longer wants to be responsible for the property.
Braunau Mayor Gerhard Skiba has said he fears that the property could fall into the hands of extremists.
The EveryOne Group previously helped open a genocide art museum in 2007, when it set up a permanent exhibit titled “Holocaust and Genocide Art” in the Hilo Art Museum of Hawaii. The exhibit was hailed by organizers and the museum’s director, Ted Coombs, as an educational project that portrayed fragments of a fundamental part of human thought.
Following its success in Hawaii, the EveryOne Group began to envision Hitler’s birth home as a powerful location for a new Holocaust art museum.
“We believe it is of great importance that racial tolerance and the memory of the Holocaust be allowed to substitute the culture of hatred and evil in a place that is just as symbolic as Auschwitz,” the co-presidents of EveryOne said in a statement. “It would offer the fruits of peace and equality to future generations.”
The $3.3 million selling price could be covered quickly by visitors’ tickets, documentaries, publications and the like, the group noted.
In 2007, after the opening of Hilo’s “Holocaust and Genocide Art” exhibit, Alfred Breitman, an artist and member of the EveryOne Group, wrote that art has the power to create a lasting impact on its viewers, and that Holocaust and genocide art has a special way of connecting with youth. “Art is a powerful instrument for education and keeping memory alive, because it reaches the public conscience and speaks to the heart of the young,” he said.
EveryOne hopes that the Israeli government sees the potential of the museum as well, “turning the site where this evil started out, and where the seeds of the massacre took root, into an art gallery commemorating the Holocaust.”