Location: Upper Austria Map
Braunau am Inn is a town in Upper Austria. The district town of the district of the same name is located opposite Simbach am Inn on the right bank of the Inn, which forms the German-Austrian border here. With the Peace of Teschen in 1779 she came from the Electorate of Baiern (Kurpfalzbaiern) together with the Innviertel to Austria, where she stayed with brief interruptions. It became known through the execution of the bookseller Johann Philipp Palm at the behest of Napoleon I in 1806. It is less well remembered as the birthplace of Adolf Hitler; a memorial from 1989 reminds of this.
Braunau am Inn or Braunau on Inn is a large Austrian town that stands on the banks of the Inn River and its confluence with the Salzach. It stands on a historic border of Austria and a state of Bavaria (today part of Germany). Early records indicate that it was probably found around the Abbey of Ranshofen that was first mentioned in 788. Braunau am Inn was first mentioned in 1120 deed, however in the 13th century it became an important fortified town with large salt mine technology that was thriving and giving its residents work.
Catholic parish church of St. Stephan with its 99 m
high tower and largely preserved Gothic and Baroque furnishings
Citizens Hospital Church of the Holy Spirit
Ranshofen Abbey in
the suburb of the same name
City gate tower
Hitler's Birth Place or Geburthaus as it is locally known is a home where Adolf Hitler, future Nazi leader of the Third Reich (1933- 45), was born on April 20, 1889. Hitler family spent only few first few years of his life here before moving to Linz. It is easily recognized by a large bouldee that stands outside. It was brought here from a quarry at the Mauthausen Concentration Camp and bear an inscription in German: "For peace, freedom/ and democracy/ never again fascism/ millions of dead admonish" (Fur Frieden, Freiheit und Demokratie, nie wieder Faschismus, Millionen Tote mahnen).
By plane
Munich Airport (IATA Code: MUC, travel time on the
motorway approx. 60 minutes) and Linz Airport (IATA Code: LNZ) are
easily accessible by car, bus and train. The somewhat closer
Salzburg Airport W. A. Mozart (IATA code: SZG, ICAO code: LOWS)
can also be considered.
By train
Braunau is located on the
Munich - Linz railway line, which has long been served by regional
trains (travel time 2 hours 14 minutes, change in Mühldorf am Inn
and Simbach).
By bus
Flixbus offers direct connections to
Vienna and Munich.
By street
From Germany it is best to
take the federal highway 3 to the Pocking exit, then continue on the
federal highway B12, which is currently being expanded to the
federal highway 94, to Simbach am Inn and there over the Inn to
Braunau. From the direction of Vienna and Linz via the Innkreis
Autobahn A8 to the Ried junction and further on country roads that
form the Europastraße 552 after the planning of the Innviertel
expressway S 9 was abandoned. The shortest route from Munich is via
the 94 federal motorway, which has not yet been fully completed, to
Simbach and there across the border. From Switzerland via Munich.
From Salzburg via Lamprechtshausener Straße B156.
By boat
The previously quite significant shipping on the Inn was
discontinued with the beginning of the railway age.
In Roman times, the area around Braunau south of the Inn belonged to the province of Noricum. An altar dedicated to the goddess of victory Victoria Augusta has been preserved at the Haselbach branch church with the "Haselbach Roman Stone".
the first documentary mention of Rantersdorf (Ranshofen) took place
in 788 and in 1120 Braunau was first mentioned in a document under the
name Prounaw. For centuries, Braunau, like the entire Innviertel,
belonged to Bavaria. in 1260 Braunau received the town charter. During
the great city fire in 1380, the wooden city of the founding period,
including the Inn Bridge, was completely destroyed. In the middle of the
15th century, the parish church of St. Stephen was built, and in 1492
the foundation stone was laid for the 87-meter-high tower of St.
Stephen's Church. In 1504, the city was shelled by the Palatines in the
Landshut War of Succession and briefly occupied.
During the
Bavarian peasant and popular uprising of 1705/1706 (Sendlinger
Mordweihnacht), Braunau was briefly besieged by Austrian troops of the
Imperial Army under the supreme command of the Habsburg Emperor Joseph
I. However, the troops had to surrender to the insurgents on December
16, 1705. Braunau and Burghausen thus became the military and political
centers of the uprising movement. The first democratic entity, the State
Defense Congress (Braunau Parliament), met in the city. In the course of
the War of the Austrian Succession, Braunau was again besieged by the
Imperial Army in 1743. The date May 9, 1743 is imprinted on the Braunau
emergency cliffs, the beginning of the siege. In 1779, the Innviertel,
which belonged to the Electorate of Bavaria, was finally granted to the
Habsburgs in the Peace Treaty of Teschen.
The Nuremberg
bookseller Johann Philipp Palm was executed in Braunau in 1806 on
Napoleon's orders for high treason. Between 1810 and 1816, the
Innviertel briefly belonged to the Kingdom of Bavaria again. On March
28, 1874, a fire that broke out in a brewery on the town square
destroyed more than 70 houses.
In 1914, the garrison of the k. u. k. Galizische Feldjäger Battalion No. 4 was located in Braunau. In the First World War, the k.u.k. Prisoner of War camp Braunau was a prisoner of war camp of the k.u.k. army near the city, which was built along the Mattig River at the beginning of the war. During the offensives in Serbia and Galicia, the Imperial and Royal army had taken hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, for which numerous camps were built. The Upper Austrian locations of these camps were Aschach, Braunau, Freistadt, Kleinmünchen, Marchtrenk and Mauthausen, in addition, the Linz-Katzenau internment camp still existed. Up to 15,000 prisoners of war were housed in 120 barracks in the k.u.k. Prisoner of war camp Braunau. A camp cemetery was built in Haselbach for the victims, which is now looked after and maintained by the Austrian Black Cross as the Braunau-Haselbach military Cemetery. The Imperial and Royal Naval Academy was then moved from Pula to the Salzburgertor Barracks (today Bucheder) in 1915. The Braunau refugee camp was built in the district of Laab, where refugees from Trentino (then: Welschtirol) were accommodated.
After the annexation of Austria to the National Socialist German
Reich in March 1938, the previously independent municipality of
Ranshofen was incorporated into the municipality of Braunau am Inn on
October 15, 1938.
On May 1, 1945 at 12 o'clock the road bridge
over the Inn was blown up, and a little later the railway bridge
Simbach–Braunau. On the afternoon of May 2, troops of the 13th US
Armored Division marched over a pontoon bridge to Braunau and occupied
the city area without a fight.
After the end of the Second World
War, Braunau belonged to the American occupation zone in occupied
post-war Austria. The US military administration set up a DP camp.
Adolf Hitler (dictator of the German Reich from 1933 to 1945) was
born on April 20, 1889 in Braunau. The city midwife Franziska Pointecker
was present at the birth. The Hitler family moved to Passau in 1892. On
May 2, 1945, US soldiers occupied Braunau without a fight. Gauleiter
Eigruber ordered a small Wehrmacht commando to blow up Hitler's
birthplace. A U.S. roadside post shelled the command vehicle, which
turned and fled. A public engagement with Braunau's Nazi past began in
the late 1980s. In April 1989 - two weeks before the 100th birthday.
Hitler's birthday – on the initiative of Mayor Gerhard Skiba, a memorial
stone against war and fascism was erected on public grounds in front of
the birthplace. The stone comes from the quarry of the former Mauthausen
concentration camp. There have been or are several projects that deal
with the Nazi past and serve as a reminder and remembrance. in 1992,
Andreas Maislinger and Erich Marschall celebrated the Braunauer
Zeitgeschichte Days, organized by the Verein für Zeitgeschichte from
1993. They dealt with topics of contemporary history and regional
history. The Braunau Initiative, launched by the editor-in-chief of the
Braunauer Rundschau, Reinhold Klika, in February 2000, is sending a
signal and called for the purchase of the Hitler birthplace and the
establishment of an international meeting place. In 2006, the hospital's
park was renamed to the name of Franz Jägerstätter, a conscientious
objector executed by the National Socialists, and Gunter Demnig moved
several such memorial stones for Nazi victims who had previously lived
there to Braunau – as part of his Europe–wide Stolpersteine memorial
project (see list of Stolpersteine).
In 2007, the municipality,
together with the Contemporary History Association, awarded the Egon
Ranshofen-Wertheimer Prize for the first time. It is named after Egon
Ranshofen-Wertheimer, a diplomat, constitutional lawyer, emigrant and
adviser to the US government during the Second World War, who came from
Ranshofen near Braunau. The prize is awarded to Austrians abroad who are
or have been particularly committed to their homeland of Austria.
On July 7, 2011, the Braunau municipal Council posthumously deprived
Hitler of the honorary citizenship conferred in the 1930s by the then
still independent municipality of Ranshofen, as well as the right of
homeland.
The birthplace of Adolf Hitler was returned by the
Republic of Austria in the early 1950s as part of a restitution
settlement to the former owners, to whom the house had been purchased
during the Anschluss of Austria. In 2012, a Russian Duma deputy wanted
to buy the house and have it demolished. After unsuccessful
negotiations, the Ministry of the Interior considered expropriating the
owner in 2016 in order to gain control over the use of the building. In
an interview in October 2016, the Austrian Interior Minister Wolfgang
Sobotka stated that the house should then be demolished and a new
building erected. Sobotka was referring to an alleged recommendation of
a commission of historians. The mayor of Braunau, Hannes Waidbacher, who
is sitting on this commission, commented on this that the Commission's
recommendation "does not say anything about demolition", but only
recommends a "profound architectural redesign", which should
"permanently prevent the recognition value and the symbolic power of the
building". The head of the Upper Austrian State Archive, Cornelia
Sulzbacher, was also surprised by the minister's statements and also
said that there was only the recommendation to change the appearance so
that the house could no longer be used as a symbol.
The house has
been being renovated since October 2023.