AUSTRIA SEIZING HITLER’S BIRTHPLACE TO PREVENT NAZI PILGRIMAGE SITE: Austria's government moved on 12 July 2016, to seize the house where Adolf Hitler was born to prevent it becoming a site of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis, and the country's Interior Minister said he wanted to tear it down. Hitler's family lived in the house in Braunau on the Inn for three years around his birth on April 20, 1889; but the fate of the three-story building coated in pale yellow paint has long been the subject of controversy. A spokesman for the interior ministry said the government had agreed on a law to take ownership after the building's landlord, a local woman, had refused to sell it to the state. The bill will now go before parliament. "The decision is necessary because the Republic would like to prevent this house from becoming a 'cult site' for neo-Nazis in any way, which it has been repeatedly in the past," said Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka. Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938. Debate still smoulders over whether Austrians were willing accomplices, many having cheered his return to his country of birth at the time, or the first victims of a dictatorship that ultimately reduced much of Europe to ruins and cost tens of millions of lives. (J.Post)