Seeking to keep neo-Nazi sympathizers who frequent the birthplace of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler at bay, the Austrian government has approved a plan to turn the house into a museum about the Holocaust. According to the plan, proposed by Austrian historian Andreas Maislinger, the house in Braunau am Inn in northern Austria will be known as "The House of Responsibility" and will commemorate the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazi regime under Hitler's leadership. The building, which the dictator's parents sold shortly after his birth, has since been used as a library, a bank and a high school. Most recently, and ironically given that the Nazis killed some 300,000 people with physical or mental disabilities, it housed a workshop for the mentally challenged. On Tuesday, those victims of Germany's "euthanasia" program were commemorated with the opening of a memorial in Berlin. Relatives of the victims joined Mayor Klaus Wowereit and members of the public to lay wreaths and white roses in front of the 30-meter (100-foot) blue glass wall of the open-air memorial and permanent exhibition. "The Nazi murders of disabled people are among the most inhumane acts of history," said Wowereit. "It is high time that these victims of Nazi inhumanity finally receive their own memorial." The Nazis killed people with disabilities and psychological ailments mostly by gas and lethal injections. The scheme was coordinated from offices next to Berlin's Tiergarten, where information about the forced sterilizations and murders is now presented on plaques.
