Braunau am Inn (English: Braunau on the Inn) is a town in the Austrian state of Upper Austria, the capital of Braunau am Inn District. Located on the border with Germany, it is the largest town in the Upper Austrian Innviertel region. The population of Braunau am Inn is at 16,000. The municipal area comprises the cadastral communities of Braunau am Inn, Osternberg, and Ranshofen.
The town is situated on the lower Inn River below its confluence with the Salzach, where it forms the border with the German state of Bavaria. It is located halfway on the road between the state capital Linz and the Bavarian capital Munich, about 60 km (37 mi) north of Salzburg. Braunau is connected by bridges over the River Inn with its Bavarian counterpart Simbach am Inn. A traditional port of entry, all border controls have been abolished since the implementation of the Schengen Agreement by Austria in 1997.
While the abbey of Ranshofen was already mentioned in the course of the deposition of Duke Tassilo III of Bavaria in 788, Braunau itself first appeared as Prounaw in a 1120 deed. The Innviertel region then was part of the Duchy of Bavaria. Braunau received a town statute in 1260, one of the first in present-day Austria. It became a fortress town and important trading route junction, dealing with the salt trade and with ship traffic on the River Inn. As a major Bavarian settlement, the town played an outstanding role in the Bavarian uprising against the Austrian occupation during the War of the Spanish Succession, when it hosted the Braunau Parliament, a provisional Bavarian Parliament in 1705 headed by Georg Sebastian Plinganser.
Hitler was born in an apartment building recorded at Salzburger Vorstadt 15 in a 1890 register, which then housed a craft brewery and several rental flats, one of them occupied by Alois Hitler, his third wife Klara, their son Adolf, and his elder half siblings Alois Jr. and Angela. The house was purchased for the Nazi Party by Hitler’s personal secretary Martin Bormann in 1938 and turned into a cult centre containing an art gallery and a public library. Occupied by US troops at the end of World War II, the building temporarily housed a documentary exhibition on Nazi concentration camps. In 1952 it was restored to its original owners and thereafter used as city library, technical college and a day-care centre for disabled persons. Since 2011 the house remains vacant. In 2014, the Austrian Ministry decided to open in the house a “House of Responsibility” – a museum dedicated to Hitler’s crimes during the existence of the Third Reich. In the course of the process of coming to terms with the history of Austria in the time of National Socialism, the Braunau mayor Gerhard Skiba in April 1989—two weeks before Hitler’s centenary—took the initiative and placed a memorial stone in front of the building. The stone commemorating the victims of World War II is made of granite from the quarry at the Mauthausen concentration camp. It states, Für Frieden, Freiheit und Demokratie. Nie wieder Faschismus. Millionen Tote mahnen (“For peace, freedom and democracy; never again fascism: millions of dead remind us”), also meant as a dissociation of any kind of “Hitler tourism”. Since 1992 the annual Braunau Contemporary History Days initiated by Andreas Maislinger concentrate on accounting for the past; the town’s administration awards the Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer Award, named after native diplomat Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer, to honour committed Austrians abroad. Several Stolpersteine were installed in Braunau by the artist Gunter Demnig. In 2011, the town council revoked the honorary citizenship that had been awarded to Hitler by Ranshofen in 1933, despite the fact no historical evidence could be found it was granted.