Adolf Hitler was born in a house in the northwestern Austrian town of Braunau am Inn in 1889.Johannes Simon/Getty Images

(CNN) — The house in Austria where Adolf Hitler was born will become a human rights training center for police officers, the Austrian Interior Ministry announced Wednesday.

The building, located in the northwestern town of Braunau am Inn, will house the center along with a police station, for which the Austrian government revealed its plans in 2019.

The decision was made based on the recommendations of an interdisciplinary commission of experts concerned with depriving the building of its "mythical appeal to extremist circles," the ministry said in a statement.

"We have to face our past and give this place steeped in history a vital perspective," historian Oliver Rathkolb, a professor at the University of Vienna's Institute for Contemporary History, told a news conference on Tuesday.

Hitler in 1939. AFP/Getty Images

Hitler was born in an apartment in the building on April 20, 1889 and lived there until his family left when he was three years old.

The building belonged to Gerlinde Pommer, whose family owned the building before Hitler's birth, for decades until the Interior Ministry began renting the site to her in 1972.

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It was subleased to various charities. However, the three-storey house has been empty since 2011, when the tenant, a centre for the disabled, vacated the premises.

The government said in 2016 that the property would be demolished, but the Interior Ministry invoked a "special legal authorization" to expropriate the property.

Legal disputes over seizure and compensation followed, during which plans to tear down the building were shelved.

After securing the site, the Austrian government remained concerned that it would attract neo-Nazis and other sympathizers of Hitler's ideology. Announcing the decision to transform it into a police station in 2019, Austria's then-Interior Minister Wolfgang Peschorn said that "the future use of the house by the police will be an unmistakable signal that this building will never serve to commemorate National Socialism."

"It will be an office for Austria's largest human rights organization - the police - and also a training centre on this issue of fundamental importance," Hermann Feiner, a member of the commission and former head of construction and real estate projects at the Interior Ministry, said on Wednesday.

The conversion, estimated to cost 20 million euros ($21.5 million), is expected to be completed by 2025, with police moving in the following year.

CNN's Oscar Holland contributed to this article.

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