Should Vienna’s ‘Hitler Balcony’ Be Opened to the Public?
On the morning of March 15, 1938, Adolf Hitler left his room at Vienna’s Imperial Hotel for the short ride down the Ringstrasse to the Neue Burg, the final wing added to the sprawling Hofburg imperial palace completed in 1919. The Neue Burg is situated on Heldenplatz (Heroe’s Square) where some 250,000 Austrians had gathered to hear him speak. Standing on the large balcony overlooking the square, Hitler proclaimed the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria into the greater German Reich: “The oldest Ostmark”—the Nazi name for Austria, meaning its eastern borderland—“of the German people shall be the youngest bulwark of the German nation and thus the German empire.”
Since 1945, the balcony has been closed to the general public. Now, with the opening of the House of Austrian History, Vienna’s contemporary history museum, in 2018, the...