Austria’s Interior Ministry has announced that the house where Adolf Hitler was born will be turned into a police station.

The announcement on Tuesday follows years of legal wrangling as the Austrian  government fought to prevent the building from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.

The yellow corner house located in the northern town of Braunau on the border with Germany where Hitler was born on  April 20, 1889 was taken into government control in 2016.

The destiny of the building was however subject to a lengthy legal battle with the family of Gerlinde Pommer which owned the house for nearly a century.

That legal battle only ended earlier this year when the country’s highest court ruled on the compensation Pommer would receive.

The court ruled that Pommer was entitled to some €810,000 in compensation, less than the figure she had sought but still more than she had been originally offered.

Pommer had been renting the 800-square-metre property which also has several garages and parking spaces located behind the main building to the Interior Ministry since the 1970s.

The government paid her around €4,800 a month and used it as a centre for people with disabilities.

This arrangement however  fell apart in 2011 when Pommer refused to carry out essential renovation work and also declined to sell it. Since then, the building has lain empty.

At one point, the Ministry was pushing to have the property torn down but the plans ran into angry resistance from politicians and historians.

Although Hitler only spent a short time at the property, it continues to draw Nazi sympathizers from around the world. Every year on Hitler’s birthday, anti-fascist protesters organize a rally outside the building.

The Interior Ministry says it will now invite submissions of befitting designs from Architects to have the building house the town’s Police force.

“The house’s future usage by the police should set a clear signal that this building will never be a place to commemorate Nazism,” the Austrian Interior Minister, Wolfgang Peschorn said in a press release.

An EU-wide architecture competition will be launched this month with a jury of experts, including a representative of the town, all of whom are expected to make a decision on the best design in the first half of next year.