The Austrian Government is moving to seize Adolf Hitler's birthplace to prevent it from becoming a site of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis.

Hitler's family lived in the house in the town of Braunau am Inn in northern Austria for only three years around his birth on April 20, 1889, but the fate of the three-storey building coated in pale yellow paint has long been the subject of controversy.

An interior ministry spokesman said the Government had agreed on a law to take ownership after the building's landlord, a local woman, had refused to sell it to the state. The bill will now go before Parliament.

"The decision is necessary because the Republic would like to prevent this house from becoming a 'cult site' for neo-Nazis in any way, which it has been repeatedly in the past, when people gathered there to shout slogans," Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka said before the cabinet meeting.

"It is my vision to tear down the house."

Hitler was born on April 20, 1889. ( AFP )

A commission consisting of 12 members from the fields of politics, administration, academia and civic society will ultimately decide the fate of the building.

Austria's interior ministry has been renting the property from the retired local woman who owns it since 1972 and has sublet to Braunau.

The ministry pays around 4,800 euros ($6,966) a month in rent.

The building has housed workshops for disabled people, but has been empty since 2011, because the owner repeatedly rejected ideas for the future use of the house and purchase offers from the state, according to the interior ministry spokesman.

Once the law has passed Parliament, the owner has no right to appeal the decision or negotiate her compensation, which will be in line with the sum paid to home owners evicted in the course of railway line construction.

Local historians say Hitler was not born in the house itself but in a building behind it that has long since been demolished. His family moved away from Braunau when Hitler was three.

Outside there is a stone memorial that reads: "For Peace, Freedom and Democracy. Never Again Fascism, Millions of Dead Warn."

Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938.

Debate still smoulders over whether Austrians were willing accomplices, many having cheered his return to his country of birth at the time, or the first victims of a dictatorship that ultimately reduced much of Europe to ruins and cost tens of millions of lives.

Reuters/AFP