“I am donating the land to anyone who wants it back,” said the Berlin state finance official. This residence is located on a 17-hectare property, north of the city.
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Expensive to maintain, difficult to destroy, complicated to sell… The former villa of Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, is a burden for the municipality of Berlin (Germany). But also the subject of endless debate. “I am donating the land to anyone who would like it back, it is a gift from the Land of Berlin”declared finance official Stefan Evers during a discussion in the Berlin Chamber of Deputies on Thursday, May 2.
The city-state of Berlin has been struggling for years to find a second life for this once luxurious property built near a lake, on a vast 17 hectare property, in the countryside surrounding the German capital. The property is located about forty kilometers from Berlin, in the state of Brandenburg, but neither the latter nor the federal government are interested in a “such a generous gift”he added.
Several million euros for maintenance and security
Joseph Goebbels was offered the land in 1936, having the vast residence built there with funding from the UFA, the powerful film production company over which he reigned supreme. The U-shaped building housed a private cinema room and spacious living rooms with a view of Lake Bogensee, where Goebbels received stars, personalities and mistresses.
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The “Goebbels villa” also blocks the use of another local relic: a vast complex erected after the war by the authorities of the former GDR on the same land as the house of Hitler’s minister, in the middle of the forest . This group of buildings built in the Stalinist style of the early 1950s housed the training center for cadres of the Free German Youth (FDJ, the youth organization of the East German communist party SED). Within this communist university, the “Goebbels villa” had been converted into a supermarket for students and a nursery.
In the absence of a buyer or subsidy, Berlin is now considering demolishing everything and renovating the land, because the annual security and maintenance costs run into the millions, according to German media. Bild and RBB. This would require removing the status of historic monuments from buildings. In 2016, the Berlin Real Estate Fund decided not to sell the already very dilapidated “Villa Goebbels”, “lest it fall into the wrong hands” and not “become a place of pilgrimage for the Nazis”.