Berlin is putting Joseph Goebbels’ money-consuming villa on offer

If it is not possible to find a suitable new owner who can cover one and a half euros per year in maintenance costs, the villa will be demolished. Berlin has been looking for a solution for decades.

Since 2000, the 17 hectares of the estate surrounding Villa Bogensee, named after the nearby lake, have been neglected. This also applies to other buildings on the site, such as a disused training institute for the communist youth organization from the time of the Democratic Republic of Germany (GDR) and several bunkers. Apart from day trippers, who marvel at Goebbels’ villa overgrown with climbing plants, no one comes to the poorly developed forest area 40 kilometers from Berlin.

In 1936, Berlin gave Nazi leader Goebbels this area as a gift for his birthday. At the expense of the UVA film studio, Adolf Hitler’s confidant had an immense estate with 30 bedrooms and 40 studies built there for 2.6 million Reichsmarks (the current equivalent of 65 million euros). In one of those rooms he wrote his infamous Sportpalast speech of 1943. In it he called for ‘total war’. He watched his propaganda films in the private cinema before the films went to the distributor.

He also used the villa to escape his wife and six children: Bogensee is said to have been Goebbel’s love nest for many rendezvous with Nazi film starlets. After Adolf Hitler ordered Goebbels to stop those escapades, his family came to live in Bogensee. At the beginning of 1945, the family moved to Berlin, where the Goebbels first poisoned the children in May 1945 and then committed suicide.

After the Second World War, the Soviet armies used the site as a military hospital and then it was transferred to the GDR. He turned it into an international study center for the communist youth movement. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, an attempt was made to establish a restaurant, hotel, beer café and a school. Those ventures were not successful.

An additional problem is that the national German government and the state of Brandenburg, on whose grounds the villa is located, do not want to participate in the expensive maintenance of the estate. Partly because of the 150,000 euros in annual maintenance costs, Berlin wants to get rid of Bogensee and the surrounding lands. But as owner, the city must also prevent groups with neo-Nazi sympathies from taking control of the building to turn it into a place of pilgrimage for Goebbels.