Berlin wants to get rid of the dilapidated former country house of Joseph Goebbels. The state is offering the villa on Lake Bogensee for free to those who want to cover the sky-high maintenance and security costs. Otherwise, the building will be demolished, Berlin Finance Minister Stefan Evers said in the state parliament this week.
Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, had the villa built in 1939 on a 17-hectare plot of land, about forty kilometers north of Berlin. He had received the land as a gift from the city in 1936. He used the villa for extramarital affairs and entertained Nazi leaders there.
The villa has been empty since the beginning of this century. Berlin repeatedly tried to transfer the building to the federal government or the state of Brandenburg, where it is located, but they were not interested in that either. In 2016, commercial sales were abandoned for fear that the place would end up in the wrong hands and develop into a place of pilgrimage for the extreme right.
This week, Minister Evers called for new proposals for the building that do justice to its versatile history. That history is not limited to Nazism. After Goebbels and his wife committed suicide in Berlin in 1945, the villa fell into the hands of the Red Army, which handed it over to the East German communist youth movement. After expansion with various buildings in Stalinist style, the complex was used as a training center for many years. The former villa served as a supermarket for students and as a daycare center.
After the fall of the Wall in 1989, the building housed a training center for social workers, a conference center for the Berlin police and catering establishments, until it finally became vacant.
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