Berlin wants to give away the villa of Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The villa has been a burden for the state for years: it is expensive to maintain and difficult to sell. Demolition is also not an obvious option.
Goebbels’ villa is located on a lake on a vast estate of 17 hectares. It was once a luxurious building, but now the state of Berlin has been trying for years to find a second life for it. The estate is actually located in the state of Brandenburg about forty kilometers from Berlin. However, neither the state nor the federal government are interested in it, says Stefan Evers, Berlin’s finance minister.
“I offer the property to anyone who wants it as a gift from the state of Berlin,” Evers said Thursday in the Berlin House of Representatives. If no one wants the site, Berlin will demolish the villa.
According to the German media, Bild and RBB, security and maintenance costs run into the millions every year. In order to demolish the buildings, they would have to be stripped of their status as historic monuments.
Goebbels was given the land in 1936. He had the enormous mansion built with money from the UFA, the Nazi film production company over which he was lord and master. Goebbels entertained Nazi leaders, celebrities and mistresses in the building.
In the 1950s, a training center for the youth organization of the East German Communist Party was built on the same site. The ‘Villa Goebbels’ itself was used as a supermarket and daycare at the time. No new use can be found for this either because the villa is an obstacle.
The Berlin real estate fund decided in 2016 not to sell the dilapidated ‘Villa Goebbels’. It feared that it would “fall into the wrong hands” and “become a place of pilgrimage for Nazis”.
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