When you really want to get rid of something, the simplest thing is to give it away. This is what the City of Berlin has planned to do with a huge villa that it owns but has no use for. Located just over an hour's drive from the German capital and situated on a 17-hectare wooded plot, the 1,600-square-meter building has become a money pit for the city, which spends several hundred thousand euros a year on maintenance and protection.
Hence the decision to hand it over for free. "I'm offering anyone who wants to take over the site the chance to receive it as a gift from Berlin," Senator for Finance of Berlin Stefan Evers, told a municipal assembly on May 2. If no one happens to show any interest, "we will have no choice but to demolish the building," he said.
Such attention to the good management of public funds should have earned a consensus. The only problem was that the villa's first occupant was the Third Reich's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945). Upon learning that the City of Berlin was prepared to give it away, Oliver Borchert, mayor of Wandlitz, the community on which the land is located in the German state of Brandenburg, became emotional. "This idea is most unfortunate. I have no desire for Berlin to give this property to someone who could be guided by ideological ulterior motives," he told German news agency DPA.
The Wandlitz mayor's worries are not unfounded. In 2021, one organization proposed revitalizing the site with a hotel, artists' studios, conference rooms, and a yoga school. But the project fell through when it was revealed that one of its creators was an activist from the Reichsbürger ("Reich citizens"), a far-right movement whose members (estimated by intelligence services to number around 20,000) have refused to recognize the institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany and have dreams of restoring the German Empire of 1871.
A few months ago, fake news circulated on social media that the villa was purchased by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in October 2023 for €8.1 million. Posted on pro-Russian accounts, this "news," accompanied by a photograph of a forged sales document, was supposed to corroborate the Kremlin's assertions that the Ukrainian president is a Nazi.
The story of the Bogensee villa, named after the charming little lake on whose shores it stands, began in 1939. That year, Goebbels decided to have a new house built just a stone's throw from the one the City of Berlin had made available to him three years earlier − since Hitler's propaganda minister was also the Gauleiter (head of administration) of the Reich's capital.
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