German officials have offered to give away the former holiday home of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels for free, after struggling for decades to find a buyer for the dilapidated estate.

Stefan Evers, the finance senator for Berlin state, announced on Thursday that he was ready to give the property to “anyone” who wants to take it off their hands.

The 17-hectare estate and villa is currently owned by the state of Berlin and has troubled officials for years due to the astronomical costs of its upkeep – not to mention its dark history.

“I offer to anyone who would like to take over the site, to take it over as a gift from the state of Berlin,” Mr Evers said this week in the Berlin house of representatives.

Goebbels, the head of Nazis propaganda and a member of Adolf Hitler’s inner circle, had the house built in 1936 and used it for affairs with various actresses.

After the fall of the Nazi regime it was briefly used by the Allies as a military hospital before passing into the hands of the Soviets, who turned it into a youth camp.

Since 2000 the estate, roughly 10 miles north of Berlin, has been uninhabited and the villa, which is enclosed in dense woodland behind Lake Bogensee, has fallen into disrepair. Many of the windows are boarded up or broken and parts of the entire facade of the villa are missing.

Mr Evers says he is looking for proposals that will do justice to the site’s historical significance, such as being taken over by the federal government or the neighbouring state of Brandenberg where the estate is located.

Another possibility would be a private new owner, perhaps with the intention of turning the area into a museum.

The senator warned that if no new owners come forward “as has been the case in the past decades, then the state of Berlin will have no other option than to carry out a demolition”.

The state of Brandenberg has so far been reluctant to acquire the site as renovation costs would run to an estimated €350 million, according to German broadcaster ZDF.

This leaves the considerably cheaper option for Berlin state of simply knocking it down, which would cost just €50 million.