Berlin authorities propose giving away Joseph Goebbels’ country house | The Basque Journal

“I offer anyone who wants to take over the facility to give it as a gift from the state of Berlin,” the politician announced this week, opening a debate and giving rise to an initiative that is categorically rejected by both the town of Wandlitz, where the facility is located. complex, like the federal state of Brandenburg, to which this city council belongs. Senior representatives of the municipality and the region said they were not interested in “such a generous gift.”

Built in 1939 in the middle of a 17-hectare forest, Goebbels’ country house next to Lake Bogensee is a 30-room villa that has been disused since 2000 and is in danger of ruin due to its current abandonment. The Nazi agitator used to retire there in the middle of the Second World War with his family and there he wrote many of his propaganda speeches, including the almost two-hour one he gave at the Sportpalast in Berlin before thousands of followers, an example of Nazi rhetoric and propaganda, which ended with the historic question “Do you want total war?” and that was answered with a resounding yes.

Goebbels committed suicide on May 1 with his wife Marga after murdering their six children in the chancellery bunker, one day after the dictator Adolf Hitler did the same.

At the end of the Second World War, the Allied troops used the field house as a field hospital and in 1946 the forces of the Soviet Red Army handed it over to the Free German Youth (FDJ), which founded a higher school for communist indoctrination there. . The then head of the FDJ and later leader of the defunct German Democratic Republic Erich Honecker also had a complex of educational and residential buildings built on those lands in the style of classical socialism. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the East German communist regime had the ideological school of its youth academy there.

The maintenance of the entire facility has a current annual cost of 250,000 euros just in terms of surveillance and security. The latest budget for the restoration and modernization of its buildings now amounts to 350 million euros, an amount that the Berlin Senate, the city-state government, is not willing to spend.

Wooded area

On the other hand, the local authorities of the German capital are studying demolishing the entire complex and returning the site to its natural state as a wooded area as a last option at a cost of 50 million euros.

Governed in a grand coalition by Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, that senate plans to include that amount in its next budget, an initiative with which its authorities intend to pressure the neighboring state of Brandenburg and the municipality of Wandlitz to act if they want to save the country house. by Goebbels.

Despite everything, Evers assures that Berlin is not closed to proposals for the future of the complex 15 kilometers north of the city limits if they are of interest and do justice to the historical significance of the site, although he demands that these initiatives be accompanied of financing that exempts the German capital from all expenses.

However, his offer to give away Goebbels’ villa and the rest of the buildings on his 17 hectares of land is the subject of criticism. The first are those of the mayor of Wandlitz, Oliver Borchert, who highlights the danger of the Nazi agitator’s country house ending up in the hands “of any private person pursuing ideological objectives.”

In statements to the German agency DPA, Borchert stressed that in the past members of the so-called “Reichsbürger” or “citizens of the Reich” were interested in acquiring this real estate object.

Of far-right ideology, the followers of this movement do not recognize the existence of the Federal Republic and trace the country’s legality back to imperial Germany in 1871. 27 of its members are currently prosecuted for plotting a coup d’état and planning the takeover of the Bundestag, the federal parliament, by arms.

Despite everything, Borchert wants to save the site and avoid at all costs the destruction of what he considers a “historical testimony”, for which he has announced the development of a project with a future, for which the Wandlitz City Council is considering several alternatives, from a Center for Resilience Studies for Democracy, to a university campus, a hotel or a medical rehabilitation clinic.