Villa Bogensee, named after the nearby lake, is four miles north of Berlin. The property was used by Goebbels as a kind of refuge from everyday life in the capital.
Goebbels, who was among Adolf Hitler’s most trusted men, had the villa built in 1939. He lived there until the days before the end of the war in 1945, when he committed suicide with his wife in a bunker in Berlin. The house has not been used since 2000, and is now in disrepair. Any renovation of the building is estimated to cost millions of euros.
It is owned by the state of Berlin, which over the years has tried in vain to transfer ownership to the German state or the state of Brandenburg, where the villa is located. Berlin will not bear the costs of maintenance and guarding and has now repeated the offer.
– I will offer it to anyone who wants to take over the place, as a gift from the state of Berlin, said Berlin’s finance minister Stefan Evers to the state assembly on Thursday, according to the news agency DPA.
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– If we fail again, as we have done in the previous decades, Berlin will have no other choice but to carry out the demolition we have already prepared, says Evers.
The minister did not say whether the state will also consider any private stakeholders.
After the Second World War, the Goebbels villa was briefly used as a military hospital, before being used by a youth association.
