The hideaway villa used by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, to entertain his lovers is to be put up for sale in an attempt to bail out the cash-strapped city of Berlin. The rundown, empty Wald-hof estate, set in woodland 40 kilometres (25 miles) north of the city, has become a financial burden for the Berlin council, which has been contemplating the closure of opera houses and other desperate measures to avert bankruptcy.Maintenance costs alone amount to €255,000 (£168,000) a year. Now the council has devised a strategy to dispose of one of its most notorious pieces of property and make a profit. “We want to test the interest of the international property market,” Irina Daehne, of the council’s real estate department, said. “It will be announced on the internet and there will be an advertising campaign.” The process will begin in August, usually a good time to dispose of country estates. Estate agents estimate that the house and surrounding land could fetch €2,000,000.
So far the only interest has been expressed by animal breeders and construction companies.
It will be difficult, it seems, to interest international schools or private universities in land quite so tainted as Goebbels’ romantic bolthole. Goebbels took over the place in 1936. A diary entry for November 6 that year records his enthusiasm: “wonderful autumn weather, the wood is so perfect . . . we have to get rid of the Jewish plague. Completely . . . Otherwise, early to bed. One sleeps so well in the woods.”
The propaganda minister, in charge of film-making, built a cinema on the premises and invited a string of film starlets to the house, including his principal mistress Lida Baarová. She enjoyed swimming in the Bogensee lake. Other glamorous visitors included the Third Reich actress-es Zarah Leander and Marika Rökk.
It was not only play for Goebbels. He also wrote his most important speech, calling for Total War, in the study of the house during the winter of 1942-43. “A perfect place for creative thought,” he said.
After the war the estate passed from one dictatorship to another. The Communist Free Youth movement set up a training centre there and it was used by various East German leaders. Nowadays it is used as a barracks for out-of-town riot police who travel to Berlin every year to help control the traditional May Day protests.
As the home of a noted pioneer of activist media, this would be ideal for a museum of activist journalism. The CBS section, for example, could have Walter Cronkite's hairpiece, Dan Rather's old computer printer, Edward R. Murrow's final cigarette butt, and a bottle of the embalming fluid they use to keep Andy Rooney on the air.
A whole wing could be devoted to the BBC, the Guardian and the Independent. This could house Robert Fisk's bloody bandages, a hash pipe from a BBC office party, a Reuters issued keffiyeh, and Robert Pilger's autographed Che Guevara t-shirt.
There would be a multi-media wing with video and audio clips of noted moments in media history: ABC's Don Kladstryp justifying the murder of American sailor Robert Stethem during Nightline in 1985, a full-length presentation of Cronkite's "Tet 68," Ed Bradley plagiarizing the Daily Worker, NBC's Garrick Utley in his wistful, nostalgic recalling of the conquest of Saigon by the Stalinist army on the tenth anniversary.