Approximately 18 miles northeast of central Berlin sits an abandoned three-wing villa in the woods behind a small lake. The name of the lake, Bogensee, lines the arched porte cochère entrance in respectable serif lettering. The exterior is primarily white stucco, with a steeply pitched cathedral roof to protect against the rain. Viewed from above, the asymmetrical design of the southwest wing looks like pinky broken out of joint.
The 518-acre parcel of land surrounding the villa was a 39th birthday present given to Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels in 1936 by the city of Berlin. A delighted Goebbels described it in his diary as a “forest idyll” imbued with profound solitude. Construction of the villa began in 1939, managed by architect Hugo Constantin Bartels and based on a design by Heinrich Schweitzer. (Born in Stuttgart, Schweitzer worked primarily in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem, where he built the Podbielskiallee U-bahn station and a number of private residences. Approachable but never playful, his work emits the high-pitched spiritual frequency of a would-be expressionist bound and gagged by his own traditionalist tendencies.) UFA, the state-owned film studio lorded over by Goebbels, footed the villa’s 2.7 million Reichsmark bill.
Not a great deal of interesting or relevant things happened inside the villa for the remainder of the Third Reich. That Goebbels used it as a love nest in the early days of the war was an open secret. He didn’t move his family out of Berlin proper and into the villa until 1944, in hopes its rural location would protect his children from the nightly Allied bombing raids pulverizing the capital. They would all be dead the following year regardless, poisoned by their parents just days before Germany’s unconditional surrender in May 1945.
The city of Berlin now owns both the villa and the land, and spends €280,000 on its annual upkeep. The abysmal state of Berlin’s finances makes the six-figure maintenance of an empty house unpalatable even absent Nazi ties; meanwhile the municipal government of Wandlitz, the state government of Brandenburg, and the federal government have all declined to take it off the city’s hands.
In May of this year, Berlin’s Minister of Finance Stefan Evers announced a new plan for the villa: offer it to private citizens free of charge. Interested applicants must demonstrate that they are not neo-Nazi wackjobs out to get their jollies in the Goebbels sex hut or otherwise ineligible. Thus far, no suitable candidate has been found.
That Berlin has failed to find a taker has perhaps less to do with the rigidity of the screening process than with the reality that the Bogensee villa is a liability. It’s barely accessible without a car, falling apart, and ugly. Despite how loudly the city complains about the money it spends on its maintenance, it would require extensive renovations and repairs just to make it liveable. It’s not overwhelmingly desirable real estate. On top of its material impracticalities are its ethical ones. The screening process has not only weeded out individuals associated with the far-right Reichsbürger movement but also more benign inquiries from “bargain hunters” and a dermatologist. In other words, maybe there is no acceptable answer to, “And why exactly do you want Herr Goebbels’ villa?”
So give it to no one. Stop spending money on it. Let it rot.
One perk of winning a war is that you get to be smug as hell about it, and you get to do this in the losing team’s houses. This tradition stems from the most basic tenets of ground combat, i.e. the takeover of strategically beneficial natural features and the defensive structures from which that land is controlled. Successfully raid your enemy’s castle, and you get to sit smugly on his throne in his hall. Short of raping his wife and murdering his sons, there is no more definitive symbol of victory.
This symbol, however, was forced to evolve—not only in tandem with ground combat, but with the architectural divorce of political power and military command. Over time, fortified castles occupied by kings and lords lost their uncontested status as sites of the collective administrating of war and peace. Meanwhile, beginning in the late 17th century, pleasure palaces and luxurious hunting lodges bloomed across Europe. The modern Western leader was subsequently expected to rule from a network of residences, including and especially countryside retreats that conveyed power via extravagant splendor versus formidable defensive capabilities.
This expectation still exists, even if ancien régime architectural glamour has fallen out of politically appropriate fashion. Such residences are now popular for chummy state visits and conferences, and the press regards a leader who visits his designated retreat less than his predecessors with bemusement. Post-Versailles, the most famous modern European example is probably Hitler’s Berghof, tucked atop Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps.
Militarily speaking, the Berghof’s strategic value was nil. The British didn’t even get around to bombing it until two weeks before the end of the war. Its symbolic value, however, was substantial. Hitler was enormously fond of the complex, received foreign leaders and dignitaries on its steps, and was frequently in residence. Retreating SS troops torched parts of it as they left, but not effectively enough to prevent American and French troops from looting it upon arrival. The looting of the Berghof in May 1945 was a literal and symbolic act done for emotional reasons—a modern revival of history’s singular victorious gesture, even without a gold throne upon which to plop one’s smug Allied ass.
To the victor go the spoils, simple as. Principled ideas of preventing Nazi buildings from becoming sites of neo-Nazi pilgrimage only cropped up later. Such was the rationale behind the Bavarian government’s demolition of the Berghof’s remains in 1952, and behind the deliberate absence of a sign denoting the location of the Führerbunker in central Berlin until 2006.
It is indeed necessary to actively prevent neo-fascist deification of Nazi architectural sites, and virtually every discussion around the Bogensee villa operates from this ideological position. Still, if the Bogensee villa was going to become a site of neo-Nazi pilgrimage, wouldn’t it have happened already?
It’s a stretch to present the Bogensee villa as Goebbels’ Berghof. Yes, it was a secluded natural retreat, and yes, aspects of its interior were modeled after the Berghof’s rooms. But, unlike the Berghof, it was a site of minor political and architectural importance to the Third Reich, and it is historically insignificant to us now. It offers no fresh insight into Goebbels’ life or personality. The structure itself has little aesthetic value—Schweitzer was an architect of moderate imagination, and there are superior examples of his work elsewhere. It is, at best, Goebbels’ third most important residence in Berlin-Brandenburg, surpassed by his mansion in Mitte and his estate on Schwanenwerder Island near Potsdam. (The latter prompted far less handwringing when it went up for sale in 2011, likely because only the basement survives. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe now sits on the site of the former.)
All the spiraling over Goebbels’ villa has somehow obscured the obvious conclusion: no one cares. No one cares! Not the historians, not the architecture students, nobody. Even the swastika-tattooed, Sieg-Heil-shouting neo-Nazis in this country straight up do not care. They’ve had over three post-reunification decades to make it into the Berghof 2.0, and they haven’t. Nobody cares.
So stop sending the maintenance crew. Let it rot.
Outside the halls of local power, ideas for the villa’s future proliferate in the comment section of the associated New York Times’ story published in August. Many suggest turning it into some variation of a memorial or a learning center. One rather specific comment suggests its transformation into a museum of Jewish cinema and humor complete with a theater for staging The Producers. Earlier this month, the Brussels-based European Jewish Association proposed the villa’s conversion into “an education centre about how propaganda led to the Holocaust” at least partially funded by taxpayers.
Staging The Producers on Goebbels’ lawn in 2024 is not akin to, say, the American war photographer Lee Miller having a soak in Hitler’s bathtub in April 1945. Miller spent the war embedded with Allied troops, even accompanying the first American regiment into Dachau. She was there. Seeing as the median ages of American World War II veterans and Holocaust survivors are 98 and 86 respectively, a rapidly dwindling number of people alive today can say the same.
This impulse to repurpose the Bogenesee villa and every other borderline Nazi-adjacent site into an education center or a memorial is not just impractical—no one is going to rural Brandenburg for The Producers, sorry!—but a tepid exercise that smacks of stolen valor and magical thinking. We, the overwhelming majority of the living, were not there. After this many decades and with a building so minor and remote, the choice to remake it as a site of Jewish remembrance offers no poetic justice. In fact, it’s superfluous considering the abundance of such places in far more publicly accessible locations throughout Berlin.
There has to be some degree of hands-off decline allowed for these bottom-tier Nazi buildings. Don’t demolish it, and don’t do anything else with it either. Spend that €280,000 elsewhere. May I suggest repairing virtually any sidewalk in Kreuzberg?
We venture paradoxically close to deifying the Nazis ourselves when we pre-declare that their minor architectural remains will inevitably become temples for the fascist faithful. This is a tacit acknowledgement of the way our collective retelling of the 20th century mythologizes Hitler and the Nazi elite into a pantheon of malevolent gods capable of superhuman evil. What the gods touch—where the god cheated on his wife and watched movies, in this case—is destined to become a site of diabolical pilgrimage, a wellspring of sinister power, and a source of constant concern.
Enough. There is no malignant aura radiating off Goebbels’ villa, just the putrid stench of a public money pit. This debate is pointless. Leave the villa alone. Let the earth swallow it as only she can, beautifully indifferent to the crimes of dead men.