When you want to get rid of something at all costs, the simplest thing is to give it away. This is what the municipality of Berlin intends to do with a huge villa which it owns but which it makes no use of. Located a short hour’s drive from the German capital, on 17 hectares of wooded land, this 1,600 square meter building is a financial pit for the city, which spends several hundred thousand euros each year in construction costs. maintenance and monitoring.
Hence the decision to sell it. “I suggest to anyone who wishes to take over the site to receive it as a gift from Berlin,” declared the city’s finance deputy, Stefan Evers, on May 2, in front of the municipal assembly. If no one is interested, “we will have no choice but to demolish the building”, he added.
Such concern for good management of public funds should have garnered consensus. Only problem: the first occupant of the said villa was none other than Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), the minister of propaganda of the IIIe Reich. Upon learning that the city of Berlin was ready to give it away for free, Oliver Borchert, the mayor of Wandlitz, the municipality where the land is located, in the Land of Brandenburg, choked up. “This idea is most unfortunate. I have no desire for Berlin to give this property to someone who would be guided by ideological ulterior motives,” the councilor declared to the German press agency DPA.
Zelensky and fake news
The mayor of Wandlitz’s concern is not unfounded. In 2021, an association proposed to bring the place back to life, by setting up a hotel, artist studios, conference rooms and a yoga school. But the project came to an end when it was revealed that one of its initiators was an activist of the Reichsbürger (“citizens of the Reich”), this far-right movement whose members (who number around twenty thousand according to the services of intelligence) do not recognize the institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany and dream of restoring the German Empire of 1871.
A few months ago, fake news circulated on social networks indicating that the villa had found Volodymyr Zelensky as a buyer, who would have bought it for 8.1 million euros in October 2023: distributed by pro-Russian accounts, this “information”, accompanied by a photograph of a false bill of sale, was supposed to corroborate the assertion, hammered out by the Kremlin, according to which the Ukrainian president was a Nazi.
You have 64.63% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.