Yahoo Finance Would you live in a Nazi relic?
Who really wants to sit back, relax and enjoy vacationing in the same spot where Hitler’s right-hand man, Joseph Goebbels, once seduced starlets?
Nobody? No takers?
What about owning a seaside condo in a massive, impersonal block of abandoned buildings that the Nazis built as a leisure retreat?
Anyone?
It’s a tough sell, one the German government has been trying to make for years--with varying degrees of success--as it considers what to do with some of the abandoned and decaying relics of World War II. Many Nazi-built structures have been destroyed, but some have simply been left to rot along scenic coastlines or in the middle of bustling cities. (Click here or on a photo to see them in the slideshow.)
For decades, the general rule had been to leave many of these structures as is, stark reminders of the fascist rule that once swept up the nation. But “with Germany’s economy solid, the property market booming and interest rates near record lows, some German developers and investors are starting to look to architectural relics of the Third Reich for opportunities,” the Wall Street Journal writes.
Plus these structures cost money to maintain, and can blight otherwise lovely landscapes. Prora -- a 10,000-room mega-hotel built in 1933 through Hitler’s odd Kraft Durch Freude, or Strength Through Joy, organization -- sits along an idyllic coastline near picturesque white-chalk cliffs lining the island Rugen.
Prora, the largest construction project of the Third Reich, is seeing new life after having sat incomplete and largely vacant since World War II. A youth hostel has taken over one wing, while German property firms Irisgerd and Prora Solitaire are building hotels and apartments, the Journal writes.
Prora Solitaire is finished with a large section of its ambitious revitalization plan, and residents have started to move in, the company wrote on its website. A cafe is open, but bigger plans for a large lobby, restaurant and spa as well as more shops are still underway. Irisgerd is converting the property to apartments, which, though incomplete, were already 70 percent sold when a sales rep spoke to the Journal.
(Click here or on a photo to see a slideshow of the Nazi-era buildings.)
Even Congress Hall, the iconic Roman Colosseum-inspired structure that dominated Nazi rally grounds in Nuremberg, has been revitalized -- also only in part -- as a 515-seat concert hall. Competing with Prora as the largest (also unfinished) structure the Nazis undertook before being consumed by war, Nuremberg had kept the building effectively untouched, save for a museum, “as a reminder of the dangers of fascism,” according to the international edition of Der Spiegel.
In Bremen, two architects have been converting World War II air raid bunkers into apartments, condos, and studio and performance spaces for artists and musicians.
In Hamburg, an air raid shelter was transformed into a renewable energy power plant, complete with a mini-museum and cafe with a deck speckled with tables and chairs.
But not every property can so easily slink away from the past. Some are perhaps simply too freighted with their dark history.
Take Bogensee, a lakeside vacation complex that once belonged to Goebbels, the infamous Nazi propaganda minister. For nearly two decades, the Berlin city government's Property Fund has been trying to sell its massive 70-room property, which is named after the lake it overlooks about 30 minutes northeast of Berlin.
Goebbels was given the villa in 1939, and he used it both to conduct his illicit affairs with Babelsberg Film Studio starlets and to compose some of his most vitriolic campaigns -- including the “total war” speech in 1943, meant to rally the Germans as the Allied armies closed in -- according to TheLocal.de, an English-language German news organization.
The house was later incorporated into a larger school complex run by the socialist Free German Youth (known as the FDJ in German, the Frei Deutsche Jugend) movement, but it has been vacant since the end of the 20th century.
Properties connected with party members as high up as Goebbels are rare at this point: The worst of them get destroyed. Hitler’s Bavarian mountain home was dismantled in 1952, and Air Marshall Hermann Goering’s home was literally blown up in 1945.
Although the Berlin Property Fund wants to unload the property, the city must also be careful about who buys it, fund spokesperson Marlies Masche told TheLocal.de, so that these regime relics do not fall into the wrong hands -- “particularly those of neo-Nazis who could turn it into a gathering point for the extremists or a shrine to the former propaganda minister,” the news site wrote. That means background checks on all potential buyers, of whom there are few.
Meanwhile, villa maintenance is costing the city of Berlin thousands of dollars each year, according to the Telegraph.
With the so-far successful development of Prora and other buildings, including air raid bunkers throughout the country, the time may have finally come for these buildlings to shed their Nazi-era identities.
Whether or not that could lift Goebbels’ shadow from his love nest remains to be seen.
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