One of the disused buildings at Wandlitz. Photo: DPA 
 
 History weighs heavily on the German property market, no more so than at a sprawling lakeside villa that once served as a love nest for Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. 
 
 Berlin has been trying to sell the - in theory - prime slab of real estate north of the German capital for 15 years. 
 
 But rather than a gem that the cash-strapped city, which is scrambling to pay for a record refugee influx, can liquidate, Berlin has admitted it sees the asset as little more than a millstone around its neck. 
 
 Berlin Immobilienmanagement GmbH (BIM), the city's wholly owned real estate agency, has in effect given up on the sale and expressed concerns it could fall into "the wrong hands". 
 
 "I am really afraid that this could become a shrine for Nazis and I don't think we should take that risk," the executive director of the BIM, Birgit Moehring, said. 
 
 Instead, it hopes to lease the property, whose idyllic setting is nestled in a wood and perched on the small Bogen lake. 
 
 The squat, sprawling house was used by the top Nazi as "country retreat" perfect for trysts with a revolving cast of budding actresses and paramours. 
 
 "It was refuge from the busy city" 40 kilometres (25 miles) to the south, BIM spokesman Christian Breitkreutz told AFP. 
 
 Berlin itself bought the land complete with a small cabin in 1936 for Goebbels, Hitler's nefariously skilled spin doctor, in honour of his 39th birthday. 
 
 Goebbels was taken with its secluded setting and subsequently had a much larger villa built on the site bankrolled by UFA, the movie production house he ran with an iron fist. 
 
 The luxury facilities included a private cinema and spacious living quarters overlooking the lake. 
 
 Joseph Goebbels. Photo: DPA 
 
 Attacked by damp cold 
 
 Today, the original generous picture windows, rich wood panelling and marble fixtures can still be seen, said Roberto Mueller, who has worked as a guard at the site since 1984. 
 
 But the house, ravaged by moisture and biting cold in the isolated and abandoned site, has begun to rapidly crumble. 
 
 The city had repeatedly tried to sell the house in recent years and a last attempt, via a public tender, came up dry in December, Moehring said, confirming that BIM had finally given up. 
 
 Goebbels and his wife Magda committed suicide in Hitler's bunker as Berlin was overrun by Soviet Army troops in May 1945, after she murdered their six children. 
 
 Dealing with the Goebbels villa has been all the more complicated because it is on the same slice of land as another vestige of the country's tumultuous past. 
 
 In the post-war years, East Germany built a vast complex on the land in the Stalinist style of the early 1950s to house a training centre for the FDJ, the communist party's youth indoctrination organisation. 
 
 The regime also used it to put up visiting party cadres from "brother states" such as Vietnam, Cuba and Angola. 
 
 At the time, the neighbouring Goebbels villa was converted into a supermarket for FDJ students and a children's nursery, Müller said. 
 
 In total, the four main post-war buildings cover some 1,400 square metres (15,000 square feet) of bedrooms, conference halls, reception and banquet space. 
 
 Day by day, they are falling apart. 
 
 Phantom village 
 
 "At present there is no heating, no running water, there is serious damage to the facades, the roofs are falling apart and inside there is a lot to do too," Moehring admits, saying renovation costs would be "considerable". 
 
 Currently the only viable use for the phantom village has been as a unique, evocative film set, most recently for the adaptation of the international wartime bestseller "Alone in Berlin" starring Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson. 
 
 "What would really appeal to us would be if someone arrived with an intelligent concept to use this place which is so steeped in history," 
 
 Moehring said, suggesting a continuing education campus or a hotel as other possible options. 
 
 She said BIM had been in touch with potential investors. But a major stumbling block remains the fact that the Goebbels villa is a listed building. 
 
 Because that prevents any major change to the structure, Moehring would like to see it stripped of its protected status. 
 
 "I am someone who absolutely defends the importance in this city of always being able to feel the presence of history," she said. 
 
 "But you also have to ask the question whether it is sensible to maintain certain buildings under the protection a historic monument grants." 
 
 If it were lifted, Moehring said the best thing might be the most radical measure: razing it to the ground. 
 
 Germany has often been confronted with questions over how to deal with the toxic legacy of sites linked to its bitter 20th century history. 
 
 Hitler's own "Eagle's Nest" mountain-top lodge now has a restaurant, a cafe and shops selling books with titles such as "Hitler's Mountain" that draws thousands of tourists each year. 
 
 Many of Germany's ministries pitched up in the Nazis' former official buildings when the government moved to Berlin from Bonn in 1999. 
 
 And the hangars of the former airport Tempelhof, a prime example of the Nazis' architectural gigantism, and the erstwhile headquarters of communist East Germany's feared Stasi secret police are both being used to house tens of thousands of asylum seekers. ||||| The lakeside villa was Berlin’s gift to Joseph Goebbels. The infamous Nazi propaganda minister used it as a secret “love nest” in which to consummate his countless affairs and as a tranquil refuge from where he composed tirades against the Jews in order to please Adolf Hitler. 
 
 Yet sixty nine years after Goebbels and his wife murdered their six children and then committed suicide in a garden above Hitler’s Berlin bunker, the Nazi minister’s Haus am Bogensee villa survives intact, overgrown and empty in a lost corner of East Germany just 24 miles north of the capital. 
 
 The Berlin city government, which owns the listed 70-room lakeside complex completed in 1939, has been trying in vain since Germany’s reunification to find a buyer for the Goebbels’ villa. 
 
 But its unsavoury past has deterred prospective investors and Berlin is concerned that neo-Nazis might bid for the complex in disguise. 
 
 “The nature of the property means that the background of anyone interested in it, has to be checked,” a spokesman told The Telegraph, “ Nobody can say how long it will be before we find a suitable investor,” he added. 
 
 So far no prospective buyer’s name has been put forward despite more than 20 years of attempts to sell off the Haus am Bogensee. 
 
 The property is believed to be the only leading Nazi bigwig’s villa to remain intact after the Second World War. Nazi Air Marhsal Hermann Goering’s lavish “Carinhall” lodge nearby was blown up in 1945. 
 
 Despite its historical status, the Haus am Bogensee has become an expensive and embarrassing millstone costing thousands each year in maintenance costs – although the city says that recent attempts to market the villa in a package with a number of East German communist era buildings raised some interest. 
 
 Nowadays visiting the Nazi propaganda minister’s rural hideaway means taking an excursion into Germany’s not so distant past. The Haus am Bogensee stands in the middle of a park-like complex of East German communist era buildings, on a street, named after the prominent Soviet proletarian writer Nicolai Ostrovski. 
 
 The Goebbels villa was used as a communist youth university after 1945, but the deep overhanging Nordic roof of the building and the rough stone columns supporting its covered entrance show that it is a piece of typical Nazi-era “Germanic” architecture built in the style of Adolf Hitler’s now destroyed “Berghof” Bavarian mountain retreat. 
 
 The Haus am Bogensee boasts the remains of an underground bunker, a cinema and a still fully intact and elaborate banqueting hall complete with open fireplace, oak panelled ceiling and French windows which sink into the floor allowing unhindered access to a large outdoor terrace. “It is a place of idyllic solitude”, is how Goebbels described his country surroundings. 
 
 The club-footed and sexually voracious Nazi minister exploited the villa for his own ends. 
 
 The abode was far away from the Berlin mansion he shared with his wealthy and ardently pro-Nazi wife, Magda and their six children. Goebbels used its remoteness to indulge his reputation as the so-called “ Bock” (Randy Goat) of Babelsberg – the name of the Berlin studios film over which he reigned supreme. 
 
 After sacking Babelsberg’s Jewish actresses, Goebbels devoted much of his time to seducing the Aryan starlets who replaced them. 
 
 The Haus am Bogensee became renowned as his “love nest”. 
 
 The propaganda minister’s escapades were finally brought to the attention of a disapproving Adolf Hitler with Goebbel’s all too public dalliance with the Czech actress Lida Baavora, which prompted Magda Goebbels to contemplate divorce. 
 
 Hitler was aghast at the prospect of the outwardly “model Nazi” Goebbels family breaking up and ordered his propaganda minister to end the affair. 
 
 Goebbels obeyed. 
 
 When the Allies started bombing the capital of the Third Reich, Magda and the children moved into the Haus am Bogensee from where Goebbels continued to write venomous propaganda, including his famous appeal to Germans to embark on “Total War “ in February 1943. 
 
 Goebbels and his family left towards the end of April 1945 and joined Hitler in his Berlin bunker. Hitler committed suicide on April 30th. 
 
 Goebbels and his wife poisoned their six children the following day and killed themselves shortly afterwards. 
 
 Today there is little to remind the visitor of the Haus am Bogensee’s turbulent past. The Berlin city government has not set an asking price for the complex but hopes that the site may be turned into a hotel, boarding school or a wellness spa. 
 
 It has made no provision to ensure that the villa’s Nazi associations are remembered, should it eventually sell the property. “It would depend on what any new owner wants,” a city government spokeswoman told the Telegraph. ||||| In 1940, German soldier Hans Quangel is killed in action during the French campaign. His parents, Otto and Anna, are devastated by the loss and their bereavement is unmollified by the joyful hysteria at Germany's victory. Deciding that Fuhrer Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime are responsible for this tragedy and much more, Otto cannot stand by any longer. As such, Otto begins to create handwritten cards denouncing the regime's abuses and lies, which he secretly deposits throughout Berlin while a disillusioned Anna insists on helping him. As the subversive cards pile up over the years, police detective Escherich is tasked to track down the leafleteer while being pressured by his increasingly impatient SS superior for an arrest for this "treason," regardless of actual guilt. As the stakes rise even as Nazi Germany's day of reckoning approaches, Otto and Anna are determined to spread the truth regardless of the odds even as their opposition awaits the fatal mistake that could doom them. Written by Kenneth Chisholm (kchishol@rogers.com)
– Sure, it's a fixer-upper. But the crumbling façade, failing roof, and seen-better-decades interior aren't the reasons why Berlin has been unable to sell the Haus am Bogensee, a 70-room lakeside villa that the city has been trying to unload for more than 20 years. The real sticking point is the property's Nazi legacy—it once served as a "love nest" for Hitler's propagandist, Joseph Goebbels—and the concern that it "could become a shrine for Nazis," should it fall into the "wrong hands." So now, rather than sell the property located 25 miles north of Berlin, the city's real estate agency, BIM, hopes to lease it, AFP reports. (Though the place has had a whiff of a second life: It featured as a movie set in the upcoming Alone in Berlin with Emma Thompson.) In a 2014 look at Berlin's predicament, the Telegraph reported that villa is thought to be the last that belonged to a Nazi party "bigwig" that's still standing. And what has ended up in Berlin's hands started there: It purchased the land for Goebbels in 1936 to mark his 39th birthday, according to the AFP; construction of Haus am Bogensee was completed in 1939, the Telegraph reports. Goebbels described the area as a "place of idyllic solitude," but it also was, according to reports, an ideal place for the "Randy Goat of Babelsberg" to cheat on his wife with starlets from the film studio he controlled. He and wife Magda ultimately killed themselves in Hitler's bunker after poisoning their six kids. (The Nazi's "ideal" Aryan baby, thought to have been determined by Goebbels himself, was actually Jewish.)