"Re-Education Campus" - East Germany - July 2024

Derelict Places

Help Support Derelict Places:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

UrbanX

Moderate Moderator
Joined
Apr 2, 2007
Messages
7,566
Reaction score
8,244
Location
Cambridge
Visited with Priority7 (Whom I credit for the site) and a couple of non-forum members.

Context:

A lake, a forest. Hidden and dilapidated here stands Joseph Goebbels' country estate and a few meters further on is the GDR cadet training centre of the FDJ (German Youth Movement) – That’s what we’ll be looking at today.

451680832_499842855755683_7507479331209618480_n.jpg


Most of the buildings here have been empty since 1999, 25 years ago. The entire area on the western side of the lake has been a listed building since 1996. This includes three buildings from 1939.
IMG_8557.JPG


IMG_8566.JPG


IMG_8569.JPG



It is a "place of propaganda": historically contaminated, poisoned and obviously hated, a silent place of history, a place of perpetrators and twisters of words. Two dictatorships were controlled and ideologically supported here, for more than 50 years out of the public eye



History:

First, the city of Berlin gave Hitler's propaganda minister Goebbels a weekend house for life in the Berlin recreation area for his birthday. Then the film company UFA built him another comfortable villa on the small forest lake. It was on a par with Hitler's Berghof on the Obersalzberg. The forest around it was heavily guarded.

IMG_8677.JPG


IMG_8678.JPG


IMG_8673.JPG



In 1946, the youth organization Free German Youth (FDJ for short) took over his villa as a training center for its junior officials.New Stalinist buildings were added. Isolated in the forest, liberation fighters and left-wing activists from the western world were also supposed to hear the teachings of Marx and Lenin. The GDR mass organization FDJ paid for everything, even the cigarettes

IMG_8682.JPG


The Explore:

The area is outstandingly pretty. Our hire car bobbed happily along the road around the edge of the lake – it was a summers evening and loads of people were wild swimming, families were having BBQs and picnics at the waters edge. It seems almost impossible to contemplate the evilness that regularly drove this road 80 years ago.

IMG_8579.JPG


IMG_8588.JPG



We arrived straight from the airport. I had decided to travel dressed smartly, so looked for a place to pull up and get changed. We pulled onto the drive and was surprised to see a dirty looking man sat there on an old deckchair, with a little BBQ going. I thought he waved us through and was a friendly German out for a BBQ. However my sharper eyed collegues pointed out that that his wave was actually accusing me of participating in a less than wholesome pastime. He actually became even more agitated at our presence and the wave turned quite aerobic, so we nicknamed him “Mr Motivator”


In the early 1980s, more than a dozen interpreter booths were installed above the hall. This created one of the largest simultaneous interpreting systems in the GDR. The listeners found connections for their headphones in the armrests of the 525 folding chairs in the hall. In 1981

IMG_8630.JPG


IMG_8637.JPG


IMG_8635.JPG


Today, the lecture hall has become a "chamber of horrors" for Müller. "I don't like going there anymore because the damage to the equipment is irreparable," he says. "It hurts." The parquet floors have lifted in many places due to the water dripping in and have become tripping hazards. The folding chairs are warped and ruined. Dust and crumbling plaster cover all surfaces. The technology from the interpreter booths has been dismantled or stolen.

IMG_8606.JPG


IMG_8612.JPG


IMG_8622.JPG


IMG_8626.JPG




Future:

“For 15 years, Berlin has wanted to sell a huge property on the Lake. This is where the GDR once trained its young cadets. But before that, Joseph Goebbels used the idyllic area. This makes a sale impossible, says the state.”

The site is maintained by a single (very talented) caretaker and all-round craftsman, Herr Müller. He explains that he does so much work here that nobody sees (we did, lol)

IMG_8646.JPG


IMG_8650.JPG


IMG_8663.JPG


IMG_8654.JPG


IMG_8658.JPG


In the summer, he is mainly busy keeping the beautiful line of sight from the main building to the cafeteria, which is around 100 meters away, clear. "So much wild growth here. Nature is reclaiming everything” If he had one wish, "a lot of people would have to move in here very quickly and revitalize the area,"

I love his sentiment. However the local estate agent notes that it’s not that easy:

"We cannot sell it - because of its problematic history," says Birgit Möhring, managing director of Berliner Immobilienmanagement GmbH (BIM), responsible for the state-owned land and real estate.

451695027_1671908253588359_7489708805556997513_n.jpg


IMG_8679.JPG


The state of Berlin fears that neo-Nazis or other right-wing extremist groups could secretly acquire the site and turn it into a place of pilgrimage. "Our problem is that if we sell it, we can only fix the use for a maximum of ten years," says Möhring, describing the predicament. "We cannot permanently influence who uses the property. And that is a concern for us."

Thanks for reading.
 
I think the austerity of the place speaks volumes of untold horror associated with the place. You can only remember the victims looking round. Superb report
Such "re-education centres" are around in China today, along with all the restrictions on everyday life - and work conditions as bad as 'Dickensian' Britain. Yet we buy almost everything from China with little thought about those who make the products. Read Private Revolutions by Yuan Yang to see how growing up, working and living under Communism now really is.
 
Very nicely covered, bit gutted I missed this one bur will try again next time I'm over.
Yeah, it's not going anywhere! Great to meet you finally BTW!

I think the austerity of the place speaks volumes of untold horror associated with the place. You can only remember the victims looking round. Superb report
Very true. Our group naturally split up and we all just wandered round alone, in silence.
 
Looks great, and good to see another ex-DDR building with a conscientious caretaker looking after it. Reminds me a bit of the Horsaal.
 
Superb set Mr X and I have finally conquered my white whale....4 attempts over 6 years and never managed to get in. Finally I can cross it off :)
 

Latest posts

Back
Top