Lanke is a hamlet some 50km to the north east of the centre of Berlin.
On the occasion of his 39th birthday, Joseph Goebbels was given by the City of Berlin this forest site with the Bogensee lake.
Goebbels appears to have come out here for the first time in the middle of September 1936. The location was chosen by Karl Hanke, who was his assistant at the time. In his diary, Goebbels writes, ‘All around, the deepest solitude, Hanke has done a good job.’
The Reich Labour Front provided the manpower to erect a two-storey woodframed house at the water’s edge. A tall wire fence was put around the outside to keep the riff raff out.
After the 1936 Nuremberg rally, Goebbels set about furnishing the house at Lanke, possibly with Lida Baarova in mind.
However the first Goebbels to put the house to its intended use was not Joseph but his wife Magda who took Hanke there the day before the exchange of papers. I don’t know if the two of them were involved at the time, however Magda admitted in July 1939 that she was having an affair with Karl Hanke as from 1938.
He took Lida out there several times. On one occasions, his manservant Kaiser burned the only food they had in which was potatoes. Despite the distance from Berlin, and his home at Schwannenwerder, Goebbels would frequently go out there to escape from his wife. At the same time as the leaders of the Third Reich, Goebbels amongst them, were discussing laws on adultery and divorce, the propaganda minister would frequently find Lida Baarova waiting there for him whilst his wife was at their other home looking after the children. Goebbels had given her the key to the house - admittedly not to the front gate but one can get in via the back entrance just as well.
They slept in different rooms, both usually had an early start in Berlin and the manservant Kaiser would wake them at 05:00.
Goebbels managed to acquire more of the publicly owned forest and the tax payer footed the bill to landscape it to his taste. The property soon benefitted from a private beach with jetty, boardwalks around the marshy parts and especially brought in deer.
Magda Goebbels eventually complained to Hitler. Lida must have sensed that something would come amiss when one of the two swans that inhabited the Bogensee died.
Hitler told Goebbels that he had to drop Lida and the minister obeyed his Fuhrer. He told her that he could not see her again.
Goebbels not content with the small house at Lanke, wanted a lake side mansion. On 22 August 1939, he was with his wife inspecting the construction works on the property when he received a telephone call from Hitler who was overjoyed. Hitler told him about the planned deal with the Soviet Union and the plans to attack Poland.
As tens of thousands of homes were destroyed in Poland, the Goebbels mansion was handed over and the minister named it the Haus am Bogensee. Nearly two hundred people worked on the building. The former guardhouse used by his manservant Kaiser was converted into a 16x9 metre long guesthouse for two families. There was a swimming pool measuring 20 metres by eight metres which cost 24,000 marks. The new gatehouse cost thirty thousand marks. Alterations after completion to the cinema, drawing room, and Magda’s private bedroom cost one hundred thousand marks and the children’s rooms, 140,000. The bill by the end of October 1940 is 2,663,052·58 marks. During the first summer, it was realised that some form of mosquito control was needed and that the roads were insufficient. Then Goebbels decided that for security reasons he needed radio equipment. That brought the bill to over three million marks. The furnishings came from occupied France and the Netherlands, acquired at knock down prices from people forced to sell. There were eighteenth-century tapestries and paintings by Van Dyck and Goya. Goebbels controlled the movie industry in Germany and this business helped him out with around 2.3 million marks.
Hitler visited Lanke on several occasions, just as he visited the other Goebbels home in Schwannenwerder where Magda had prepared a guest room for him.
Christmas 1944 was the last to be spent by the Goebbels family at Lanke. Magda Goebbels said to her secretary, ‘Next year we’ll surely be at peace.’ Once the festivities were complete, Goebbels’ sister Maria and his mother left Lanke, and he never saw them again.
In the middle of January 1945, Soviet armoured coloumns pierced through Poland reaching the German border in Silesia. With the Red Army now only around 200km to the east, Goebbels decided that Lanke was too close for comfort. On 31 January 1945, he sent his orderly Schwägermann out to Lanke, to collect Magda, their six children and two governesses.
He never returned to Lanke again.
25 ноя 2023
