German developers spruce up part of former Nazi resort

By Martina Rathke

It was hard to tell which was beaming more brightly, the sun or Axel Bering. The 51-year-old real estate developer from Berlin gazed out at the Baltic Sea from the third floor of the massive building built by the Nazis as a holiday complex in the beach resort of Prora on the German island of Ruegen.

 “This property is at a prime location near the beach and not reproducible. It’s almost impossible to get hold of something like this anymore,” Bering said.

He and his business partner, Michael Jacobi, had the pinewood between the building and the white sandy beach cleared of underbrush. Inside the building, what had been dreary, uniform rooms with yellowed walls were gradually being made light and cheery.

Known as the Colossus of Prora, the 4.5-km long complex consists of five (originally eight) identical six-storey blocks of steel-reinforced concrete designed for a total of 20,000 visitors. It was built between 1936 and 1939 by the giant Nazi leisure and tourism agency Kraft durch Freude (”Strength through Joy”) to provide German workers with an inexpensive beach holiday and indoctrinate them with Nazi ideology.

Not quite finished at the start of World War II in 1939, it never went into operation. After the war, the complex was used as military barracks, first by the Soviets and then by the East Germans.

Beginning in 2004, reunited Germany’s federal government began auctioning off the blocks of the complex, under heritage conservation, one by one to private investors. The land-use plan permits 3,000 accommodation places in immediate proximity to the hotels and guesthouses of the seaside resort of Binz, of which Prora is part.

Historians including Juergen Rostock, head of the Prora Documentation Centre in the middle of the complex, have warned against letting Prora degenerate into a speculative commodity whose dubious history is forgotten.

Last year Bering and Jacobi bought two sections of Block 2 nearly 100m in length from Ulrich Busch, son of German agitprop singer and leftist icon Ernst Busch (1900-1980).

Busch had purchased Blocks 1 and 2 in 2006 for €455,000 (now about $607,000) from the German federal government, and obtained construction permits after tough discussions with heritage conservation and building authorities. Insufficient financing stopped him short, however.

Bering and Jacobi have given their piece of the Nazi relic, which they are turning into 60 owner-occupied flats, the innocuous name Meersinfonie (”Sea Symphony”). Renovations are costing millions of euros. Bering said 20 of the 30 flats in one section had already been sold, and that there was abundant interest in the other 10.

 “They’re going like hotcakes,” he remarked.

In addition to the excellent location, owner-occupiers and investors are attracted by the current low borrowing rates and tax write-offs for the purchase of heritage-protected property. An 80-sq m Meersinfonie flat costs €267,000, a little more than Busch paid the government for a complete, 10-section block of flats.

A topping-out ceremony for the first flats was held this June, “73 years (sic) after the start of construction,” the developers said in their invitation to the press.

Binz Mayor Karsten Schneider called that wording “extremely infelicitous.” Otherwise, he said, what the developers are doing is perfectly legal. What is more, “After 20 years of dereliction, investors have finally turned up who appear to be solvent.”

The appreciated property values in Prora have not benefited Binz, though, whose hoteliers are warily eyeing the competition north of the picturesque facades of their resort architecture.

 “I’d have preferred Prora not being left solely to the Institute for Federal Real Estate,” said Schneider, referring to the German government agency given management of the holiday complex. What nettles him are the 3,000 accommodation places added to area’s tourism market, which has 14,500 hotel beds already, and the prospect of increased summer traffic around Binz, about a three-hour drive from Berlin.

And plenty of traffic there is — despite the notoriously cold waters of the Baltic Sea, even in summer.

In Schneider’s view, a lot of trouble could have been avoided had the Prora complex been torn down — save one block left as a monument — after German reunification in 1990. — DPA