Germany's far-right AfD party is trying to get its hands on a crumbling castle long rumored to be haunted. The Nazis used the Sanatorium Schwarzeck in eastern Germany as a training academy for Luftwaffe pilots, the Telegraph reports The building, later used by East Germany's Communist government, fell into disrepair after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Franz Schmid, an AfD lawmaker in Bavaria and treasurer of the party's "Junge Alternative" youth wing, plans to turn the building into a hotel and "patriotic center," reports Bild. The party denied being an extremist movement but it "has been embroiled in a string of Nazi-related scandals in recent years, the Telegraph notes.
The controversial sale, however, might be held up by a long-running dispute between the current owner and authorities in the nearby town of Bad Blankenberg. Authorities say the current owner never paid up after agreeing to buy the castle for around $325,000 in 2003 and has also failed to pay almost $400,000 in property taxes. If Schmid does close the deal, he is likely to have to carry out major renovations to make the building usable. Bild reports that for many years, the only people who visited the building were "ghost hunters and treasure hunters who searched the haunted sanatorium for paranormal phenomena or the gold of Adolf Hitler's confidant Hermann Göring." (More Germany stories.)
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