Former military station in front of RügenForgotten GDR island is being auctioned off! Bargains in the Baltic Sea?

Many people have probably dreamed of their own South Sea island – and dismissed the idea as a beautiful utopia. At an auction on June 4th in Hamburg, a highest bidder can now come close, albeit differently: the former GDR military station Ostervilm in the Baltic Sea, southeast of the island of Rügen, is up for sale.

The sight of the approximately 250 square meter platform in the Greifswalder Bodden, including the building, is eerie. Doors and windows are torn from their hinges and some of the wooden floorboards have collapsed. The building is littered with verdigris and bird droppings, with rusting structural elements in between.

The island served the GDR's People's Navy as a so-called demagnetization station, as reported by Norddeutscheimmobilienauktionen AG. Naval ships were treated here via a cable loop in the sea so that they would not be detected by sea mines with magneto detonators.

It is an artificial island in a water depth of about ten meters. According to the auction house, it was built in 1954 on around 600 wooden piles. On the platform there was a house and a laundry room, “Spartan but functional,” according to the catalog.

After the end of the GDR, the island fell into increasing decline despite changing owners. The auctioneers describe the condition as “dilapidated”. Nature, bird droppings and vandalism took a toll on the building. There are settlement cracks.

The minimum bid is 39,000 euros. Some interested parties already have ideas for future use, says Hanna Scheibeler, clerk at the auction house. Accordingly, a casino, a wedding location or a secluded bar in the Baltic Sea could be built on the island. “There are no limits to creativity here,” she says.

After the end of the GDR, Burkhard Lenz from Putbus on Rügen also had ideas with a friend about converting the island for possible further use. He knew many soldiers from the People's Navy who worked on the secret island during the GDR era and who came to Putbus to play football, as he explains. The facility was not intended for a longer stay. Most of the time the soldiers were only on the island for a few days, but if there was more to do, they could last for several days.

“There wasn’t much there,” says Lenz, who surveyed the island with his friend in the mid-1990s. “There was no 220 volts and there was no drinking water on the island either. That was always brought over with tanks.”

The plans that he and his friend made then fell apart, as he reports. “After several discussions with experts about this, we dropped everything.”

Sources used: Philip Dulian, dpa