This Friday, the Board of Trustees of the Garrison Church Foundation wants to meet for an unscheduled meeting, which the Mayor of Potsdam, Mike Schubert (SPD), in particular, has worked towards.

The reason for this is a 35-page report by the Federal Court of Auditors, which was made public last week and has since fueled the already heated debate about the reconstruction of the church.

Because the test report makes it clear that almost nothing remains of the original plan to finance the reconstruction of the Potsdam Garrison Church, like the reconstruction of the Dresden Frauenkirche, mainly from donations.

Reinhard Bingener

Political correspondent for Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Bremen based in Hanover.

  • Follow I follow

The foundation had already said goodbye to the idea of ​​rebuilding the entire church at an estimated cost of at least 100 million euros.

At present, only a scaled-down “basic variant” of the tower of the garrison church, which was originally almost 90 meters high, is being built.

The tower will later be used to commemorate the eventful history of the sacred building, which is not only associated with the Union of Lutherans and Reformed Churches of 1817, but also with Prussia's militarism and the "Day of Potsdam" in March 1933.

The financial framework for the reconstruction is now estimated at around 44 million euros.

And the crane above the construction site is turning simply because the foundation has been able to acquire more and more tax money from the federal government, which now accounts for well over half of the total volume.

The auditors from the Federal Court of Auditors write of a “approval cycle” during the term of office of the former Minister of State for Culture, Monika Grütters (CDU).

Your authority promised millions of dollars without first adequately examining the financial strength of the Garrison Church Foundation.

The consequence is that the federal government has to be responsible for all additional expenditure, because otherwise there is a risk of a “funding ruin” if there is an exit.

The auditors accuse the Minister of State for Culture of having "just unilaterally aligned her discretion to the interests of the foundation", "to have as many funds as possible subsequently approved for reconstruction".

Grütters successor Claudia Roth (Greens) is asked to thoroughly clarify the financial situation of the foundation, especially since there are also doubts about its accounting.

The examination revealed that donations received amounting to 167,000 euros were counted twice in the funding and that there are still unanswered questions about further donations.

The new Minister of State for Culture Roth immediately announced the consequences at the end of last week.

A further 4.5 million euros, which her predecessor Grütters promised and which are already in the federal budget, are to be examined again "comprehensively".

Subsidy fraud report?

At the same time, the critics of reconstruction, who were never lacking, especially on the left, fired more sharply at the foundation than ever before.

The citizens' initiative "Potsdam without a garrison church" says it is checking a complaint about subsidy fraud.

The Kassel architecture professor Philipp Oswalt speaks of years of "complicity" between the foundation and Grütters' authorities to get "illegal public funds".

Oswalt criticizes that the reconstruction of the tower is now "almost 100 percent financed by the state", if you include the tax deductibility of the donations and disregard a church loan of five million euros, which the Evangelical Church Berlin-Brandenburg-schlesische Oberlausitz (EKBO) and the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD).

Oswalt doesn't believe the foundation will ever pay back the money, and accuses church leaders of "collaborating in the foundation's fraudulent conduct."

The problem was foreseeable from the start.