Known.
Silenced.
Documented.
A government-owned housing company in Berlin has known for 25 years that thousands of its apartments contain asbestos. The tenants were never told.
6,736 apartments. One landlord. 25 years of silence.
degewo is Berlin’s largest state-owned housing company — over 70,000 apartments, publicly funded, publicly accountable. Since at least 2000, degewo has known that thousands of its apartments contain asbestos-contaminated floor tiles and adhesives. Internal registers document every address. Tenants receive no systematic disclosure.
In 2012, degewo gave a new tenant written permission to renovate. He ripped out the floor, then used a power grinder to mill the adhesive off the concrete screed — in a sealed apartment, with no mask, no ventilation, no protective equipment. The adhesive contained asbestos. Grinding it into dust released an estimated 1.2 million cancer-causing fibers per cubic meter of air — invisible, filling the room. He worked in that dust for days. He was inhaling asbestos.
degewo had the contamination on file. The apartment was in their asbestos register. They said nothing.
This is not a historical footnote. As of December 2024, 6,736 apartments remain on degewo’s asbestos register. Across all six state-owned housing companies: at least 29,153.
Sources — Parliamentary Question 14/219 (2000); Drs. 19/23 946 (2025); Renovation permit 04.02.2012; LG Berlin 66 S 212/18
What makes this case different: everything is on the record.
In 2021, Berlin’s environmental crimes unit investigated the case. The lead detective documented maximum health hazard. Six weeks later, the prosecutor dropped the case. Not a single suspect was questioned. The appeal was rejected. The General Prosecutor confirmed.
The same information that shareholders receive is withheld from the families living in the apartments.
Sources — Investigation file 281 UJs 699/21; degewo Group Management Report 2017; Deutsche Wohnen Stock Prospectus 2011, pp. 170–171
This is not a German problem.
UK council housing. Australia’s “Mr Fluffy” homes. New York City public housing. French social housing. The pattern is always the same.
A landlord knows. A landlord calculates. A landlord stays silent.
In every documented case of residential asbestos concealment — from London council estates to Canberra suburbs to New York housing projects — the logic is identical. Disclosure creates legal liability. Silence is free. Until someone gets sick, and even then, the latency period makes causation hard to prove.
What makes the Berlin case unusual is not the pattern. It is the paper trail. Parliamentary records since 2000. Court files. Company reports audited by PwC. Police investigation transcripts. A 25-year archive that documents, step by step, how institutional concealment works — and how every safeguard fails.
Investigative
Research.
Documented since 2018. Parliamentary questions. Court rulings. Official file references. Internal documents. Police transcripts.