Vile dwelling shortly to have a German as tenant (7)
I believe the answer is:
heinous
'vile' is the definition.
(thesaurus)
'dwelling shortly to have a german as tenant' is the wordplay.
I cannot really see how this works, but
'a german' could be 'ein' ('a' in German) and 'ein' is present in the answer.
This explanation may well be incorrect...
(Other definitions for heinous that I've seen before include "Hateful" , "Wicked (offence)" , "Very wicked, maybe in-house" , "Shockingly wicked" , "Utterly wicked" .)