Feuerstein Castle

Feuerstein Castle lies at the edge of the so-called Lange Meile near Ebermannstadt in the south German state of Bavaria. It was built in 1941 by Oskar Vierling as a laboratory for researching High Frequency technology and electroacoustics and was used until 1945 by 250 employees for research into weapons and communication technology as part of the German armaments programme during the Second World War.

At the end of the war the castle was seized by American soldiers, from 1946 it was rented by the Archdiocese of Bamberg under Jupp Schneider and sold in 1949. Since then the castle and the entire estate have been in use as a Roman Catholic youth and conference centre.

History

Oskar Vierling was looking for a central location for his laboratories. The choice fell on a hill called the Feuerstein. Its design as a castle blended well into the countryside of Franconian Switzerland and was chosen for camouflage reasons. During the war it was disguised as a hospital and had tiles in the form of a red cross on the roof, but actually housed a laboratory for secret Nazi armament projects. After the end of the war it was abandoned and construction plans and documents were destroyed. Nevertheless, in 2011 a document came into the hands of cryptographer-historian, Norbert Ryska, from the American special unit, Ticom (Target Intelligence Committee), which described the work of Vierling at Feuerstein Castle in more detail. According to this, Vierling worked for the Nazis on speech encoding methods, acoustic torpedo control, acoustic detonation of mines, anti-detection technology for U-boats and in the fields of radio and electrotechnology.

A relict of its construction period is the present wine cellar, formally a walk-in safe with a ten-centimetre-thick steel door. The charm of the castle comes not from any medieval origin, but from its wartime history and its young age.

The castle has been expanded by dormitory accommodation, a dining hall, leisure facilities (Kegelbahn, table tennis, volleyball, hard court, sports field), conference rooms, camping sites, agriculture, a riding stable and a glider airfield. Today Feuerstein Castle is a modern youth facility owned by the Diocese of Bamberg.

In 1999 Feuerstein Observatory was founded, 500 metres south of Feuerstein Castle Airfield. The observatory took the name of the castle. The tower of the castle is used by the observatory as a microwave radio relay relay station to link it to the town of Ebermannstadt in the valley. In this way the tower built by Vierling to test the first radio relay link continues to fulfil its original purpose.

References:

• Wikipedia

Address

Burg Feuerstein 2, Ebermannstadt, Germany

Details

Founded: 1941
Category: Castles and fortifications in Germany
Historical period: Nazi Germany (Germany)