Schloss Wolfpassing

Schloss Wolfpassing stands at the eastern edge of the village of Wolfpassing in the Scheibbs district of Lower Austria. It is a four-storey baroque building arranged in four wings around an arcaded courtyard. The corners carry projecting towers and the whole is topped by a hipped roof. The village itself lies in the Erlauf valley, where the hills of the Mostviertel begin to rise.

The castle’s owners changed many times since the 17th century, beginning with the Counts of Abensperg and Traun. The Freiherren von Geymann remodelled the old fortress into a residence in the early 18th century. Later the Auersperg family gave it its present shape just before the middle of that century. During the Napoleonic wars the castle survived unharmed because the owner’s daughter had married a French general. Emperor Franz I bought it for the imperial estates in 1834. In 1910 Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand exchanged the property for another estate and removed much of the fine furniture to his Bohemian castle Konopiště.

Visitors today see the symmetrical baroque façade with its corner towers and the enclosed courtyard lined by arcades. Inside the park stands a small memorial villa dedicated to Engelbert Dollfuß, chancellor of Austria, who stayed here in the summers of 1933 and 1934. A tablet records his visits. Nearby, in the chapel tower, a second bell bears witness to the Nazi era: cast in 1939 from metal of the original Dollfuß memorial bell, it carries an inscription praising Hitler’s annexation of Austria. A modern plaque explains the history of both bells and keeps the memory alive.