Schloss Deutenhofen

Schloss Deutenhofen stands in Deutenhofen, a village in the municipality of Hebertshausen within Bavaria. The building began as a castle before 1341 under knight Ulrich Gruber. By the 16th century it became the seat of the Tewtenhofen hofmark, a Bavarian feudal estate, and remained so until 1834. The Reitmor family owned it from the 16th century and shaped it into roughly its present form. Dr Johann von Mändl, born in 1588, later became Elector Maximilian I’s finance minister and bought the estate in 1624. The castle suffered fire damage in 1632 when Swedish forces under Bernard of Saxe-Weimar burned it during the Thirty Years’ War. After the war von Mändl rebuilt and expanded the building. In 1834 it passed to the Count of Spreti. After the Second World War the castle served as an auxiliary hospital, then became a nursing home run by the Bavarian Red Cross in 1970. From 2012 it housed refugees for the Dachau District. Visitors find a large house with a small chapel in the older part, a simple white-painted room with a vaulted ceiling. The building’s history is visible in its architecture and the stories of its owners. The surrounding village and wider district add to the sense of a place shaped by centuries of change.