Schloss Langenbruck

Schloss Langenbruck once stood in the village of the same name, five kilometres north of Vilseck in the Upper Palatinate. The village was cleared in the 1930s to make way for the Grafenwöhr training ground, and today only the name remains. The site once housed a hammer mill powered by the Frankenohe stream, a tributary of the Vils. The hammer mill first appears in records from 1402, when the Bamberg bishop granted it to Heinrich Kratzer. By 1460 it was known as the Katzer hammer after its owner Michel Katzer. In the late 18th century the Ertl family modernised the works, and later the estate passed through the von Mann family for three generations. The furnace closed in 1861 and the buildings were demolished in 1870. The 18th-century manor house had two storeys under a double hipped roof. It showed five window bays on its main front, with a single-storey wing adding five more bays and three from the main block. The last owner, Dr Hans Winn, lost the property when the US Army took over the land in 1937.