Schloss Grundlsee

Villa Roth stands on a small peninsula jutting into the clear waters of Grundlsee near the village of Gößl in the Steiermark. Built between 1879 and 1883 for the industrialist Johann ‘Jean’ Roth, it was designed by his brother Franz Roth, a practising architect in Vienna. The house served as a hunting lodge and later became known as Schloss Grundlsee among locals. During the inter-war years the villa hosted the Hörbiger–Wessely acting family for summer holidays. Their daughter Elisabeth Orth later published a memoir of those weeks by the lake.

The villa is best remembered for a private tragedy in September 1939 when two shots were fired in a first-floor room. Attila Hörbiger, staying in the house, broke a window and entered to find Dr Georg Roth and his fiancée Trude Kuntner dead. Georg, aged twenty-three, had shot Trude and then himself. No farewell notes were discovered. After Austria’s annexation the villa was used by Joseph Goebbels and his family as a summer residence.

The building itself is a grand late-19th-century villa in alpine style, with bold historicist detailing. A square tower rises above the main block, its façade marked by string courses and round-headed windows. The lake front offers wide views across the water to the Dachstein massif. Though privately owned and closed to the public, the villa’s shoreline path remains open, allowing visitors to walk past its weathered stone walls and imagine the stories once lived inside.