page_title: Schloss Leopoldskron
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Schloss Leopoldskron / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Leopoldskron Castle near Salzburg, part of the panorama painting from 1829 by Johann Michael Sattler (1786-1847)
context_page_description: Schloss Leopoldskron is a rococo palace and a national historic monument in Leopoldskron-Moos, a southern district of the city of Salzburg, Austria. The palace, and its surrounding seven hectare park, is located on the lake Leopoldskroner Weiher. The palace has been home to Salzburg Global Seminar since 1947. In 2014, the palace and the neighboring Meierhof building were opened as a privately owned hotel, Hotel Schloss Leopoldskron.
context_section_description: Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg Count Leopold Anton Eleutherius von Firmian (1679-1744) commissioned the palace in 1736 on the shores of an existing pond after he had enriched himself in the process of expelling over 22,000 Protestants from Salzburg. He acquired the area between the palace and the Untersberg as a family estate, which he passed on in May 1744 to his nephew Count Laktanz Firmian, who used it to house his large collection of paintings. This included works of Titian, Dürer, Poussin, Rubens and Rembrandt.
  After the death of the Archbishop in 1744, his heart was buried in the chapel of the palace, while the rest of his body was placed in the cathedral of Salzburg. The palace was owned by the Firmian family until 1837, even after the death of Count Laktanz in 1786. George Zierer, the owner of a local shooting gallery, bought the palace and stripped it of most of the valuable interior decorations, including paintings, etchings, and sculptures.
  The palace had several owners during the 19th century (including a banker and two waiters who wanted to use it as a hotel, King Ludwig I. of Bavaria). In 1918 it was bought by Max Reinhardt, the noted theatre director and co-founder of the Salzburg Festival. By this time the palace was in urgent need of repair. With the work of local artisans, Reinhardt spent twenty years renovating the palace. Besides restoring the staircase, the Great Hall, and the Marble Hall, he created the Library, the Venetian Room, and a garden theatre. He used the whole building for his theatre productions (the audiences had to move from room to room). He also used it as a gathering place for writers, actors, composers, and designers from across the globe. Reinhardt escaped to the United States as actions increased against the Jews, hoping the Germans would be defeated in the war. He worked in Hollywood during World War II and died in New York in 1943, before the Allied victory.
  In 1939 the German government confiscated the palace as a national treasure during the taking of "Jewish property" throughout Austria.  During the same year, Hermann Göring assigned the palace to Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, an Austrian who had been spying for the Nazis in Britain and Europe and who had many influential contacts. She was charged with transforming it into a guest house for prominent artists of the Reich, and to serve as a reception facility to Hitler's Berghof home. Von Hohenlohe, who knew Reinhardt before the annexation of Austria, was able to secure from the Nazi's sixteen crates of Reinhardt's books, porcelain, silver, and furniture and had them shipped to California, though the consolation of his tangible possessions were little comfort against the loss of the Leopoldskron. Once it came to light that Stephanie von Hohenlohe may have been a double agent, she fled to England, then America, returning the palace to Nazi hands until the end of the war.
  By the end of the war, a bomb had exploded in the garden. It shattered the windows, destroyed a chandelier in the library on the ground floor, and sent shrapnel fragments into the wall murals in the Chinese room. It also damaged the stucco work in the south facade. Traces of the damage can still be seen today.
  After the war, the property was returned to the Reinhardt estate. In 1946 Helene Thimig, the widow of Max Reinhardt, offered use of the palace to Clemens Heller, who founded the Salzburg Seminar in American  Studies, a "Marshall Plan of the Mind," together with Scott Elledge and Richard Campbell, all Harvard graduate students. The Salzburg Seminar brought together young people from the countries that had been in conflict during World War 2 and originally offered education on American history, art, literature, and culture, in a period when United States armed forces occupied parts of Germany and Austria. This was later transformed into a "global forum". Since 1947, more than 500 sessions of the Seminars have been held on a wide variety of issues.
  In 1959 the Salzburg Global Seminar purchased the palace, and in 1973 the adjacent Meierhof, which was part 
caption: Schloss Leopoldskron in 1829 by Johann Michael Sattler (1786-1847)
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