Schloss Hirschberg am Haarsee

The house before the seminary

The site above the Haarsee began as a dairy farm, a Schwaige recorded in 1349 when Duke Ludwig V placed it under the monastery at Polling. The house the seminary knew was new: Karl von Hirschberg, a royal Bavarian chamberlain and cavalry general, bought the ground in 1906 with his wife’s dowry and had Carl Hocheder build him a country house there between 1907 and 1909, two and a half storeys on a rectangular plan in a baroque manner with art-nouveau detail, with central heating, a lift and a swimming pool, for something like a million gold marks. The place-name Hirschberg am Haarsee was registered in 1908 and the estate was settled as a family entail in 1913.

War loans and inflation broke the family’s fortune, and from 1923 the house was let to the Berlin banking family von Bleichröder. James von Bleichröder, an art collector, moved the majority of his art collection to the castle when the family arrived. The state confiscated it in 1943 and ran it under the cover name Waldbichl as a guest house of the Reich Foreign Ministry. Mussolini was brought there on 19 September 1943, days after his rescue from the Gran Sasso, and stayed until the twenty-third; his family remained until 2 November. From 18 October 1944 until 1 May 1945 the Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy was held in the house under guard.

The castle and the first students

The site was the castle at Haarsee near Weilheim, recorded in the DP inventory under Eberfing. It should not be confused with the better-known Schloss Hirschberg near Beilngries. Church officials negotiated with UNRRA for rooms, and the seminary took over the building on 8 February 1946. Students arrived from different places, including existing German seminaries where they had continued their education during displacement.

Recruitment was initially uncertain: moving into a new institution under relief administration meant giving up relatively secure places elsewhere. By June 1946 a church report registered 72 students, while a list dated 6 June 1946 printed by Blazejowskyj carries 68 names, and its room-assignment list only 62. Some were still studying at other seminaries, so this is an enrolment figure rather than proof that 72 people were simultaneously living in the castle.

Father Vasyl Laba was rector. Father Volodymyr Malanchuk, who taught there, took the building of the library in hand himself. UNRRA provided the material support and it was UNRRA that allotted the house — described in the seminary’s own account as Mussolini’s former residence in Germany — for the students’ use.

Study, books and community

Teaching followed the tradition of the theological academy in Lviv. The planned course lasted five years, with philosophy and theology alongside languages and related subjects. Ukrainian was the language of teaching. Lessons occupied at least five hours a day, and students sat semester and annual examinations. A library eventually held more than 2,000 volumes.

The programme also created a shared cultural life. A student society founded on 31 March 1946 organised educational, artistic and sporting activities. Another association concentrated on religious devotion. Students used a small press for lecture materials and their own publications: Seminarijni Visti appeared in 12 issues, while a humorous paper commented on life inside the seminary. The chapel moved from a music room into a larger castle salon as space became insufficient.

Keeping the seminary open

Food and money remained persistent concerns. Ukrainian communities collected donations; church bodies and overseas organisations contributed funds, books and relief parcels. Relief administration also affected the internal organisation. UNRRA treated the institution as a DP camp and expected the corresponding self-government, whereas the seminary had its own academic and religious leadership.

On 4 December 1946 UNRRA’s representatives said by telephone that they no longer recognised the seminary’s existence, that they regarded the seminarians and their teachers as displaced persons, and that they were to move at once from Hirschberg to the camp at Mittenwald. Lorries came the next day and took them all. Rector Laba and Professor Sopuliak stayed behind at Hirschberg in protest. The camp had no conditions for study, and the interruption lasted about three months before the students and staff returned.

Getting back was not the same as being secure. The apostolic visitator for Ukrainian Catholics in Germany, Father Mykola Voiakovs’kyi, tried to place the seminary in German seminaries, but every option proved too expensive; UNRRA handed the Hirschberg house back to the German authorities and the rent rose sharply. Food for the students came from American aid and through Caritas in Munich. Church negotiations nevertheless secured a rental agreement for the castle on 1 February 1947, and classes restarted there on 15 March. The returning student group was smaller than before the interruption.

A move to the Netherlands

Cardinal Eugène Tisserand, secretary of the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, raised money for the seminary on a journey to North America, and in Brussels in November 1947 asked the Redemptorist Father van der Male and Bishop Ivan Buchko to look for somewhere in Belgium or the Netherlands. The Dutch Apostolate of Reunion, a society begun after Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky’s visit to the Netherlands in 1921 and by then 175,000 members strong, took up the search and offered two houses, one at Sittard and one the Augustinian monastery at Culemborg. Culemborg was chosen. The Augustinians moved into the right wing of their own house and repaired the left wing for the seminary at their own cost, and Dutch donors furnished it. Father van der Male came to Hirschberg twice to see the community he was moving, in September 1947 and in March 1948.

The Dutch military mission granted visas at the end of December 1947, but American permission to leave Germany took months more. The seminary crossed into the Netherlands at Venlo on 24 April 1948 and travelled on by rail through Eindhoven; six professors, two lay teachers among them the musician Myroslav Antonovych, and forty-two seminarians made the journey. Bishop Buchko sang the inaugural liturgy in the Byzantine rite in the monastery chapel at half past nine on the morning of 21 June 1948, with the seminary’s theological choir under Antonovych. The Dutch minister of justice, Johan van Maarseveen, told the professors and students that he hoped the Netherlands would become a second homeland to them. Oleksandr Malynovs’kyi, formerly apostolic administrator of the Lemko region, became president and rector for discipline, and Laba remained rector of the seminary.

The choir carried the seminary’s name around the country and helped pay for it: a four-day tour of Limburg in August 1948, a liturgy and a concert of Ukrainian folk songs at Tilburg in the spring of 1949. At Easter 1949 Dutch Catholic radio broadcast the liturgy from Culemborg live, and it was heard in the Netherlands and by Ukrainians in France, Germany, England, Austria and America, relayed over loudspeakers in the displaced-persons camps. Bishop Buchko announced the seminary’s closure on the same station in February 1950. Ten of its seminarians had been ordained priest there and two deacon; the rest went on to Canada or back to Germany, and in April 1951 the Roman congregation moved the seminary itself to Canada.

Hirschberg then entered another educational phase. The German Spätberufenenschule St Josef used the castle from 1948 before moving to Fockenfeld. Its later commemorative artwork preserves a small image of Hirschberg alongside its other homes. This was a successor institution, separate from the Ukrainian displaced students’ seminary.

What became of the house

From 1961 until June 2000 the Federal Intelligence Service ran its training academy for higher civil-service entrants in the building under the cover name Wildpark, and in 1984 the heads of the Western intelligence services met there as the Berne Club. The federal property office then put the house up for sale at 3.9 million euros. A buyer took it in 2004 for an equestrian resort that the courts stopped in 2011, a hotel scheme failed against state planning rules in 2016, and since the summer of 2018 it has been in private hands. The town of Weilheim bought the Haarsee itself, some 6.4 hectares, in 2012 to keep the shore open to the public.