Virnsberg

The castle before 1945

Schloss Virnsberg is unusual in combining two castle forms: it was built as a hill castle and is at the same time a moated castle. The medieval core was extended around 1700 by a baroque farm court. The castle is first recorded in 1235 as Virnsperc, when it belonged to the imperial ministerials of Uffenheim; the Hohenzollern burgraves of Nuremberg held it from 1259 and made it over to the Teutonic Order in 1294.

Virnsberg then stood under the Teutonic Order from 1294 until 1806. From 1525 the Commandery of Virnsberg formed part of the order’s Franconian bailiwick, and after the Reformation it was a Catholic enclave inside the Protestant principality of Ansbach. The commandery built a hospital in the village in 1532; the building, with its inscription stone of that year, later became the schoolhouse.

After secularisation the castle passed first to the Bavarian state and then changed owners often, among them private families and, for some years, an evangelical welfare body. In 1905 a member of the von Friesen family bought it; the family lived there until shortly before the Second World War and, according to the castle’s own history, fled from the Nazis before the war began.

The war and the end of it

From 1943 to 1945 the castle housed the Nazi land service, the NS-Landdienst, with a training establishment inside its walls. That is the wartime use behind the heading “Ab 1943” under which the castle’s own chronology places its later service to UNRRA — the heading marks the start of the wartime occupation of the building, not the start of the refugee camp.

The fighting reached the district in April 1945. American troops entered Sondernohe on 16 April 1945, the first village in the Ansbach district and so the first in the Flachslanden municipality, and the 17th Tank Battalion then advanced on Virnsberg. Seven German soldiers and one civilian died in the fighting at Virnsberg; eight dwelling houses and fourteen barns burned down.

In the postwar years the castle was used as a refugee camp, as American quarters and as a medical station. The three uses are listed together and are not separately dated, but they place the UNRRA camp in a building that the occupying army was also using.

UNRRA camp in the castle

The Arolsen inventory carries the Virnsberg centre in District 3 of the American zone, records only Ukrainian nationality, assigns assembly centre number AC 92-305 and places it under Team 548 Ansbach, with Area Team 1041 Ansbach from November 1946. The team director is given as Ronald and the field supervisor as Johnson. No capacity figure is recorded. The inventory closing date lies between 31 October 1947 and 30 January 1948.

Two dates in the entry are easy to misread. The opening date of 24 January 1946 is the inventory’s general first-listing date, entered against a thousand of its rows, and the assembly-centre date “from 09.1948” is likewise a column-wide note attached to more than a thousand entries rather than a date for this camp. Neither should be read as an event at Virnsberg.

Team 548 Ansbach ran a small group of centres. Besides Virnsberg it had the Baltic camp in the Ansbach Gymnasium as AC 92-300, the Hindenburg-Kaserne in Ansbach with a recorded capacity of 2,050 as AC 92-307, and, immediately alongside Virnsberg in the numbering, the Ukrainian centre at Oberzenn in the Uffenheim district as AC 92-306. Oberzenn closed a little earlier than Virnsberg, between 20 September and 17 October 1947. The two were the team’s Ukrainian houses.

Ukrainian sources give the size of the community. Questionnaire returns collected by the Central Representation of the Ukrainian Emigration in 1946 and 1947 counted 210 Ukrainians at Virnsberg. UNRRA’s assembly-centre summary of 24 August 1946 counted 355 and that of 31 May 1947 counted 230. The PCIRO summary of 2 January 1948 has no entry for Virnsberg, which is consistent with the inventory’s closing window.

Those figures are worth setting against the place. The village of Virnsberg had 237 inhabitants at the census of 1925 and 266 in 1950. For a period in 1946 the castle therefore held more Ukrainians than there were villagers below it.

The IRO records held in the French national archives include a file on Camp Virnsberg dated October 1947, listed between files on Camp Gunzenhausen of October 1947 and Camp Langlau of April 1947. Those two centres lay outside the Ansbach district but inside the same UNRRA area: the inventory places Gunzenhausen and Langlau under Team 167 Ansbach and, like Virnsberg, under Area Team 1041 Ansbach. Together with the Arolsen strength and change reports for Virnsberg, these are the administrative records that would document the camp’s final months.

A family-supplied obituary published by an American funeral home in 2025 records one route through the camp. It states that a Ukrainian family “ultimately wound up in a displaced persons (DP) camp in Erlangen, Germany. After Erlangen, they were moved to Virnsberg, then to Bayreuth, Germany.” The obituary gives no dates for the stay at Virnsberg and does not say how the moves were arranged.

The castle after the camp

From about 1954 an evangelical welfare association from Nuremberg ran the castle as an old people’s home, a youth hostel and accommodation for migrant workers, until fire-safety concerns closed those institutions. A parallel account of the same years lists the uses as an old people’s home, a youth home and a school country home, running from 1954 to 1963, and has the building serve as an inn for thirteen years after that.

Fritz Rang bought the castle in about 1966 and developed a restaurant business in it. In 1977 the castle was bought by a Nuremberg lawyer, who transferred it to a charitable castle association in 2001; it was sold to a Munich investment company in 2017. The whole estate is now managed through Schloss Virnsberg GmbH & Co. KG, and the castle is opened for guided tours and hired out for private functions.

The village itself lost its independence on 1 May 1978, when the municipality of Virnsberg was incorporated into the market town of Flachslanden under the Bavarian local-government reform. It had 267 inhabitants in 2022.