Rothschildschloss

Castle and market town alike are thought to be a foundation of the counts of Peilstein, bailiffs and vassals of the bishops of Freising. From 1190 to 1218 bailiffs and bishops fought a complex dispute over Burg Konradsheim, then much the more important of the two. Waidhofen's oldest surviving masonry belongs to the first half of the 13th century. The dispute ended only when the Peilstein line's successors died out and the property fell for good to Freising, which resolved to entrust it to no bailiff again.

The bishops came often from the later 13th century on, issuing charters here from 1264 down to 1312. Inventories of 1313 and 1316 list crossbows, lances, breastplates, helmets and bear spears, and a 14th-century account names the garrison as the families of the Pfleger and the Kastner, a huntsman, a tower watchman, a gatekeeper and two watchmen.

Konradsheim was destroyed in a conflict with Duke Rudolf IV, and from 1365 the seat of the Freising lordship moved officially to Waidhofen. The works of the later 14th century raised the keep and lengthened the palas. The bishops' chronicle names Berthold von Wehingen, bishop from 1381 to 1410, as builder of the keep, though whether the whole campaign was his seems doubtful.

The great town fire of 1515 destroyed the castle along with the church and the whole upper town, and on Holy Saturday 1571 the bishop's fisherman started another blaze by shooting at jackdaws, which left the castle and much of the town in rubble and ashes.

The Counter-Reformation was enforced here with full severity. The town council, by then entirely Protestant, was stripped of power in 1587, and the town scribe Wolf Ebenperger, leader of the Protestant congregation, was gaoled for life in the dungeon of the keep, watched over by the Pfleger Christoph Murhammer, his long-standing personal enemy. His petitions describe the dark cell summer and winter, clothes he was never allowed to change, leg irons never removed, and kidney-stone pain; his last, very short letter says the cold was so great he could barely write. He died within two years, probably in May 1589 or shortly after.

Debts of the Freising cathedral chapter led to the lordship being leased to Count Johann Josef von Stielbar in 1796; it failed and was reversed two years later. Bavaria secularised the bishopric of Freising in 1802, ending Freising rule here. By 1822 the castle was in such bad condition that the lord's office moved into the town; repairs from 1840 brought it back. The building was of no real use by 1864, and it changed hands four times before 1875.

In 1875 the banker Albert Salomon Anselm von Rothschild (1844–1911) bought it with the former estates of Waidhofen, Gaming and Enzersfeld for 2.9 million guilders, becoming with 31,000 hectares the largest landowner in Lower Austria. The neo-Gothic reconstruction ran from 1881 to 1890; from 1887 Friedrich von Schmidt, Vienna's cathedral master builder, designed the court arcades and the Stöckel building. His son Louis Nathaniel de Rothschild, president of the Creditanstalt, took over in 1911; in 1938 Louis was arrested by the SS, an enormous ransom was extorted for his departure, and the castle and lands were expropriated into state ownership.

In 1943 the Gau leadership transferred the castle to the town. General Lothar Rendulic, commander-in-chief of Army Group South and Army Group Ostmark, made it his last headquarters, discussing armistice terms with American negotiators on 6 May 1945; the surrender was signed at Steyr on 7 May, and the next day Rendulic went into American captivity. In the first weeks after the war the castle was badly damaged by looting by the population, and was then confiscated by the Soviet occupying forces for several years, which ended in the complete destruction of the interior. Returned to Louis Rothschild, it was donated by him to the Austrian state in return for a promise to take over his former servants' pensions.

One of Austria's three federal forestry schools opened in the renovated castle in 1949. The town bought the castle in 2002 for cultural and tourist use. Hans Hollein's adaptation of 2006–07 set glass and metal against the historic fabric, extremely controversial among Waidhofen residents; the Lower Austrian State Exhibition of 2007, "Fire & Earth", shared with Sankt Peter in der Au, became the chief issue of the local council elections that March. The listed castle holds the town's 5e Museum, town archive, Iron Road Library and tourist office.