Sigmaringen Castle

The first castle on the Schlossberg rose in the early 11th century, on a limestone spur that stands up to 35 metres above the Danube and falls steeply away to the north and east. It enters the record in 1077, when Rudolf of Rheinfelden besieged it without success in his fight against Henry IV, King of Germany. In 1147 Ludwig, his father Rudolf and his brother Ulrich II appear as lords of Spitzenberg-Sigmaringen in a charter of the Bishop of Augsburg.

Under the counts of Helfenstein the castle was rebuilt around 1200 in buckel stone on the eastern part of the rock; the flat and therefore threatened western side was guarded by a moat and a square keep some 25 metres high.

In 1258 the castle was held by Graf Ulrich II von Helfenstein, whose daughter Agnes married Ulrich I von Montfort; in 1272 it passed to that house. Hugo V von Montfort sold castle, county and town in 1290 to Albrecht and Rudolf von Habsburg, and by 1325 both had gone to the counts of Württemberg. In 1399 Count Eberhard von Württemberg granted Sigmaringen, with the county of Veringen, to his uncle and liegeman Eberhard III von Werdenberg as a fief.

Eberhard's son Johann IV acquired castle and county in 1459 and the next year declared his holding an Austrian fief to secure it. Between 1460 and 1500 the Werdenbergs converted the fortress into a residence at the extent it still occupies. When the last male Werdenberg died in 1534, King Ferdinand I granted the fiefs of Sigmaringen and Veringen in 1535 to Charles of Hohenzollern.

Charles I was the first Hohenzollern to rule at Sigmaringen, and the Pfullendorf agreement of 1540 settled the two counties on the house for good. His son Charles II, count from 1576 to 1606, founded the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen line; Sigmaringen was the family's principal residence until 1850, and in 1623 the house was raised to the rank of princes of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Thirty Years' War reached the Danube in 1632, when Swedish troops took the castle. Imperial forces under General Horn recovered it the following year, and in the recapture the eastern part of the castle burned. Johann of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen had fled to Bavaria before the siege and died there in 1638. His son Meinrad I had the burnt eastern ranges rebuilt in 1658 and 1659 by Michael Beer.

Prince Karl called a constituent assembly in 1833 and proclaimed a constitutional charter for his lands; in the revolution of 1848 he abdicated on 27 August in favour of his son Karl Anton, who soon surrendered his sovereignty to Prussia. Karl Anton rebuilt the castle into a meeting point for the nobility of Europe — the Weapons Hall of 1864, a French salon made from the dining hall by the Parisian architect Lambert in 1872 — and gathered a weapon collection of more than 3,000 pieces.

On 17 April 1893 an electrician's blowlamp caught insulation packed into a ceiling void; the fire almost entirely destroyed the east wing; the brigades' couplings would not fit the castle's, and water had to be carried up from the Danube by a chain of buckets. Rebuilding ran from 1895 under Johannes de Pay and, from 1900, the Munich architect Emanuel von Seidl, and ended only under Leopold's son Wilhelm; Leopold's candidacy for the Spanish throne had set off the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.

After the Allied landings in France, the German regime moved the Vichy government to Sigmaringen in September 1944, over Marshal Pétain's protest; the castle and the Prinzenbau then held extraterritorial status as a French enclave until April 1945. The Gestapo forced the princely family out and interned them at Schloss Wilflingen, the Stauffenberg house confiscated after the 20 July 1944 plot against Hitler. Pierre Laval, its former prime minister, was there, with Joseph Darnand, head of the Milice, and the writers Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Lucien Rebatet, who feared for their lives on account of their political and anti-Jewish writings and fled there with the government. Pressed to join a fascist government and name Jacques Doriot its head, Pétain refused and regarded himself as a prisoner of war.

Troops of the French First Army took Sigmaringen on 22 April 1945, an end Céline described in his 1957 novel D'un château l'autre. Pétain took refuge in Switzerland, returned voluntarily to face trial and was condemned to death; de Gaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, and he died in 1951 on the Île d'Yeu. French sequestration ended in November 1951 with the castle's return to the princely family.