Książ Castle and park complex

A first stronghold here was destroyed in 1263 by the Bohemian forces of King Ottokar II. The Silesian duke Bolko I the Strict, ruler in Świdnica and Jawor, had a new castle raised from 1288 and took up residence; it enters the record on 25 February 1293, when he added lord of Wrstenberc to his titles, and the castle kept the name Fürstenstein until 1945. Reckoned the key to Silesia, it was worked into the duchy's border defences by Bolko's son Bernard.

An annal entry of 1355 records Bolko II putting down rebellious vassals and seizing their castles, Książ among them, taken back from its burgrave Kekelon von Czirn. Bolko II died childless in 1368 and the estates passed to the Luxembourg crown of Bohemia, his widow Agnes of Habsburg holding the use for life; on her death in 1392 Wenceslaus IV took the duchy and made Książ the seat of his starostas.

Jan of Chotěmice bought the castle from Wenceslaus IV for 400 kop of Prague groschen. During the Hussite wars insurgents took Książ and held it in 1428-1429. In 1463 George of Poděbrady took control and gave it to his commander Birka of Nasiedle, who in 1466 made it over to Hans Schellendorf against a pledge of 5,200 guldens.

Schellendorf stood by King George and, after George's death in 1471, backed Vladislaus Jagiellon against Matthias Corvinus and Wrocław. He held Książ against Hungarian attack in 1475 and again in 1477; only the siege of 1482, mounted by the Silesian and Lusatian estates with Hungarian troops, broke him, and he ended in prison. Corvinus gave the wrecked castle to Georg von Stein, commander of the combined Hungarian and Wrocław forces, who began turning its defensive rooms into living quarters; the southern range of his time took the name Matthias Wing.

In 1497 Vladislaus II leased the estates, by then two towns, five castles and seventeen villages, and on 11 June 1509 the castle was sold to the knight Kunz von Hohberg. His family, which took the name Hochberg in 1714, rebuilt it in Renaissance style in 1548-1555, and on 5 April 1605 Emperor Rudolf II turned Konrad III von Hochberg's tenancy into hereditary right. The Hochbergs held Książ for the next four hundred years.

Wallenstein stayed at Książ during the Thirty Years' War, in which the castle was plundered and partly destroyed more than once. The fortifications wrecked by the Swedish attack of 1646 were rebuilt in 1648 as garden terraces in the French manner, and between 1705 and 1732 Konrad Ernest Maximilian von Hochberg had the old defences cleared away for a baroque state wing built by Feliks Antoni Hammerschmidt.

Jan Henryk XI, Count von Hochberg and Prince von Pless, came into Książ in 1856 and laid out roads, parks and forests, funded a free cooking school for the daughters of Wałbrzych mine workers and evening classes for young workers; by the end of the century the family was spending 60,000 marks a year on social causes. His son Jan Henryk XV married Mary Theresa Cornwallis-West in London on 8 December 1891; as Princess Daisy she bore her three sons at Książ and received guests there between 1896 and 1914, Jennie Jerome, Winston Churchill's mother, among them. Her husband's second great rebuilding, from 1909 to 1923, added a wing, modernised the terraces with their fountains and raised a main tower 47 metres high.

Maria Hochberg von Pless, the last of the family at Książ, left in 1940, and the castle passed into German state hands during the war. From 1944 Organisation Todt set about converting it into a headquarters for Hitler, the work supervised by SS and Todt personnel as part of the underground Project Riese complex, though whether that was the object is disputed. In May 1944 a subcamp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp was established at Fürstenstein to supply the labour: forced labourers and Gross-Rosen prisoners sank a lift shaft 40 metres deep before the main portal and drove tunnels and an underground shelter beneath the castle, and most of the historic interiors were destroyed in the rebuilding. A memorial marks the site of the subcamp.

Daisy's sons fought against Hitler, Jan Henryk XVII in the British army and Alexander in the Polish. Red Army forces occupied the castle after the Vistula-Oder offensive in 1945 and stayed into 1946; the entailed library of more than 64,000 volumes was carried off, most of it probably to the Soviet Union. Securing work began in 1956. Since 1971 the underground has housed the Lower Silesian Geophysical Observatory of the Polish Academy of Sciences.