Qualla: Schloss Allner

Schloss Allner: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tohma (talk), CC BY-SA 4.0. On 7 April 1945, the US 97th Infantry Division tried to cross the Sieg River south of Hennef and stepped into a perfect kill zone. Two German officers and a handful of soldiers from the 353rd Infantry Division had set up machine guns in the towers of Schloss Allner, a 15th-century moated castle on the north bank, with clean fields of fire down both sides of the river. American gun crews from the 922nd Field Artillery Battalion fired over three thousand 105 mm rounds at the castle in two days. According to the after-action report, the building crumbled and the machine gun fire continued. The Americans eventually had to send G Company across the river on 8 April and clear the castle out room by room. Ten American soldiers died in the assault. Nobody recorded how many Germans. The castle came out of the war with one tower destroyed by a direct artillery hit and the rest holed and burnt. Its strangest chapter was still ahead.

Read more: Schloss Allner on Qualla

Image: Tohma (talk) | CC BY-SA 4.0

Schloss Allner: A Castle on the Sieg

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wolkenkratzer, CC BY-SA 3.0. The original cross-shaped manor at Allner was built around 1419 on the south slope of the Nutscheid Ridge, just where the small River Sieg loops past on its way to join the Rhine at Bonn. Arnold von Merkelsbach, vassal of the Stifts Vilich and bailiff of the Blankenberg Office in...

Read more: Schloss Allner on Qualla

Image: Wolkenkratzer | CC BY-SA 3.0

Schloss Allner: The Ophthalmologist's Gothic Revival

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wolkenkratzer, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1850 the von Loe heirs left Schloss Allner and it sat empty for twenty years. In 1870 the Dusseldorf eye surgeon Albert Mooren bought it as a country retreat, and in 1875-76 he hired the Franciscan brother Paschalis Gratzke - a working architect as well as a religious - to rem...

Read more: Schloss Allner on Qualla

Image: Wolkenkratzer | CC BY-SA 4.0

Schloss Allner: Two Days of Artillery

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit [Rheinpfeil], CC BY-SA 3.0. By April 1945, the Pagenstechers had been pushed out and the Wehrmacht held the building. Two officers from the 353rd Infantry Division of the LVIII Panzerkorps had set up machine guns in the towers when the US 97th Infantry Division reached the south bank of the Sieg on 7 April....

Read more: Schloss Allner on Qualla

Image: [Rheinpfeil] | CC BY-SA 3.0

Schloss Allner: An Orphanage, and What Happened Inside It

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bodenstein, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. After the war, Lucy Pagenstecher married Rainer C. Horstmann, who served as mayor of the municipality of Lauthausen from 1956 to 1969. In 1950 Horstmann sold Schloss Allner for the symbolic price of one Deutschmark to the Bonn Caritas Association, a Catholic charity, which conver...

Read more: Schloss Allner on Qualla

Image: Bodenstein | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Schloss Allner: Condominiums Above the Watermill

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wolkenkratzer, CC BY-SA 3.0. Schloss Allner is now a privately owned residential complex. The castle was subdivided into condominiums in the 1980s, and the most recent restoration in 2010 added a bridge across the moat-fed channel to the property's well-preserved watermill. The marriage escutcheons of 1643 a...

Read more: Schloss Allner on Qualla

Image: Wolkenkratzer | CC BY-SA 3.0