Herborn Castle

Abduction of Hendrik Snoek in 1976On November 3, 1976, show jumper Hendrik Snoek was kidnapped by two men from his apartment in Münster and then hid in a 52 m high cavity in a pillar of the Ambachtal Bridge near Herborn. The kidnappers demanded a ransom of 5,000,000 DM (approx. 2,500,000 euros) from Snoek's parents for his release, which Snoek's best friend should give to Breido Graf zu Rantzau near Frankfurt am Main. On November 5th, an employee of the city of Herborn accidentally discovered pieces of paper during a routine trip, which Snoek threw out of an opening. The police, alerted, found Snoek tied around his neck with a chain and freed him. [27] A short time later, the Münster Regional Court sentenced one of the kidnappers involved [28] to 13 years' imprisonment.
1987 tank truck accidentOn July 7, 1987, six people died and 38 were injured in a tank truck accident. At around 8:45 p.m., a tanker truck loaded with 34,000 liters of fuel overturned in a curve in front of an ice cream parlor as a result of a brake failure. The brakes of the trailer had failed on the B 255, which descended for kilometers into the village. The leaking fuel flowed into the sewer system, exploded, and set twelve houses on fire. The dill into which fuel had flowed was also on fire at around 500 m along with the bank vegetation. The professional fire brigade from Frankfurt am Main, approx. 100 km away, was also called in to carry out the extinguishing work.Only after another accident on the same street was the downhill section that leads into the city given two chicanes that can only be driven through at a maximum of 30 km / h. Faster vehicles cannot follow the curve and are thus forced into an emergency lane filled with rolling gravel, in which the vehicles come to a standstill.
2015 police murderOn December 24, 2015, the 46-year-old police superintendent Christoph Rehm was killed by an intoxicated dodger with several knife stabs during a personal check in the Herborn train station, and a colleague who was also present was seriously injured. [29] The then 27-year-old perpetrator was finally sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, attempted murder and dangerous physical harm in August 2017, and the gravity of the guilt was determined, which rules out a release from prison after 15 years. [30]

Herborn Castle is located above the town of Herborn in the Lahn-Dill district and arose from the former Herborn Castle. It is a listed building.
Herborn Castle was built as a hillside castle at the end of the 13th century and was connected to Herborn's city wall. The city wall was built in 1251 after it was granted city rights. The castle lies within this curtain wall. It was first mentioned in a document in 1350. The castle was the center of the Herborner Mark, which the Counts of Nassau held as a fiefdom of the Landgraviate of Hesse Landgraves of Hesse.1584 was that of Count Johann VI. "High School" Herborn, founded by Nassau-Dillenburg, housed in the castle for a short time; However, after a few years it was moved to the old town hall (today: High School and City Museum) in the city center of Herborn. The library of the high school was located in the castle until 1725. Sometimes professors from the high school also had their official apartments here. (The most prominent resident was the constitutional lawyer Johannes Althusius.)The castle temporarily served the counts as a secondary residence and also as a widow's seat (an actual use as a widow's seat is not directly verifiable, however), but ranked well behind the main Nassau residences in Dillenburg and Siegen. It was i.a. a secondary residence of Count Engelbert I of Nassau-Breda, who "gave" the castle a contemporary late-Gothic style with French-style towers until around 1445. Other uses of the castle were, among others. a gun workshop (production of fire boxes in the 15th century) and an inglorious mint in the 1680s. From 1781 the official residence of an official (Carl Ludwig Reichmann) was located in the castle walls. In 1796 the French General Soult stayed at the castle. His hasty flight from his opponent, Archduke Karl of Austria, probably gave the "Franzosenpförtchen" and the "Franzosenweg" its name. In 1757 Isabelle Charlotte von Nassau-Dietz was splendidly buried in a marble sarcophagus in the Evangelical City Church of Herborn. According to the records of the royal archivist J. Steur from The Hague, Isabella Charlotte mostly lived in the royal seat of Dillenburg, just a few kilometers from Herborn. Although the Herborn Castle was temporarily intended as a residence for noble widows, Isabella did not live in Herborn in the castle, but in Dillenburg in the "Unteres Tor" building she donated (or Stadtschlösschen, today city library). In Herborn, however, she charitable donated accommodation for disadvantaged (not aristocratic!) Widows, the so-called "yellow house".After a decay period from 1815 to 1840 - in the z. For example, a schnapps distillery could even be found in the castle walls in 1822, but despite renovations it was not possible to repair the structural damage, and so the castle was to be sold for demolition in 1840. In order to prevent this, the first listed citizens' initiative of Herborn was formed. Finally, the state government in Wiesbaden bought the castle back and had it repaired. From 1840 to 1866 it was the seat of the authorities. After the change of rule to Prussia in 1866, the Prussian king then left it to the theological seminar of the Nassau regional church, which had emerged from the theological faculty of the high school in 1817 and which until then had its seat in the "school yard" (high school). In the war years 1870/71 it served as a hospital. During this time, the envelope of the open-air balloon "Ville de Paris", which rose from besieged Paris and landed in Sinn, was exhibited in the courtyard. The proceeds went to the hospital.1929–1931 it was restored by the Herborn architect Ludwig Hofmann.

Nicely located above the city. Mighty building with three towers.