Neuerburg Castle

The Neuerburg is the ruin of a hilltop castle near the municipality of Niederbreitbach in the district of Neuwied in the north of Rhineland-Palatinate.

The castle ruin is located about 2.5 km east of Niederbreitbach at about 250 m above sea level on a steeply rising cliff on the left bank above the Fockenbach. The castle's jurisdiction included the villages of Hegerhof, Kelterhof, Kurtenacker, Ackerhof, Wüscheid and the western part of Kurtscheid. The castle is not accessible to hikers and interested parties.

Ludwig II of Thuringia had the Neuerburg built around the year 1170 (1160 to 1180). It is a kind of prototype of a Staufer castle.

In 1218, a noble family (ministerials) of Countess Mechthild von Sayn, who occasionally visited the castle after the death of her husband Heinrich III von Sayn († 1246/1247), named themselves after it. In 1250, she handed over the castle to the Archdiocese of Cologne. The castle itself was located in the Hunschaft Breitscheid. Two residential houses were part of it, intended for a forester, castle guards, and administrative officials. Mostly, one encounters six castle guards from Kelterhof, Kurtenacker, Ackerhof, Hegerhof, and Wolfenacker.

Since 1290, a Cologne electoral office of the same name was named after the Neuerburg, which was frequently pledged (e.g., temporarily to the Isenburg-Grenzau family and von der Leyen). The administrative area of the Neuerburg office was consistently identical to that of today's Verbandsgemeinde Waldbreitbach, with the communities of Kurtscheid and Datzeroth holding a special historical position. The administrative seat (Huhns-Mühle) was the village of Niederbreitbach until modern times.

In the 17th century, the castle began to decay. Before 1850, the remaining buildings were finally demolished by the Princes of Wied, the then and still current owners of the ruin.

During the advance of American troops in 1945, they shelled the ruin, and the castle grounds received about 60 shell hits. In the core castle, the partially preserved battlement was destroyed. One third of the shells hit the keep and its battlements. The east and south walls of the castle were razed to the ground. Reconstruction began in 1946, with the plan to make the keep habitable again.