Niederhatzkofen Castle

Niederhatzkofen Castle, located in the eponymous district of the city of Rottenburg an der Laaber in Lower Bavaria, is a former moated castle of the Notthafft family. The castle was formerly the manorial seat of the Hofmark Niederhatzkofen. Today, it operates under the name Schlossklinik Rottenburg and is a specialist hospital for internal medicine and geriatrics with 66 beds. Since 2012, Schloss-Reha Rottenburg, a facility for orthopedic post-acute rehabilitation with 30 beds, has been affiliated.

In place of the castle, there was formerly a moated castle, first mentioned in 1420. In that year, the Veste Hatzkofen was pledged by its owner Wilhelm Leutenpeck to Duke Ernst of Bavaria-Munich, and eight years later it passed into the possession of a certain Bernhard Kolnpeck. The fact that the castle was owned by the Leutenpeck family is manifested by the mention of a Leonhard Leutenpeck as lord of the castle in 1457. Subsequently, the Veste Hatzkofen changed owners several times.

In 1570, the Hofmark including the castle was acquired by Burghard Notthafft, a representative of the Bodenstein line of the Notthafft family. Three years earlier, he had been appointed ducal administrator in nearby Rottenburg. Shortly after moving in, he had the castle building rebuilt, as evidenced by a chronicle of the Bodenstein line from 1628. The same source indicates that the new castle fell victim to a fire in the next generation. During the Thirty Years' War, the castle was destroyed by the Swedes in 1632. Under Burghard's grandson Johann Sebastian Notthafft and his son Georg Christoph Cajetan Notthafft, the castle was rebuilt in the style of rural late Baroque and completed around 1723. The last resident of Niederhatzkofen from the Notthafft family was Cajetan Anton Notthafft von Weißenstein, who died in 1752.

In 1781, the castle was sold to Wiguläus von Kreittmayr (1705–1790), an important reformer of the Bavarian electoral legal system. He had the castle largely redesigned in a Neoclassical style. Five years after his death in 1790, his widow bequeathed the castle to her son Ignaz von Kreittmayr, whose sons both died young. Thus, Niederhatzkofen fell to Ignaz's nephew Josef Ritter von Vacchiery in 1845, who died three years later. Thereupon, the castle was sold to the Counts of Preysing-Lichtenegg-Moos, before it was sold at a favorable price to the district of Rottenburg in 1947 for the establishment of a hospital. During the necessary conversion measures, the castle building was extended by one floor in 1949. In the course of the territorial reform in Bavaria in 1972, the specialist hospital passed to the district of Landshut, and in 2001 it was outsourced with the other two district hospitals to the Landshut Municipal Company for Medical Care (La.KUMed). In 2011, a modern extension was built onto the historic castle building for the new facility for post-acute rehabilitation.