Holzdorf Manor

A place named Halsdorf was first mentioned on July 4, 1271. In the 14th century, the Counts of Orlamünde were named as owners of an estate. In 1333, they transferred responsibility for the village church to Oberweimar. The place then became almost completely deserted and was no longer listed in the church register of 1500.

The manor house of the estate dates from 1690 to 1750. Until 1874, the estate was owned by the Weitzenberg family, direct descendants of Lucas Cranach the Elder. Subsequent owners expanded the estate. It experienced its heyday in the 1 920s and 1930s under the successful Mannheim industrialist and art collector Dr. Otto Krebs (1873–1941). He acquired the estate in 1917 and then undertook extensive expansions and alterations. The manor house became a representative stately home, externally with a facade cladding of carved shingles, internally splendid with gold-decorated leather wallpaper, mosaic parquet, and Belgian tapestries. The extensions to the building complex (1920 to 1939) served to house an extensive art collection that Otto Krebs amassed. Its focus was on valuable paintings by French Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, including Cézanne, van Gogh, and Gauguin, as well as sculptures by Degas and Maillol. It was considered one of the most significant German private collections of paintings. Its material value was estimated (in the 1990s) at one billion Deutsche Mark.

Music was also cultivated at Holzdorf Estate: In the 1920s, Adolf Busch and his string quartet visited the estate several times, and in 1930, Krebs' partner Frieda Kwast-Hodapp retired here for study purposes. After Krebs' death, she also taught here.

The landscape architect Franz Wirtz from Frankfurt created an appealing early modern landscape park on ten hectares, with larger-than-life sculptures (including those by Rodin, Meunier, and Lehmbruck), pavilions, a bathing garden with a swimming pond, and bathhouses. From the mid-1920s, Krebs used the entire estate, including the park, for changing exhibitions of his collection. Otto Krebs died in 1941. He transferred a large portion of his assets (Strebel-Werke and other real estate) to a foundation for cancer and scarlet fever research.

1945 to Present

In April 1945, US troops occupied the estate. Museum director Scheidig succeeded in returning the Max Reger archive, which had been saved from the air raids on Weimar and brought to Holzdorf. Only then did he discover that Otto Krebs' painting collection must have been behind "secure" special vault doors in the estate's cellar. In early July 1945, Marshal Chuikov, the head of the SMAD Thuringia, took up quarters in the manor house. The estate became a supply center for the Red Army.

After the expropriation of the estate and its transfer to state ownership, Scheidig tried in 1946, through the President of the State of Thuringia, to save the painting collection. This failed due to Chuikov's resistance: Before the evacuation of the estate by the Soviet occupation in 1952 (probably already in 1948), the paintings were transported to the Soviet Union. It is not certain whether the Soviet art protection officers still found the complete collection. A (non-original) inventory list contained 98 paintings and 18 sculptures. 20 paintings have since disappeared, 78 paintings are in the archive of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. 55 of them were shown in 1995 in a special exhibition/looted art exhibition "Hidden Treasures". In March 2012, an exhibition of replicas of the paintings from the Krebs collection, stolen as looted art, was opened at the estate, made by artists and students from St. Petersburg.

The more valuable part of the park sculptures was transferred to the East Berlin National Gallery during the GDR era, from where they came into the possession of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 2008, this foundation handed over the sculptures to Krebs' sole heir, the Mannheim Foundation for Cancer and Scarlet Fever Research. In June 2010, six sculptures (Degas, Rodin, de Fiori, Meunier, and Heise) were auctioned at Christie's and will thus not return to Holzdorf Park, where they formed a total work of art. Their value is estimated at 1.3 to 2 million British Pounds.

After the withdrawal of the Soviet army, Holzdorf Estate was used as a training center, children's home, and school (Polytechnic High School with grades 5 to 10). In the 1960s, a large, three-story prefabricated building was placed in the park as a school, which still stands today (2011). The farm buildings belonged to an LPG during the GDR era. The owner of the estate – after being vacant from 1993 to 1999 – is Diakonie Landgut Holzdorf gGmbH. The estate currently (2012) houses the Diakonisches Bildungsinstitut "Johannes Falk" with a school for elderly care, Diakonie Weimar-Bad Lobenstein with a forest kindergarten and other youth welfare services, and Diakonie Landgut Holzdorf itself with offers for long-term unemployed and the rental of guest rooms and the manor house.

The estate now consists of a quadrangle of the manor house, a transverse building, farm buildings, and the (former) administration building, as well as the park with the prefabricated building. Most of the buildings are in a renovated state in 2012. A support association, Förderverein Landgut Holzdorf e.V., exists.