Speck Castle

Speck was first mentioned in a document in 1274, when Prince Nicolaus von Werle sold the "Düstern Wohld" between Lake Müritz and Lake Specker See to the city of Röbel. The name "Speck" comes from the Slavic term for the dam or a fascine-fortified path that leads through a swamp.

The only country road connecting the south of the Stargard region with Waren passed over this dam through deeply drained "Rieselwiese". As the only station on this route, Speck had an inn, whose tavern rights have been documented since 1713. Speck had been Holsteinian property since the 13th century, until Ludwig Reimer von Rohr was enfeoffed with the manor in 1753. The extraordinarily barren soils of this sandy landscape probably never brought great wealth to the estate. In 1812, Otto Friedrich von Rohr, probably due to a lack of heirs, sold Speck to Carl Wilhelm von Haugwitz.

In 1914, the estate became embroiled in inheritance disputes and was finally sold to the state of Mecklenburg in 1926. In 1929, it was bought by the publisher and state councilor Dr. Kurt Hermann, who already owned surrounding estates with extensive lands. Around Speck, he established what was then the largest (approx. 7,000 ha) fenced game enclosure with many exotic game species, as his interest in this land was exclusively for hunting. After the end of the war in 1945, Dr. Hermann's estates were forcibly expropriated by the communists.

The castle, in its current form, was completed in 1937 by Dr. Kurt Hermann as a hunting lodge after 2 construction phases. It is said to have been built on the foundations of the old manor house from the 18th century, of which only parts of the tower are original. What the old manor house may have looked like has not yet been handed down.

After the expropriation in 1945, Speck Castle temporarily served as a Soviet commandant's office, a transit camp for refugees, and as the seat of the forest administration. In 1954, it became a recreation home for the German Border Police, and in 1969, it was further expanded into a recreation home for officers of the National People's Army (NVA). Around the same time, the "Müritz" state hunting ground was established as the personal hunting ground of the former GDR Prime Minister Willi Stoph. As a hunting lodge for Stoph, the Ministry for State Security built several houses on Specker Horst, east of the Great Specker See. This property, illegally built in a nature reserve, was demolished in 1992.