Bornhagen is a municipality in the district of Eichsfeld in

Thuringia Thuringia (; german: Thüringen ), officially the Free State of Thuringia ( ), is a state of central Germany, covering , the sixth smallest of the sixteen German states. It has a population of about 2.1 million. Erfurt is the capital and lar ...

, Germany, located at the foot of the ruins of Hanstein Castle. The town district Rimbach is positioned directly south of the castle citadel at an elevation of 370 m. Bornhagen is located 22 km south of

Göttingen Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the capital of the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, the population was 118,911. General information The ori ...

, 85 km northwest of the state capital

Erfurt Erfurt () is the capital and largest city in the Central German state of Thuringia. It is located in the wide valley of the Gera river (progression: ), in the southern part of the Thuringian Basin, north of the Thuringian Forest. It sits i ...

and 270 km southwest of

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...

. It is the westernmost settlement in Thuringia but does not contain the westernmost point which is 75 km south near

Geisa Geisa () is a town in the Wartburgkreis district, in Thuringia, Germany. It is situated in the Rhön Mountains, 26 km northeast of Fulda. The near border with Hesse was the border between West Germany and the GDR during the Cold War. Thus ...

. Hanstein Castle was mentioned for the first time in official documents in the 9th century in Corvey Monastery, and is considered one of the largest castle ruins in central Germany. In the Middle Ages, the castle served as a prison. During the

Thirty Years' War The Thirty Years' War was one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in European history, lasting from 1618 to 1648. Fought primarily in Central Europe, an estimated 4.5 to 8 million soldiers and civilians died as a result of battle ...

, it was partly destroyed by Swedish troops, after which it was no longer inhabited on a regular basis. Reconstruction work was begun on the castle in 1985 with the support of the local heritage society. The three-wing altar from the former castle chapel can be viewed in the Catholic Church in Rimbach. Bornhagen contains a full-scale replica of the

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (german: Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas), also known as the Holocaust Memorial (German: ''Holocaust-Mahnmal''), is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by arc ...

Gallery

File:Bornhagen Kirche.jpg,

Lutheran Lutheranism is one of the largest branches of Protestantism, identifying primarily with the theology of Martin Luther, the 16th-century German monk and Protestant Reformers, reformer whose efforts to reform the theology and practice of the Cathol ...

church File:Wurstmuseum Bornhagen.jpg, Sausage museum File:Burg Hanstein.JPG, Burg Hanstein File:Bornhagen Friedensstr Nachbildung Holocaust-Mahnmal 1 2018-01-01.jpg, A replica of the Holocaust memorial was erected on the property adjacent to the home of the far-right politician

Björn Höcke Björn Höcke (born 1 April 1972) is a German politician and a member of Alternative for Germany (AfD). Along with Andreas Kalbitz, Höcke is the leader of the AfD's far-right "Der Flügel" faction, which the German government's Federal Offic ...

References

Eichsfeld (district) {{Eichsfeld-geo-stub