History

The Main Building

...can look back on an extremely varied past. It was built in 1934/1935 having been commissioned by Hermann Göring for his "hunting assistant" Willi Schade. The building was then initially used as the guest house for Goring’s hunting lodge, "Carinhall", which was previously situated on the north-east bank of the Großer Döllnsee Lake.

After the Second World War,

...the building was acquired by the Free German Youth ('Freie Deutsche Jugend' (FDJ)), the youth movement of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and was used as a youth hostel until the end of 1954, when it then became a prestigious holiday and guest house for the GDR government. Wilhelm Pieck, Walter Ulbricht, Erich Honecker and other prominent GDR figures were guests of the Döllnkrug" house during this period.

In the 1970s,

...the building gained a swimming pool with a sports hall on its top floor. In 1974, the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany took over the house and made it its guest residence, particularly using it to host guests from the Soviet Union as part of an international holiday exchange scheme. The building even played home to Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who was Erich Honecker’s guest at a state hunting event in the Schorfheide region.

Another interesting fact: Walter Ulbricht (*1893), the long-standing General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and the later Chairman of the State Council of the German Democratic Republic, died on 1st August 1973 in the former guest house of the GDR government by the Döllnsee Lake.

At the Beginning of the 1980s,

...the building was taken over by the State Council of the GDR. Over the next few years, the "Döllnkrug" house hosted a number of State Council conventions and international conferences. These included a consultation meeting between the Foreign Ministers of the Warsaw Pact and Andrei Gromyko and the meeting held between the Chancellor of West Germany, Helmut Schmidt, and Erich Honecker in 1981. Four years later, the vast premises were put under the control of the East German Ministry for State Security, which it operated alongside the Wandlitz Waldsiedlung (Wandlitz Forest Settlement), which was home to most of the Members of the Government of the German Democratic Republic.

After the Fall of the Berlin Wall,

...the premises was acquired from the "Treuhandanstalt" ('Trust Agency') by four private entrepreneurs from Bavaria and one from Berlin, who then constructed what is now the Döllnsee-Schorfheide Hotel over the following years. Alongside the restoration of the swimming pool and the main building with its prominent hipped roof, the complex gained two new wings containing guest rooms and a seminar pavilion with a unique auditorium. The opening celebrations of the Döllnsee-Schorfheide Hotel took place in 1994, with the hotel boasting a total of 174 guest beds and a modern congress and conference centre attached to the main building. This was the first time in centuries that the building and its grounds on the banks of the Großer Döllnsee Lake were opened to the general public. In its tenth year, the hotel received four-star classification and was extended further, with the addition of an annex containing 27 rooms and the "Traumzeit" ('Dream Time') Body Lounge.

Nowadays,

...the Döllnsee-Schorfheide Hotel provides holidaymakers and weekend guests with an island of peace and relaxation, a source of inspiration and knowledge for creative course and seminar participants and an idyll at the heart of the Schorfheide-Chorin Biosphere Reserve.