Jagdschloss Gaaden, Hunting lodge in Gaaden, Austria

Jagdschloss Gaaden is a classicist hunting lodge built around 1910 to plans by Munich architect Emanuel von Seidl for Karl von Škoda, on a hill in a 360-hectare hunting estate south of Gaaden in the Vienna Woods. The property is privately owned and not open to the public; a 1911 description notes that the building's layout was determined by the cardinal directions and the views.

Karl von Škoda had the neoclassical hunting lodge built around 1910 to plans by Munich architect Emanuel von Seidl, on a 360-hectare hunting estate south of Gaaden. After Škoda died in 1929, the Belgian legation secretary Baron Joseph van der Elst rented it in the early 1930s. In 1941 Emil von Škoda sold the property to the Viennese Pölzl family; at the end of the war Soviet occupation troops seized the empty lodge. From 1948 to 1955 it served as a children's holiday home, and after the 1955 State Treaty it returned to the Pölzl family.

From 1948 to 1955 the lodge housed more than 1,000 children as a summer holiday home, run under Moritz Fels-Margulies with a lease from the City of Vienna at 200 schillings a month. Meals were the centrepiece: pastries, fruit, chocolate and honey bread almost daily, schnitzel with chips on Sundays. The grounds held meadows, orchards, a pond for bathing and playgrounds, and a winter garden kept children busy in bad weather.

The lodge stands on a hill in a 360-hectare hunting estate south of Gaaden and is privately owned, not open to the public. A 1956 agreement with the City of Vienna barred any forestry or hunting use of the property. The buildings damaged in the war were rebuilt between 1960 and 1965.

The lodge was used as a children's holiday home from 1948 to 1955, when more than 1,000 children spent their summer months there under Moritz Fels-Margulies. Meals were central: almost daily pastries, fruit, chocolate and honey bread, and on Sundays schnitzel, fries and pastries often from Demel. The grounds had meadows, orchards, a pond for bathing and playgrounds.