rebuilt as a pleasure palace - Reinhardsbrunn Palace - in 1827. Duke Ernest I of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who had inherited the site the year before, built his summer residence here in an English style, surrounded by the first Romantic park in Thuringia. Ernst I was the father of Prince Albert, and hence the father-in-law to Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. It was not, as has been alleged, at Reinhardsbrunn that Victoria met Albert for the first time. They met first in London in May 1836, though after their marriage (1840) and after Albert's death (1861) Queen Victoria did visit Reinhardsbrunn in 1845 and 1862. The Abbey Church, the last significant remnant of the monastery, was demolished in 1855 and replaced by a smaller neo-romanesque palace chapel. In 1874, the effigies of the Landgraves of Thuringia, previously located in the Abbey Church, were moved to St. George's Church in Eisenach, where they remain today. In Duke Ernest II of Saxe-Cobourg-Gotha, Albert's older brother, died in the palace on August 22, 1893. The Saxe-Coburg and Gotha family kept ownership until the end of World War II, after which it came into possession of the East German state. The house and estate were used for a short time by Soviet Red Army forces as a military hospital and then for various functions by the government of East Germany. The palace was opened as a high-end hotel, marketed towards West German tourists and dignitaries, in 1961. Listed in 1891 as one of the artistic landmarks of the duchy, and in 1980 as a landmark of national significance by East Germany, after German reunification the palace was registered in 1992 by the State of Thuringia as a historic monument. Together with its facilities and park, after the reunification, it passed from the Treuhandanstalt into the possession of Western hotel companies, then to a Weimar company, BOB Consult GmbH. None of these companies were able to secure funding to restore the property. BOB Consult and the property was purchased in 2008 for €12,000,000 by a Russian investment consortium, Rusintech, in a case of suspected money laundering. Rusintech did not maintain the palace, and it fell victim to decay and looting. The state of Thuringia performed urgent repairs to prevent structural failiure, and in July 2018 legally repossessed it to ensure its safety, the first such action in the Federal Republic. Currently, the palace is being restored