bath. A Bride Chamber in the Bower (after a location in Lohengrin), guest rooms in the first and second floor of the Palas and a great banquet hall were further abandoned projects. In fact, a complete development of Neuschwanstein had never even been planned, and at the time of the king's death there was not a utilization concept for numerous rooms.
When Ludwig II died in 1886, Neuschwanstein was still incomplete. The king never intended to make the palace accessible to the public. But no more than six weeks after the king's death the regent Luitpold ordered the palace opened to paying visitors. The administrators of Ludwig's estate managed to balance the construction debts by 1899. From then until World War I, Neuschwanstein was a stable and lucrative source of revenue for the House of Wittelsbach, indeed Ludwig's castles were probably the single largest income source earned by the Bavarian royal family in the last years prior to 1914. To guarantee a smooth course of visits, some rooms and the court buildings were finished first. Initially the visitors were allowed to move freely in the palace, causing the furniture to wear quickly.
When Bavaria became a republic in 1918, the government socialized the civil list. The resulting dispute with the House of Wittelsbach led to a split in 1923: Ludwig's palaces including Neuschwanstein fell to the state and are now managed by the Bavarian Palace Department, a division of the Bavarian finance ministry. Nearby Hohenschwangau Castle fell to the Wittelsbacher Ausgleichsfonds, whose revenues go to the House of Wittelsbach. The visitor numbers continued to rise, reaching 200,000 in 1939.
Due to its secluded location, the palace survived the two World Wars without destruction. Under the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Institute for the Occupied Territories (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg f�r die Besetzen Gebiete), a suborganization of the Nazi Party, it served until 1944 as a depot for Nazi plunder from France
