Rappensee Hut
building in Oberstdorf, Swabia, Germany

The Rappensee Hut (German: Rappenseehütte) is an Alpine Club hut belonging to the Allgäu-Kempten Section of the German Alpine Club. With 304 bedspaces it is the largest of all the 327 huts of the German Alpine Club. It received a record number of guests on 19 September 1970 with 681 people overnighting. On average the hut has about 15,000 overnight stays per year.
Location
The Category 1 hut is situated in the Allgäu Alps in southern Germany, a few kilometres south of Oberstdorf on a grassy terrace near the lakes of Little and Great Rappensee. The most important summits in the vicinity are the Biberkopf and Hohes Licht. The well known Heilbronn Way begins and ends to the east and above the Rappensee Hut.
History
The Rappensee Hut was built in 1885. After several extensions it has become the largest hut in the German Alpine Club.
In August 2009 after drinking water over 100 guests at the hut complained of gastroenteritis and circulatory problems and some had to be evacuated by helicopter and treated in hospital.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Rappensee Hut” is building in Oberstdorf, Swabia, Germany. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Rappensee, building and Oberstdorf, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “building in Oberstdorf, Swabia, Germany” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2131646. Authority coordinates are 47.289, 10.255. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1970, 1885 and 2009.
Modern boundaries and familiar names can conceal earlier jurisdictions or structures that do not align with the present site. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Rappensee Hut” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.