Bad Kohlgrub UNRRA Hospital

The Lower Kurhaus

The spa property had been modernised during the 1930s, including a drinking fountain supplied by its own mineral water. In February 1942 the spa operation was handed over to the Luftwaffe as a military hospital. American troops reached Kohlgrub on 29 April 1945; UNRRA took over the Lower Kurhaus the following month.

The building had a longer history of medical use. In the First World War the spa had served as a convalescent home for soldiers, treating what was then called trench disease until 1922. The whole spa business in the Gagers district, comprising some 50 hectares, passed into the single ownership of Else Windhäuser in 1932 and was handed over complete to the Luftwaffe ten years later.

This was the Lower Kurhaus. The Upper Kurhaus was a different building whose reopening for spa guests on 30 June 1948 does not establish the hospital’s closure date.

Treatment and maternity care

The existing medical staff cared for former forced labourers and women after childbirth from eastern European war zones. The municipality records numerous births here. Its role therefore encompassed both recovery from wartime suffering and the practical medical needs of families beginning the postwar years.

The Bavarian historical account describes a sanatorium for particularly weakened or ill displaced people, set up by UNRRA doctors in a building the American military government had requisitioned. After recovery, patients moved into other DP camps or communities. A stay at Kohlgrub could consequently be one medical stage within a longer displacement journey, rather than a family’s permanent camp residence.

Different communities, different counts

A published Ukrainian population return records 140 people at the UNRRA hospital in May 1947. A separate history of Jewish DPs records eighteen Jewish residents in that month. These figures classify people differently, so they should be read as separate source measures rather than added together into a supposedly complete hospital population.

Jewish returns varied substantially: 36 in August 1946, 54 in September, 49 in November, two in January 1947, eighteen in May, forty in June and one in August. The sequence reflects a changing medical community, but it does not by itself explain each admission or departure. Three men are named in that register as the representatives of the Jewish patients.

Stebelsky’s table gives Bad Kohlgrub a row of its own, labelled UNRRA hospital, with a figure only in the column for 31 May 1947. The blanks in the other three columns are not zeros; they mean that the hospital does not appear in the returns used for those dates.

Another Ukrainian presence in the village

A published recollection records a separate Ukrainian presence at Kohlgrub. While barracks at Oberammergau were being repaired over the winter of 1945 to 1946, the women and children of one group of Ukrainian families were billeted in the village’s summer cottages, with their own administrator, while the men worked at Oberammergau and returned at weekends. This was holiday accommodation in the village and has nothing to do with the sanatorium in the Lower Kurhaus.

The end of the sanatorium phase

The available institutional histories place the end of the UNRRA sanatorium tentatively in 1947. An exact final day is not established. The Jewish register gives 1946 as the year the facility opened, against the municipal record of a takeover in May 1945; the discrepancy has not been resolved here.

The building outlived the hospital by less than twenty years. The municipal chronology records that in March 1946 the village took in 820 expellees from the eastern territories and that the lower Kurhaus was filled with those families, and that in 1964 and 1965, once they had moved into new cooperative housing, the derelict lower Kurhaus was pulled down. Those families were German expellees, a different group from the displaced persons treated in the sanatorium, and the chronology does not explain how the two occupations of the building overlapped.

The wider recovery of the spa town followed its own timetable. Limited spa operation was permitted again in March 1946, the Upper Kurhaus reopened on 30 June 1948, and the whole village received the title Bad on 13 July 1948.