Ecksberg Hospital

The institution before liberation

The Ecksberg care institution began in 1852. Its own history records state seizure under National Socialism and the murder of many former residents. From August 1943 it operated as a branch of Eglfing-Haar, caring for transferred patients under conditions in which further deaths occurred.

A cemetery was opened in 1944, initially for victims within the institution and, towards the end of the war, for victims from nearby concentration-camp subcamps. These successive uses are part of the hospital site’s history, but they should not be collapsed into one continuous DP camp.

Emergency care in May 1945

On 26 April 1945 the Mühldorf camps still held 5,284 prisoners. A last evacuation transport of about 3,600 people left the following day, and American troops entered the Waldlager on 1 and 2 May and freed those who remained. Help reached the sick, who were too weak to leave the camp unaided, only on 4 May.

The local memorial’s account describes transfers to Mühldorf’s main hospital, Ecksberg’s military hospital and improvised facilities at Ampfing. A shortage of medical personnel led to the recruitment of local women and girls to assist with nursing. Survivors were then housed with local families for roughly two years while they recovered or arranged emigration.

Liberation did not immediately reverse the effects of starvation, disease and mistreatment, and the memorial describes continued deaths among former prisoners across this relief operation. It gives no separate Ecksberg mortality total.

A Ukrainian group in 1947

Stebelsky’s table of Ukrainians in the camps of the American zone carries a row for Ecksberg entered as a hospital. It prints 25 in the column drawn from the UNRRA summary of 31 May 1947 and no figure at all in the other three columns: the questionnaire returns of 1946 and 1947, the UNRRA summary of 24 August 1946 and the summary compiled for the Preparatory Commission of the International Refugee Organisation on 2 January 1948.

That establishes a Ukrainian presence at the named medical institution two years after liberation and only on one reporting date. It does not establish that those patients arrived together or shared the same wartime experience, and the absence of figures either side is an absence of returns rather than proof that no Ukrainians were there.

The hospital in the DP administration

The Arolsen inventory registers Ecksberg as Hospital Ecksberg, or General Hospital, in the district of Mühldorf. It records an opening date of 1 July 1945 and a closing date somewhere between 30 September 1949 and 30 September 1950, so the hospital served displaced people for four years or more after the emergency of May 1945 had passed.

Its capacity is given as 120 at 31 October 1947. It was administered by UNRRA Teams 154 at Mühldorf and 161 at Wasserburg on the Inn, and from November 1946 it fell under the area teams at Mühldorf, Traunstein and Bad Reichenhall in the Munich area A 7. Its assembly-centre number was AC 95-449, which became OB 772 from September 1948.

The inventory’s nationality field lists Polish, Baltic and Yugoslav patients and does not mention Ukrainians. Because Stebelsky’s table records 25 Ukrainians there in May 1947, the two records describe the same institution from different angles, and the catalogue’s list should not be read as a complete account of who was treated.

Where the records are

The inventory names holdings and change reports for Ecksberg in the Arolsen collection under document identifiers 81976312 to 81976330. It also records that the Stiftung Ecksberg itself holds scattered papers on the accounts between the DP hospital and the institution’s administration, and a photograph of the DP hospital staff.

The foundation’s own published chronology does not mention displaced persons, the hospital, the American forces or UNRRA. It runs from 1852 to a 1945 entry recording the restoration of the establishment to the original Ecksberg institution, and then jumps to 1955. The gap between that account and four or five years of registered DP hospital use is the main unresolved question about the site.

Distinct facilities in the same district

Several separately registered facilities lay close by and should not be merged with this one. Mühldorf-A and Mühldorf-B were residential centres in the town. The Attel hospital at Wasserburg was a second medical institution, with a capacity of 510. Aschau held a Jewish children’s centre and later a rehabilitation centre. Pürten held three registered sites, one of them Polish and Ukrainian. Ecksberg is the district’s general hospital entry and its figures belong to it alone.

Return to the care foundation

The institution’s chronology records restoration of ownership in 1945, followed by recognition as a public-law foundation in 1955. The return of ownership is an administrative milestone, not proof that all postwar medical relief ended on that date.