Gauting DP Hospital

From Luftwaffe barracks to a hospital

The German air force built a training barracks of 38 hectares on the site in 1938 and 1939, including a searchlight detachment. In 1943, during a search for a specialist clinic for lung disease, the barracks were converted into a Luftwaffe hospital for soldiers with tuberculosis, and capacity was raised in stages from 500 to 1,200 beds; satellite wards were opened in the Gauting elementary school and at Eibsee near Garmisch-Partenkirchen. American forces entered Gauting without a fight on 30 April 1945, after local members of the Freiheitsaktion Bayern offered the unconditional surrender of the town. The military patients were transferred to other hospitals and displaced people with tuberculosis began receiving treatment there.

A community of patients

The local historical research group describes approximately one thousand patients from more than twenty nationalities. At times around half were Jewish survivors of concentration camps. These estimates refer to the wider hospital community; the smaller Ukrainian figures below measure a particular nationality within it.

Recovery was not assured. The same research documents almost five hundred deaths among the patients, many of whom had already endured severe persecution, and the research group compiled lists of the Jewish and non-Jewish dead, who were buried at Gauting. The Bavarian state history project separately records graves of 224 foreign workers and 85 Jewish dead in the Gauting cemetery, in a specially allotted plot, and describes the oldest Holocaust memorial on German soil as standing in the village. Those cemetery counts cover the war years generally and are not a tally of hospital patients.

Newspapers, radio and ordinary routines

The patients’ publication Unser Leben appeared in 1947–1948 in three languages. The historical research group documented thirteen of its fourteen issues, together with a commemorative booklet marking the thousandth broadcast of Radio Gauting in 1954. Its existence records patients participating in the life of the institution, rather than appearing only as subjects of medical administration.

Radio Gauting began broadcasting as the sanatorium’s own station on 19 August 1948 and by 1954 had reached more than a thousand programmes. A cinema showed films including Gone with the Wind and Quo Vadis, and a Jewish prayer room occupied part of the B building. A vehicle hall, a laundry, a nursery garden and the keeping of pigs and sheep supported partial self-sufficiency on the large grounds. The site was guarded first by American soldiers, then by the displaced persons’ own police, and finally by the hospital’s own staff.

Ukrainian patients in the records

Published population returns identify 29 Ukrainians in August 1946, 66 in May 1947 and 74 in December 1947. Stebelsky’s table, which lists Gauting explicitly as a DP hospital among the assembly centres of the American zone, leaves the 1946–47 questionnaire column blank for it. These returns establish a continuing Ukrainian presence in a specialist medical institution.

An IRO centre in its own right

Gauting was more than a treated population. The guide to displaced-persons research compiled by Boshyk and Balan shows it as the seat of an International Refugee Organisation zone office: monthly reports for Zone VI (Gauting) survive in the IRO papers at the Archives Nationales in Paris, and Gauting also appears as area team 1065 in the series of monthly reports for July to December 1947, alongside Regensburg, Augsburg, Kempten, Mittenwald and Munich.

Continuing care after IRO

In 1951 the Upper Bavarian state insurance institution took over administration from the International Refugee Organisation, which was itself wound up in 1952. The hospital’s own account records that 746 displaced-person patients were still in the institution at the handover, and that training workshops in trades such as machine building and electrical engineering were set up to support their longer-term integration. Displaced patients continued to be associated with the clinic into the mid-1950s. The transfer therefore marks a change in administration rather than a day on which every patient left.

The site remains a lung clinic, passing to the Asklepios group on 1 January 1999. Its own historical presentation and a memorial plaque on the grounds draw on the research of Walter Fürnrohr and Felix Muschialik, whose 2005 study of the DP hospital reproduces the patient newspaper in facsimile. Together they preserve a medical chapter of displacement that differs from the residential camps and emigration centres.