Merxhausen Hospital

From monastery to state institution

The buildings began as an Augustinian double monastery founded in 1213. Hesse adopted the Reformation after the Homberg synod of 1526, the house was secularised in 1527, and a charter of Landgrave Philipp dated 26 August 1533 turned it into one of the territorial hospitals for the rural poor. Merxhausen and its counterpart at Haina were founded in the same year, and the site remained a public institution of care for four centuries before the events described here.

By the twentieth century it was a state asylum whose patients were women. The medical site had already undergone violent changes before liberation. Under National Socialism, chronically ill patients were stripped of legal protection, and the institution’s own historical account records transfers towards the killing centre at Hadamar. The municipal trail records that 494 patients from Merxhausen became victims of the “Aktion T 4” murders.

The wards under military occupation

From 1942 the Wehrmacht used nine of the institution’s thirteen ward buildings as a military hospital, which forced the remaining patients into severe overcrowding. The municipal account records two doctors for 400 patients and rations reduced to the point where physical decline was accepted. Local historians describe this as a silent form of killing, distinct from the transports to Hadamar but part of the same policy.

The displaced-persons hospital belonged to the subsequent Allied period. Its patients and administration must be distinguished from the earlier psychiatric institution and its victims, even though both histories occupied the same grounds.

A relief hospital under UNRRA and IRO

The American military government requisitioned sections of the institution for sick displaced people. The camp catalogue lists the unit as “Merxhausen Hospital / TB- und General-Hospital”, with an opening date of 12 August 1945 and a closure recorded only as falling between 31 March and 30 September 1949. It carried the assembly-centre number AC 587, became K 161 in the renumbering of September 1948, and had a capacity of 460 places recorded on 31 October 1947. Its nationalities are given simply as various.

Relief work was organised through UNRRA Team 906 Merxhausen, under the Kassel area teams and the Frankfurt am Main area office. The same team number also covered a second hospital for displaced people at Steinatal near Ziegenhain, so the team’s scope was wider than this one site. UNRRA was absorbed into the International Refugee Organisation in Europe early in 1947, and the municipal history records that several hundred patients were treated between the beginning of 1946 and the middle of 1949, drawn from eastern and southern Europe.

The Ukrainian return

A Ukrainian count taken from the UNRRA summary of 31 May 1947 records 36 Ukrainians at Merxhausen Hospital. The figure appears in Stebelsky’s Table 7 for the American zone, where the surrounding columns are blank, so no comparable Ukrainian figure exists for August 1946, December 1947 or the questionnaire returns collected during 1946 and 1947. This dated national count cannot be read as the hospital’s bed number, its cumulative admissions or its full international population.

A place of remembrance

Sixty-three displaced people who died in the institution between 1946 and 1949, from fatal illness or from exhaustion, were buried in a cemetery of their own. The municipal trail records that they came from Estonia, Greece, Yugoslavia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the USSR, Ukraine and Hungary. The cemetery was redesigned in 2011 and forms a stop on the local peace-education trail, maintained with the support of the German war graves commission.

Later guided commemorations have connected the surviving graves with the history of wartime uprooting and the struggle to recover after liberation. The trail places the displaced-persons cemetery beside the war cemetery at Bad Emstal-Sand, the memory of the workhouse inmates sent to Merxhausen as labourers, and the former synagogue at Riede, so that the site is read as one layer among several.