Parkhotel, Bad Wörishofen

A spa hotel before 1945

The house on Bahnhofstrasse began as the Kurhotel of Dr Wilhelm Sproll, in a town whose reputation rested on Sebastian Kneipp’s water cure. In both world wars the spa’s hotels and clinics were turned into military hospitals, and Bad Wörishofen was again a hospital town in the Second World War.

At the end of the war around 4,000 wounded soldiers and evacuated mothers with children were being cared for in the town. A local newspaper’s account of the last weeks of the war lists the Parkhotel among the larger houses that were fully occupied, alongside the Sonnenhof, the Kneippianum, the children’s home and the Kurhotel St. Josef.

The DP period

The inventory dates the Parkhotel’s opening as a DP facility to 24 January 1946, the same date on which the director of UNRRA Team 558 Bad Wörishofen took up post. The facility carried the assembly centre number AC 94-293 and, from September 1948, the numbers S 534 A and S 534. From November 1946 it came under Area Team 1063 Kempten within Area 5 Augsburg. The recorded capacity of 235 dates from 31 October 1947. The nationality line reads Polish-Ukrainian; it documents a Ukrainian presence but gives no Ukrainian head count.

The town’s camp as a whole was described at the time as Lithuanian. Team 558 issued its own camp money, printed in July 1946 with the inscription D.P. CENTER BAD WÖRISHOFEN / UNRRA. Ukrainian families arrived from spring 1946. A former resident writing in 2009 recalled that Ukrainians lived in four hotels, the Park Hotel, the Waldheim, the Luitpold and the Luers, that 491 Ukrainians lived in the town altogether, and that each hotel had its own administrator. An earlier contribution of 2008 on the same page speaks instead of more than 400 Ukrainian families in the town. The figure of 491 is a town-level recollection, not a count for the Parkhotel.

The same recollections describe a Ukrainian community life that was organised across the town rather than in one building: a Ukrainian gymnasium whose only graduating class finished in 1948, Plast scouting with a cub den in summer 1947, and an end-of-year school celebration in June 1947 at the Luitpold camp. A separate Jewish DP sanatorium-hospital operated in the Josefheim and the Hotel Sonnenhof from 1945 to 1951. In these years the town counted 5,036 inhabitants and 5,231 refugees.

Closure and the hotel afterwards

According to the former resident, all the camps in Bad Wörishofen were wound up in May 1948 when the International Refugee Organisation consolidated its centres, and the Ukrainians were transferred to the camps at Mittenwald, Augsburg and Dillingen. The inventory, however, assigns the Parkhotel new assembly centre numbers from September 1948 and closes it only before 9 April 1949. Either the building continued in use for other residents after the Ukrainian transfer or the two accounts date the end differently; the ITS reports for Bad Wörishofen would settle the point.

The hotel returned to spa business after the DP years and, in its own account, quickly became a meeting place for prominent guests. It continues today as Das Parkhotel at Bahnhofstrasse 8-10.