Rosenheim DP Hospital

The orphanage before 1945

A Rosenheim orphanage foundation had been collecting money since 1895. After the inflation of the 1920s destroyed its capital, the fund was rebuilt to about 70,000 marks by 1933, and the remainder of the 230,000 mark building cost came from the municipal lottery and donations. The site chosen was the wooded Dachsberg ridge known as the Schöne Aussicht near Fürstätt, above the flood plain and with a panorama of the Alps. Karl Kugler won the architectural competition, and the house was built in 1934 and 1935 with a heavy roof that gave it a castle-like appearance; a mural by the local painter Michael Licklederer decorated the south front.

The house was planned for 50 to 60 children, but it was never run as the intended orphanage before the war. On completion in 1935 it was leased to the Nazi welfare organisation NSV as a rest home for mothers, on condition that up to 15 orphans were taken in. From 1940 it became a Wehrmacht reserve hospital and was given camouflage paint.

The DP hospital

After the war the building held a hospital for displaced persons, described by the municipal archive as survivors of the persecution of the Jews and former forced labourers. The inventory row for the Rosenheim DP hospital gives an opening date of 24 January 1946, the same date recorded for the town’s other DP centres, which reflects the start of UNRRA Team 188’s administration rather than the first admission of a patient. The team was directed by a Mr Carton and belonged to UNRRA Area A 7 Munich.

The hospital’s capacity was recorded as 125 on 31 October 1947. Its nationality line reads Polish-Ukrainian and Baltic, which documents a Ukrainian presence among patients and staff but gives no Ukrainian head count. The hospital served the Rosenheim centres in which the same nationalities lived: Center A, a labour camp of 250 places recorded for Polish-Ukrainian, Polish, Estonian, Lithuanian and Jewish DPs, and Center B, a Lithuanian centre of 200 places.

Other medical provision in the town was separate. The Jewish transient children’s centre and then Camp Kadima in the Pionierkaserne had their own camp hospital from 1946 to 1949, and the Jewish community also used a ward in the municipal general hospital. A directory of Jewish communities lists an IRO hospital for Rosenheim alongside that ward; the IRO succeeded UNRRA in 1947, so this is probably the same DP hospital under its later administration, though the directory does not say where it stood.

Closure and return to the orphanage

The inventory dates the hospital’s closure to between 30 September 1949 and 30 September 1950, and the municipal archive records that the military government released the building in 1950. The town council then decided to repair the house and restore it to its original purpose. The orphanage was inaugurated on 8 October 1951 and, as the Kinderheim Schöne Aussicht at Meraner Strasse 50, still provides residential care for children and young people under the foundation of 1895.