HEILSTATTE GRABOWSEE [DE]

Exploration #154 Heilstatte Grabowsee. Heilstatte Grabowsee was the first sanatorium for pulmonary tuberculosis in northern Germany and was founded by the German Red Cross in 1896. It is located about 30 km north of Berlin, in the urban area of Oranienburg. The approximately 34 hectare area is surrounded on two sides by forest and banks in the south and west into the Grabowsee lake.

In the second half of the 19th century, the number of lung patients in the German Empire rose sharply. About a third of all patients between the ages of 15 and 60 suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis. The Heilstatte Grabowsee was part of the People’s Hospitals Association for the Red Cross initially planned as a test facility. It was to be investigated whether lung patients could also be treated successfully in the northern German lowlands. Until then, human medicine assumed that lung diseases could only be improved or cured in the mild climate of the Mediterranean Sea or in pure mountain air. This is how the first lung sanatorium in northern Germany was established in 1896. In 1900 there were already 200 beds available for slightly to seriously ill men.

During the four years of the First World War, Grabowsee was used by the Red Cross as an emergency hospital for the treatment of soldiers with lung disease. Prisoners of war were also housed here until 1918. The war and the inflationary period also brought the sanatorium into great economic hardship. The people’s sanatorium association sold the institution on June 1, 1920 to the Brandenburg State Insurance Institute. From 1926 onwards, extensions were built so that the number of existing beds doubled to around 420 by the 1930s.

After the Second World War, thanks to the discovery of antibiotics, tuberculosis could be cured more quickly: long hospital stays were no longer necessary and the facilities were no longer used for medical purposes. The sanatorium was used by the Red Army as a Soviet military hospital between 1945 and 1995. Some facilities were run down in the long term, so that after the withdrawal of the armed forces of Russia in 1995, a new use did not seem possible without enormous expense.

Today, the grounds are a popular backdrop for films and photographs. In 2013 the site was used as a location for the film Monuments Men – Unusual Heroes and in 2017 for the film Heilstätten, which takes place in the Beelitz Heilstätten. An association is nowadays taking care of the place.

You could also check my report of these abandoned sanatorium: sanatorio città di Milano, Landesanstalt Teupitz, le sanatorium d’Angicourt.