Sanatorium Wienerwald
The Wienerwald sanatorium is a former lung sanatorium ( lung sanatorium ) in Feichtenbach in Lower Austria , a cadastral community of Pernitz in Piestingtal . Founded in 1903/04 by the two lung specialists Hugo Kraus and Arthur Baer, the house, tucked away in a side valley of the Piesting, soon became world famous. Well-heeled patients from all over Europe, primarily from Eastern Europe, but also tuberculous guests from overseas, such as coffee plantation owners from South America, frequented the exclusive sanatorium , which was roughly on par with the health resorts in Davos in terms of reputation . The rush was so great that the two doctors decided to significantly enlarge the house , which was originally designed for around 90 patients .
When Hugo Kraus, who was also the inventor and designer of the cold quartz lamp for irradiation of the larynx, first practiced the artificial pneumothorax method known from Switzerland in Austria in 1930 , the interest of the wealthy clientele increased exorbitantly, so that the house, despite its high prices, continued until the middle of the 1930s was practically permanently on the verge of overload. Personalities such as Federal Chancellor Ignaz Seipel , who died there on August 2, 1932, Cardinal Innitzer, and Franz Kafka in 1924 were among the patients at the high altitude clinic, which is around 530 meters above sea level .
Hugo Kraus
Hugo Kraus was born on June 8th, 1872 in Czaslau near Pardubice / Bohemia. He came from a traditional Jewish academic family, his father, Julius Kraus, was a general practitioner in Czaslau. Kraus attended the German grammar school in Prague , followed by medical studies at the University of Prague , where he received his doctorate in 1897 . Then he was an aspirant at the Vienna General Hospital . Kraus initially specialized in pediatrics, later on pulmonary medicine and larynx diseases. Then he became assistant to the board of med. University Clinic Vienna and founder of the Alland lung sanatorium , Leopold von Schrötter , in his Alland sanatorium. Around 1900 the doctor went on extensive study trips to Switzerland, visiting the Basel sanatorium in Davos Dorf several times.
In 1903 he bought three farms in Feichtenbach (on the advice of his father's friend Leopold Schrötter) together with his former student colleague Baer and the Wienerwald sanatorium was founded. On July 1, 1904, the two pulmonologists opened their sanatorium. Kraus, who had a practical disposition, devoted himself more to tuberculosis research and developed some technical aids, such as the cold quartz lamp for irradiating the larynx , and in 1930 carried out the first artificial pneumothorax operation in Austria. He was considered a busy scientist, determined and enterprising. Numerous publications in international journals cemented his reputation as one of the leading lung specialists in Europe. Pointing beyond his era and known to date is, for example, his treatise On the diagnosis of small gas bubbles via pleuritic effusions from 1911. On the other hand, Kraus is described as an emotional, comfortable person, sociable and affable. In Feichtenbach and the surrounding area, Kraus was highly valued by the population, because he not only enjoyed mingling with the people, but also treated the locals without insisting on payment.
On April 21, 1938, the SS seized the Wienerwald sanatorium in the presence of the Gestapo and the managing director of Lebensborn, Guntram Pflaum . Kraus took refuge in a mattress dormitory (one witness spoke of a knife stab in the chest so that traces of blood were found all over the sanatorium ), where he attempted suicide. Three days later, on April 24, 1938, Hugo Kraus died in the Wiener Neustadt hospital. Official cause of death: self-poisoning. The exact course of events is in the dark, but to date there are justified doubts about the botched suicide of the doctor.
Arthur Baer
Arthur Baer was born on August 1, 1872 as the son of the Jewish Maierhof tenant Moritz Bär in Roschowitz / Bohemia . Like Kraus, he also attended the German Gymnasium in Prague, followed by medical studies at the University of Prague , where he received his doctorate in 1897 . Then he was also an aspirant at the Vienna General Hospital. Baer later went to Peter Dettweiler's sanatorium in Falkenstein im Taunus as an assistant . There he met his future wife Elisabeth Matwejewa Spitzmacher, a Moscow German-Russian from a wealthy family, whose fortune formed the cornerstone of the Wienerwald sanatorium.
This is followed by two years of study in France and Switzerland . After founding the sanatorium, Baer is the pragmatic part of the medical duo. He is a member of the " Gutensteiner Summer Society", is considered serious and closed, and has little personal contact with patients. Like his wife, the enthusiastic hunter was an elegant figure, but of a completely different nature. This not only led to tension between him and his wife, but also to a falling out with Kraus. In the late 1920s and 1930s, the two sanatorium directors finally ordained completely separately from each other. One's patients mostly did not see the other.
After the Aryanization of the Vienna Woods, Baer was immediately taken to the Vienna Regional Court. After days of interrogation by the Gestapo , Baer finally signed the waiver of all possessions. He fled to his brother in Pardubice / Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia , where the medical councilor, who had been expelled from his naturalized home Feichtenbach, ran a small ordination rather than badly. He died completely impoverished on October 7, 1941. Official cause of death: "vigilium cordis" (heart valve defect), in the Pardubice death register there is simply only "vitium cordis". But there are also testimonies that he is said to have committed suicide, worn down by the treatment by the National Socialists.
architecture
The foundation building is a 13-axis, five-storey building with an attic built into the roof landscape in the style of late historicism / Heimatstil . From its south side it shows a clear tripartite division, with a pseudo-mean risalit only indicated by the roof and missing balconies in the receding central wing . Since the building is on a hillside, the reference level is actually an upper floor; the entrance was originally on the north side. On the west side, a wooden terrace was attached to the building.
In 1909/10 the winter garden, which represented the foyer , was extended to make space for a modern operating theater . It is considered proven that Hugo Kraus brought the concept for his sanatorium with him from a study trip from Switzerland. There are indeed striking structural similarities with the Basel sanatorium in Davos , which Kraus visited in 1902. This similarity even goes so far that the alignment of both buildings is identical and it can be assumed with a high degree of probability that it was not the master bricklayer Johann Jauernik, but the technically gifted physician himself who drew the draft plan for the Wienerwald sanatorium.
At the beginning of the 1920s, a north-eastern extension wing was added, the top floor of which was designed as an attic in a deeply drawn-down hipped roof , and the construction of a house with a square floor plan with also a deeply drawn-down hipped roof, in the basement of which four garages were housed, jokingly by the locals as "The Dreimäderlhaus" called. Later conversions were in 1938, 1951/52 ( Franz Mörth ), 1962 (Mörth), 1967 (Viktor Adler), and the addition of an indoor swimming pool in 1979/80. The redesign of the facade of the main house by Franz Mörth, who also designed the building of the Vienna Chamber of Labor , is a typical example of the architectural resumption of the New Objectivity after the Second World War .
interior
As elegantly reserved and conservative as the Wienerwald sanatorium was planned in terms of its external appearance, the interior was just as progressive and modern. Strictly following aseptic precautions, the sanatorium founders made sure that the hygienic requirements were met by using the most modern materials. The floors were, unless - were tiled throughout with - as in the ordination and sanitary rooms linoleum covered, on the walls to wallpaper made were Lincrusta , a linoleum-like material. Everything should be easily washable or washable, smooth, impermeable and, if possible, disinfectable or sterilizable.
At the same time, the two founders of the sanatorium created a stylish atmosphere that did not need to shy away from comparison with the famous sanatoriums in Switzerland, such as Professor Jessen's forest sanatorium, which later became famous through Thomas Mann's Zauberberg :
The furnishings in the patient rooms consisted of seamlessly processed white lacquered furniture, some of which were covered with glass and marble panels. A large winter garden on the ground floor served as a foyer through which one reached the central staircase . On the 1st and 2nd floor there was a doctor's apartment on the east side above the dining room, which was accessed via a separate staircase. From the beginning there was a patient elevator and a dining elevator took care of the non-ambulatory patients on the upper floors. The patients had access to a dining and ballroom equipped with Thonet and Mundus tables and bentwood armchairs, an elegant salon and a music room.
When it opened, the house met all the standards of a modern pulmonary hospital and even exceeded them in some areas. Nevertheless, Kraus and Baer made every effort to improve the quality continuously. When an operating theater was built on Kraus' initiative, it was small, but one of the most modern of its time.
Warrior sanctuary
The warrior sanctuary built in 1915/16 in the middle of the First World War , a 25-axis, elongated building, was already destroyed by flames in the winter of 1920. It had a brick ground floor and a wooden open upper floor in which the beds were accommodated. The building accommodated about sixty patients. The simple complex was only structured by a clearly protruding three-axis central projection crowned by a small turret.
The warrior sanctuary was founded on the initiative of Baer, who had been called up into the army of the dual monarchy on the first day of World War I. However, Baer was soon exempted from active military service on condition that his activity was to serve in the military. It was recognized that when the war began, the number of soldiers with lung disease had increased explosively due to the unsanitary conditions.
The doctor kept this promise in his own way by promoting the construction of a warrior sanatorium on the grounds of a sanatorium. To this end, Kraus and Baer made the land on which the sanatorium was to be built available free of charge for an initial ten years. The construction of the sanatorium was financed primarily from funds from the medical profession, above all the involvement of Hofrat Hermann Schlesinger, who donated a not inconsiderable part of his private fortune.
Inaugurated on July 6, 1916 by the protector of the Austrian Red Cross , Archduke Franz Salvator , the building initially actually served the treatment of officers of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy with lung disease, but from 1919 onwards, as its original purpose was no longer used, it was used as a purely women's wing of the sanatorium.
On October 31, 1920, a fire broke out in the common room of the sanatorium, presumably due to a defective stove pipe. In addition, due to the low outside temperature of minus 10 ° C, both the water pipe and the extinguishing water pond were frozen over. Although every effort was made to extinguish the fire, it could not be prevented that the entire structure burned down to the foundation walls.
Lounge, park and terrain cure
Adjacent to the main building of the sanatorium there was a wooden terrace on which the patients, insofar as they were physically able , could complete the prescribed reclining cure . For this purpose, the house provided its own anatomically curved and white lacquered tubular steel beds, but the patients had to bring blankets and footwear because Kraus criticized the practice of borrowing institutional equipment, as was quite common in sanatoriums at the time, as unhygienic and therefore refused. Bedridden and moribund patients were pushed onto the balconies or, at least with the window open, could soak up the beneficial climate.
The sanatorium was surrounded by a spacious park, in which lung patients in a better general condition had to cope with a regular terrain cure. This is a method of exposure to climatic conditions recognized to this day, in which the patient moves in the field and in which, in addition to the therapeutic climatic factors, the movement has a positive effect on the patient. Serpentine paths, laid out exactly according to the incline and length of the walking time, traversed the landscape park, which was equipped with local and sometimes exotic trees and plants, which slowly and imperceptibly changed from a kind of pleasure garden with pavilions etc. to over thirty hectares of forest and meadows. Noble trees planted in groups of three and four structured this ideal landscape, entirely in keeping with historicism. The in-house nursery supplied the park with plants grown in its own glass houses, which gave the convertible garden an almost Mediterranean flair. Palms, yuccas and giant agaves , which were integrated into the park design over the summer, can be seen on historical photos .
In addition, a so-called air hut was available to the patients for the purpose of climate exposure or heliotherapy. A wooden bowling alley for exercise was also included in the concept.
Of all this splendor in the core zone around the sanatorium, a trained eye could still see one or the other until 2008, but years of neglect and massive felling in the years 2006 to 2008 have irretrievably destroyed forest and edge areas in particular. In the winter of 2008/09, the historic park was almost completely cut down, ignoring its importance. Through the excessive use of heavy equipment, the complex structure of the park was also permanently destroyed.
Aryanization and Lebensborn
In April 1938 the sanatorium was "Aryanized" in the course of the annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany . Hugo Kraus committed suicide, his colleague Baer was arrested and forced to transfer the sanatorium to the Lebensborn association . He died impoverished in Pardubice in 1941 . In 1938 the house was rebuilt according to the guidelines of the imperial architecture, that is, simplified, the reclining hall was converted into a two-storey permanent building. The building lost the typical features of the Heimat style, such as the three characteristic turrets in the roof landscape and the half-timbering .
In the following time, the house was initially called "Heim Ostmark" - but soon afterwards, based on its original name "Heim Wienerwald" - as a mother's home for Lebensborn. It was the first of only two realized Lebensborn homes on the soil of the Ostmark . At least 1200, but probably more than 1700 children were born here. Of course, disabled children were also born in the Lebensborn homes. Most of them do not appear in the birth statistics. Often a cleft lip and palate was enough for them to be removed from the homes. The only known document on this was provided by the Wienerwald home manager, Norbert Schwab. He writes of a transfer of a disabled girl to the Reichsanstalt Am Spiegelgrund , which is "active in the sense of an extermination".
The infant mortality in the nursing homes was roughly the same as in the " Altreich ", ie around 6%. Stillbirths, however, only appear to a limited extent in the birth books. What happened to these stillbirths and deceased infants is therefore largely in the dark. In the case of the Wienerwald home, there are around 100 babies. The former caretaker of the home, Mr. Josef P., admitted in an interview on December 30, 1994 that he had buried at least one of them "at the home" on behalf of the administrator Decker.
Women from all over Germany came to the home for childbirth: if the racial characteristics "matched", the association paid the travel and accommodation costs; the mothers usually stayed in the home a few weeks after the birth. Because of the good medical care, not only single pregnant women came, but also wives of SS members. In the home, records were kept of every woman (age, physique, character, etc.), and even the behavior during childbirth was noted (screaming was stigmatized as "un-German"). With the approaching eastern front, fewer pregnant women came from the "Altreich", but more women who had recently given birth came from the area.
Although the "Lebensborn" in the declared favorite home of the Reichsführer (he also appears again and again as a godfather in the naming documents of the home) SS Heinrich Himmler (RFSS) also benefited illegitimate mothers in need, but it served the SS and NS party leaders but rather to deport her pregnant lover there without the wife (who may later also give birth there) noticing anything. Pregnancy and birth were kept secret and attested in their own “Lebensborn” registry offices (in this case: Pernitz 2). The Wienerwald home was the only pure maternal home in the Lebensborn system. In all other homes, the “Lebensborn” was also used for the kidnapping and “Germanization” of Central and Eastern European children.
Post-war history as an ÖGB home
From 1945 to the end of 1948, the Vienna Youth Welfare Organization initially ran a children's rest home for malnourished children from Vienna in the premises of the sanatorium. This saved the building from being attacked by the Russian occupation. During this time, a total of over 4100 (!) Children were nursed to Feichtenbach. The plan to convert it into a lung sanatorium in the City of Vienna failed in mid-1948, and restitution proceedings were initiated.
In 1950 the owners had to sell the badly damaged facility, and the Austrian Trade Union Federation (ÖGB) began a large-scale renovation in 1951 according to plans by the architect Franz Mörth, which now gave the house a completely new look. Cantilevered reinforced concrete balconies and a flat saddle roof now determined the effect of the new " Karl Maisel vacation home for metal and miners" of the ÖGB in Feichtenbach.
In 1952, according to Mörth's plans, an outdoor swimming pool and a youth hostel were built on the site of the warrior sanctuary that burned down in 1920, and in 1962 a restoration pavilion was added on the southeast side. Further renovations in 1967 (they mainly concerned the extension of the Mörth restaurant pavilion, the staff dining room and the expansion of the laundry into a staff residence), now by Viktor Adler, as well as the construction of a miniature golf course , on which the Austrian state championship in lane golf was held in 1984 , followed.
In 1979/80 an indoor swimming pool that was too large was added on the north side , which ultimately made the operation of the house unprofitable. In addition to the actual bathing hall, it included a sauna, table tennis rooms and an automatic bowling alley.
From 1990 to 2002 the house was used as a recovery and rehabilitation center for patients of the Vienna Regional Health Insurance Fund. During this time, around 22,000 patients who needed recovery or rehabilitation after serious illnesses were supported with a wide range of therapeutic measures to regain their skills in the home environment.
The recent past
In 1992 a memorial stone was erected in front of the former sanatorium to commemorate the founders Hugo Kraus and Arthur Baer and their fate during the Nazi era .
The building in the middle of the large park has been out of use since 2002 .
In March 2007, the former sanatorium and trade union home unexpectedly hit the headlines again when information from the population revealed a case of animal hoarding . One woman housed over 80 animals, mostly dogs and cats, in the house. The animal shelter operated without a permit was opened on 22./23. March dissolved by the district administration of Wiener Neustadt and the official veterinarian .
In January 2009 the novel “Feichtenbach - a faction” by the author Eleonore Rodler was published by Vabene ( ISBN 3851672240 ). The book sheds light on the Lebensborn era of the house and tells the fate of two boys who were born in Feichtenbach, brought to Germany and given up for adoption separately.
The “Quit Club”, a private organization for addiction therapy, tried in 2008/09 to convert the former sanatorium into a “general public psychosomatic special hospital” through a private investor. However, the project could not be implemented. The current owner of the former Wienerwald sanatorium is a German holding company. Wiener Rechtsanwälte GmbH acts as legal representative and administrator.
literature
- Leopold von Schrötter: On the status of efforts to combat tuberculosis in Austria , o. O., o. J.
- Arthur Baer, Hugo Kraus: 30 years of the Wienerwald Sanatorium - on the occasion of the thirty-year existence of the Wienerwald Sanatorium, sanatorium for lung patients, Pernitz, Lower Austria , Chwala, Vienna [1934]
- Renate Wechdorn: Sanatorium Wienerwald , Vienna, Techn. Univ., Dipl.-Arb., 1983
- Rotraut Hackermüller: The life that bothers me. A documentation on Kafka's last years, 1917 to 1924 , Medusa Verlag, Vienna [u. a.] 1984, ISBN 3-85446-094-5
- Hiltraud Ast : Feichtenbach, a valley landscape in the Schneeberg region of Lower Austria. Marktgemeinde Gutenstein (Ed.), Hollinek, Vienna 1994, ISBN 3-85119-257-5
- Günther Knotzinger: The SS home Wienerwald . Self-published, Feichtenbach 2001.
- Eleonore Rodler: Feichtenbach - a faction , Edition Va Bene, Vienna, Klosterneuburg 2009, ISBN 3851672240 , ISBN 978-3-85167-224-4
Movie
- Secret thing Lebensborn , documentary film 2003. Director: Beate Thalberg . Film about the only Lebensborn home in Austria in the former sanatorium Wienerwald Pernitz, which had not been examined until then. ORF / Cultfilm
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b E. Th .: New life in Feuchtenbach. A vacation home for metalworkers and miners . In: Arbeiter-Zeitung , April 2, 1952, p. 6.
- ↑ a b Das SS-Heim Wienerwald , 2001, p. 4, 15fff, 55.
- ^ A cold quartz lamp for irradiating the larynx , Lung, Springer New York, Vol. 81, Nov. 1932, pp. 635 to 638.
- ↑ On the diagnosis of small gas bubbles over pleuritic effusions , Lung, Springer New York, Vol 21, Oct. 1911, pp. 297 to 302.
- ↑ a b Hackermüller, The life that disturbs me , p. 100.
- ↑ Das SS-Heim Wienerwald , 2001, p. 15ff.
- ^ Hiltraud Ast: Summer freshness of the imperial era. The upper class summer society and its local hosts, meeting of two social classes , Perlach-Verlag, Augsburg [u. a.] 1990, ISBN 3-922769-21-7 , p. 65.
- ^ The SS-Heim Wienerwald , 2001, p. 17f.
- ↑ Georg Lilienthal: The "Lebensborn e. V. “, an instrument of National Socialist racial policy , Fischer [u. a.], Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 3-437-10939-1 , p. 103.
- ^ The SS-Heim Wienerwald , 2001, p. 55.
- ↑ Source: "Herrenmenschen" and Aryan women. Barbara Schleicher on the SS Lebensbornheim Wienerwald: The curious, scandalous history of a house, in: Morgen, March 2003, pp. 28–30, here pp. 28–29. The magazine "morgen" is published by the state of Lower Austria; older editions are unfortunately not available online.
- ↑ In an article about the house, Barbara Schleicher writes in the Lower Austrian cultural magazine "morgen" that the descendants were asked to pay horrific taxes for the run-down building and the 34 hectare area, so that the heirs had no choice but to give the property to sell. Source: "Herrenmenschen" and Aryan women. Barbara Schleicher on the NS-Lebensbornheim Wienerwald: The curious, scandalous history of a house, in: Morgen, March 2003, pp. 28–30, here p. 29f.
- ↑ Project description at Sozialmarie.org ( Memento of the original from January 29, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Accessed October 12, 2012)
- ↑ Das Citymagazin: From Nobelsanatorium zum Geisterhaus, Issue 05/10 ( Memento of the original from June 3, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Accessed October 12, 2012)
- ↑ Catalog list Austrian National Library
- ↑ Permalink Austrian Library Association
- ↑ Permalink Austrian Library Association
- ↑ Secret Life Born, Documentaries at Cultfilm ( Memento of the original from October 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
Coordinates: 47 ° 55 ′ 19 ″ N , 16 ° 0 ′ 14 ″ E