Qualla: Hohenlychen Sanatorium

Hohenlychen Sanatorium: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Doris Antony, Berlin, CC BY-SA 4.0. Karl Gebhardt was the surgeon German athletes went to. He ran a clinic in the pine forest above Lychen where footballers and Olympians had their joints rebuilt and where the guest book filled with the signatures of the Nazi leadership. In the summer of 1942 he began having women carried into an operating theatre at Ravensbruck concentration camp, eleven kilometres west, so that his staff could cut down to the bone of their legs, pack the wounds with bacteria and ground glass, and record whether the drugs worked. He called it research. A Nuremberg court sentenced him to death for it in August 1947.

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Image: Doris Antony, Berlin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hohenlychen Sanatorium: Sixteen Girls and Sixteen Boys

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gabor Fischer, Public domain. Hohenlychen began as an ordinary good idea. Once German social insurance law made the state responsible for treating tuberculosis - which then meant sunlight, clean air, food and rest - sanatoriums went up across Prussia by the dozen. In 1902 Gotthold Pannwitz bought about a hect...

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Image: Gabor Fischer | Public domain

Hohenlychen Sanatorium: The Schoolfriend

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit M.Schoettler, CC BY-SA 4.0. Gebhardt had been at school with Himmler in Landshut. After the Nazis took power he reintroduced himself, joined the SS, and was installed as Hohenlychen's medical director in 1935 on the understanding that the place would become a centre for sports medicine and a military hospit...

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Image: M.Schoettler | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hohenlychen Sanatorium: What Was Done to the Women

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. In May 1942 Reinhard Heydrich was wounded in Prague. Gebhardt took the case, thought little of sulphonamide antibiotics, and gave him too little; Heydrich died of the infection. Gebhardt's judgement was now in question, and Ernst-Robert Grawitz had already been pressing him to te...

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Image: Unknown | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Hohenlychen Sanatorium: The Wards at Hohenlychen

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Doris Antony, Berlin, CC BY-SA 4.0. Ravensbruck was not the only site. Ludwig Stumpfegger, who worked under Gebhardt and later became Hitler's second personal physician, performed transplantation experiments on bone, nerve and muscle at Hohenlychen itself. Kurt Heissmeyer, another of Gebhardt's staff, set out to pr...

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Image: Doris Antony, Berlin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hohenlychen Sanatorium: Verdicts, and Afterwards

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit M.Schoettler, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the spring of 1945 Himmler met Count Folke Bernadotte of the Swedish Red Cross here, in the negotiation he believed would save him, and agreed the White Buses that carried thousands of prisoners out of the camps. Red crosses on the roofs kept the bombers away until a raid on 2...

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Image: M.Schoettler | CC BY-SA 4.0