Obermayer Award

A home for Holocaust survivors, a complex history

Badehaus: Former bathhouse becomes a center for education and understanding

by Toby Axelrod

The many-layered wartime history of Wolfratshausen was buried, nearly forgotten—even avoided—for decades. But when the former Badehaus was slated to be sold and torn down 10 years ago, the past came up in a big way. And it has never receded.

The Badehaus (pronounced bah-deh-house), or bathhouse, is a mute witness to the history of the Nazi era and its aftermath. 

Today it houses a museum that tells the history of survival, of migration, of rebuilding broken lives. It does this with eyewitness testimony and intergenerational participation. Thanks to volunteers who never gave up, Wolfratshausen, a small town in in Upper Bavaria, has become an example of how people of all ages and backgrounds can join to make the past accessible and relevant for today.

“We created a special little world in and around [the Badehaus],“ says historian and journalist Sybille Krafft, the driving force behind the educational memorial. “And the heart of our project is the contact with contemporary witnesses and their families.”

Built by the Nazis in 1940, the Badehaus was where conscripted workers and forced laborers in the nearby Föhrenwald armaments production camp would shower. After the war, the U.S. Army turned Föhrenwald into a displaced persons camp for Jewish refugees—as many as 6,000 survivors of the Holocaust—who used the Badehaus and later set up a mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath, in its basement.

One of the largest of the hundreds of displaced person camps for Jewish refugees in postwar Germany, Föhrenwald was finally closed in 1957, the last such camp to be shut down. It later housed German Catholic families who had been expelled from countries occupied by the Nazis during wartime. The bathhouse was rebuilt to provide housing for teachers and students. And the camp was renamed Waldram.

Older residents of Wolfratshausen knew this complex history. They had also seen SS guards herding Jews on a so-called death march from the Dachau concentration camp, about 53 kilometers (33 miles) away, in the spring of 1945, shortly before Germany capitulated to the allies. The march passed near Föhrenwald, and it became a point where many Holocaust survivors were liberated by American troops. 

Few of those residents talked openly about this past in their own backyard, and it was not even taught in local schools. “This history was forgotten, suppressed very successfully,” says Krafft, 63. “Generations of pupils grew up without knowing anything about this very special history.”

In 2012, the impending sale of the Badehaus galvanized Krafft to take action. With others, she formed the association Citizens for the Badehaus (Bürger fürs Badehaus Waldram-Föhrenwald e.V.). They fought to ensure that the building would be saved and turned into a place of remembrance, meeting, and documentation.

The property was part of a large plot owned by the Catholic seminary foundation St. Matthias, which wanted to sell the site to a developer.

The seminary foundation “had other plans, lucrative plans, for what to do after they would have torn down the Badehaus,” says historian Ute Frevert, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and a supporter of the Badehaus memorial. “And so they were not really amused once that initiative formed. They wanted to tear it down.”

Not only did Krafft’s association have to convince the church and town to give up a potential development deal, they also had to convince their neighbors to face a difficult past. “Some people just did not want to be reminded of the Nazi period,” says Krafft. “It was not easy.“

Telling the Story 

Located on Independence Place (now Kolpingplatz), the urban heart of the village, the Badehaus was one of the last central buildings still in close to its original form. In 2018, after raising 1.8 million euros for renovation and investing 17,000 volunteer hours on the project, the association opened the Badehaus Place of Remembrance (Erinnerungsort Badehaus).

Today, the three-story building with a peaked roof on Kolpingplatz 1 in Wolfratshausen contains exhibits documenting these overlapping chapters of local history, sparking visitors of all ages to learn more. It includes more than 50 videotaped eyewitness testimonies; film and audio features; multi-media installations; and an outdoor photo documentation about the lives of children in the Jewish displaced persons camp and the home for Catholic expellees.

The many migrations depicted here make it a perfect place to discuss integration. That’s a big topic today in Germany, which in 2015 saw the influx of more than one million refugees, mostly from war-torn countries in the Middle East and Africa. “It’s about starting a new life and having the power and to keep going despite what has happened—the power to go ahead and to try to not to despair,” says Krafft.

The Badehaus association also works with Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich to offer advanced training courses for teachers on Jewish history, Nazi history, and the history of the expellees.

Krafft, who chairs Citizens for the Badehaus Waldram-Föhrenwald, runs the organization with her deputies, Jonathan Coenen and Emanuel Rüff. The Badehaus association also works cooperatively with educational institutions and individuals involved in teaching history.

It runs a monthly event series, Encounters in the Badehaus (Begegnungen im Badehaus), and in 2021 it published its first book, LifePictures (LebensBilder), produced a film, “Of Time and Hope” (Von Zeit und Hoffnung), and created an app with audio guides and outdoor tours.

All projects are overseen by volunteers, and the association currently has 540 members. In its year of operation before coronavirus pandemic, the Badehaus counted some 8,000 visitors. 

“We have a team of teachers and museum educators who are working with pupils, establishing workshops and guided tours,” says Coenen, 25, co-deputy director. Coenen got started as a volunteer, interviewing witnesses and indexing the topics they discussed. The museum also offers internships to high school graduates and college students. “The experience of three generations working together attracted me and kept me in the Badehaus,” he says. 

In fact, the organization has been remarkably successful in attracting young people as volunteers. “That’s the idea,” says Krafft: “to involve the next generation right from the beginning in this project… and give them responsibility. So the next generation can decide with us about the future of remembrance.” 

Now, instead of running away from the past, the town is actively facing history and ensuring that it not be forgotten. And in the process, they have made connections with eyewitnesses.

It’s arguably the Badehaus association’s most important accomplishment. 

The Badehaus "gave me, my family, and the other ‘children’ of Föhrenwald a way to interact with German citizens who are also struggling with the country’s Nazi past," says Shoshana Bellen, 75. 

Bellen, who lives in Nordiyah, Israel, became a contact point between the Badehaus project and Israelis who were born in the displaced persons camp. She is one of dozens of former Föhrenwald babies who contributed remembrances and memorabilia, and who returned to the site for the memorial’s opening in late 2018.

That day, she found herself standing in front of a photograph of her mother holding her as a baby. “I am looking at the picture and tearing up,” she recalls. “And next to me is a little old man, and he is tearing up, too. I saw that he was looking at a picture of himself standing next to his dad; he was four years old." 

Talking with young Germans during her visit, Bellen realized that “as much as we, the second generation [of survivors], need to come to terms with what our parents suffered, the second generation of the Germans have to do the same thing”—come to terms with their own family history. 

Says Krafft, “When our visitors… were looking for their names and for the picture of their parents and grandparents, it was such a moving moment. I was crying and laughing” at the same time.

At moments like this, “sometimes it feels like you can heal a little bit,” adds Krafft, who grew up in nearby Munich and came to Wolfratshausen about 25 years ago. She is a television journalist, working mainly for Bavarian Broadcasting (Bayerische Rundfunk), and she is well known as a documentary filmmaker. She and her husband have two children. 

“In these times of growing anti-Semitism and racism, the Bathhouse museum is a meeting and teaching place of special quality,” says historian Robbi Waks of Tel Aviv, who spent his early childhood in the Föhrenwald displaced persons camp. 

Helen Martin Block, who lives today in Connecticut, says her visit to the Badehaus site was “life changing.” 

“My beginnings in this displaced persons camp along with thousands like me are part of the fabric of an evolution after one of the most devastating times of history,” Block says. “The leaders and volunteers make the Badehaus a gathering place for knowledge, empathy, and growth.”

Starting to Remember

Back in 2003, when the town was about to mark its 1,000th anniversary, Krafft and a friend—the late Protestant minister Kirsten Jörgensen—set about looking for local Jewish history. “When you have no signs, no memorials, statues, how can you find out about this history?” she says. “We didn’t want to look at only the wonderful things in our [town’s past], all the famous sites and people. We wanted to add to the remembrance the Jewish history in our area. And so this search began.”

Among the things they learned was that a Jewish girls’ school had been founded there in 1926; it drew pupils from across Germany but was closed on the night of the November 1938 pogrom, known as Kristallnacht—“when all the Jews were thrown out of Wolfratshausen,” she says. “And this history was completely forgotten.”

The two uncovered this and other details of local Jewish history step by step.

“This was the very beginning,” says Krafft. “But the real project on the history of Föhrenwald began with the fight for the Badehaus, 10 years ago.”

Badehaus “mirrors so many different parts of German history from the late 1930s through the 1950s,” says historian Frevert, “and it is [Krafft’s] energy and perseverance that brought these aspects to light and keeps awareness of them alive.”

Funding remains a serious challenge. It took 1.84 million euros, mostly city and state monies, to renovate and turn the building into a multimedia museum. Currently, the site receives no institutional support, whether from the local, state, or federal government. Maintenance and operation are financed by admission and membership fees, donations, and contributions. The volunteers apply for subsidies to help pay for special exhibitions and projects.

Aside from fundraising, there is still the challenge of encouraging people to care. “Some say ‘Ah, why do we have to care about that? It was such long time ago, let the past rest,’” says Frevert. 

“Each person who is participating in these initiatives encounters these obstacles in their own family or neighborhood or the local community where they live,” notes Krafft, “because while some politicians or citizens are enthusiastic, others fear that it might draw negative attention to the locality, spoiling the image of Wolfratshausen as a nice place near Munich where everyone is happy. So the need to persuade, convince, educate, and enlighten even in the close vicinity of the Badehaus is always there.”

Meanwhile, the work for the Badehaus Place of Remembrance volunteers is never done; they keep on collecting testimonies and reaching out to share this past, and to apply its lessons to the present. 

“There will be a time when everyone who is part of this history, who participated in and experienced it, will be gone,” says Frevert. “We do have all these testimonies in writing and video, so there are voices and faces,” she says. “At the same time … architectural structures really matter, in order to say: This is here where it happened. You are walking on the same ground. That is the same place.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2022