While most abandoned buildings looks like they're haunted, they're really just the derelict remains of mansion that a family struggled to sell or the shell of an old warehouse. But the history behind Beelitz-Heilstätten Hospital is actually as creepy as it looks.
Built as a tuberculosis sanatorium, this enormous hospital complex stands 30 miles southwest of Berlin. It was used to treat Nazis during World War II and the Soviet Army up until the 1990s. This is also where a young Adolf Hitler recovered after being wounded in World War I.
The Berlin Workers' Health Insurance Corporation designed this 60-building hospital complex. In 1898 it opened as a sanatorium to treat patients suffering from lung diseases.
During World War I it served as a military field hospital of the Imperial German Army. It was in late 1916 that Adolf Hitler was admitted to Beelitz-Heilstätten after being wounded in the leg at the Battle of the Somme. It was used once again as a field hospital to treat wounded Nazis during World War II.
In 1945, Red Army forces occupied Beelitz-Heilstätten, and the complex remained a Soviet military hospital until 1994, several years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The most infamous patient during this time was probably Erich Honecker, the head of the defunct East German government, who was treated for liver cancer in the early 1990s.
After the Soviets withdrew from Germany, several attempts were made to privatize the enormous hospital. According to Atlas Obscura, a small sections of the complex are still used for neurological rehabilitation and Parkinson's research, but most the sprawling complex has been abandoned.
Lately Beelitz-Heilstätten has been used as a film set for movies like The Pianist in 2002, the 2008 Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie, and the music video for Rammstein's "Mein Herz Brennt."
In early September 2015, a nearly 70-foot-tall elevated platform called Baum und Zeit—which translates as "Tree and Time"—opened to make the abandoned hospital complex more accessible to visitors. The platform runs above the grounds of Beelitz-Heilstätten for nearly 700 feet. Visitors can also go on guided tours inside of some of the buildings with go2know.
To get there, take regional train line 7 (Berlin – Dessau) to the Beelitz-Heilstätten station. The complex is on both sides of the train station.
Lyndsey Matthews is the Destination News Editor for AFAR; previously she was a Lifestyle Editor across all of Hearst Digital Media's brands, and a digital editor at Martha Stewart Weddings and Travel + Leisure.
