The research and public history project “Davos and National Socialism” investigates the medical, ideological, and institutional connections between Nazi actors and local, cantonal, and Swiss federal authorities. The project's findings will be published in book form.
In 1933, Davos became the principal centre of National Socialism in Switzerland. The town not only hosted the national leadership of the Swiss branch of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), together with several of its affiliated organisations and a German secondary school that followed Nazi educational curricula. The renowned international health resort was also home to two major tuberculosis sanatoria owned by private German foundations: the Deutsche Heilstätte Davos-Wolfgang, which operated a branch in Agra near Lugano, and the Deutsche Kriegerkurhaus.
After 1933, these institutions were systematically integrated into Nazi public health policies. As a result, their role changed fundamentally: from medical facilities, they became institutions of coercion and propaganda serving the goals of Nazi racial hygiene and the fight against perceived «social and biological threats».
This raises a number of important questions: to what extent, and with what consequences, did Davos, Agra, and Arosa, where the Nazi state was still able to open a children's sanatorium in 1941, become sites connected to the Nazi «euthanasia» programme? What did the authorities know? Who were the victims and what became of them, including after the end of the Second World War? Particular attention is paid to the transfer, after 1945, of between 200 and 250 former sanatorium patients from Davos to the canton of Valais, where they were relocated to the pulmonary sanatorium in Finhaut near Martigny.
