The German Lifesaving Society (DLRG) was founded on October 19, 1913 in Leipzig following an accident in Binz on the island of Rügen the year before. In Hesse, rescue teams had already been helping people in distress in the water since 1909 following a lock accident in Offenbach.

In 1925, the first Wiesbaden group was founded in the Augusta-Victoria-Bad and four years later, Wiesbaden's first permanent lifeguard station was built on the Schiersteiner Hafenspitze, a wooden house made of beams and boards. In 1941, the second Wiesbaden DLRG group was set up in Biebrich. The Hesse-Nassau-Waldeck regional association was founded in Marburg in 1930. Although the DLRG remained independent after 1933, it was renamed the "Deutsche Lebens-Rettungs-Gemeinschaft" (German Lifesaving Association). The division into four occupation zones made it considerably more difficult to rebuild the DLRG after 1945.

First, on October 27, 1946, the regional associations of Hesse and Hesse-Nassau merged to form the regional association of Greater Hesse. On May 31 and June 1, 1947, the founding meeting and the merger into the "DLRG working group for the united zones" finally took place in Wiesbaden. At the same time, it was decided to use the old name "Deutsche Lebens-Rettungs-Gesellschaft" (German Lifesaving Association) again, and beginners' swimming was also included in the statutes. This basic training is still at the forefront of DLRG work today.

In 1930, the DLRG in Hesse had around 800 members, in 2014 there were 56,649, 2,775 of which were in Wiesbaden, the current headquarters of the DLRG Landesverband Hessen.