Faba bean, being a combine harvested grain legume with about 30% of seed protein content, is a traditional yet underused domestic source of N and protein. With current advances in breeding for improved winter hardiness and with climate change, we expect an expansion of autumn-sown winter beans beyond UK and France into Germany. Here, we phenotyped N=189 pure line winter beans which represent the major part of German winter bean breeding germplasm and which trace back to one diverse winter bean population (‘Göttingen winter bean population’). Phenotyping was done for (1) reaction to frost after hardening (minus 16 to minus 19°C; ‘frost chamber’, juvenile potted plants), and for (2) physiological aspects of drought tolerance (traits such as drought-induced proline and glycine-betaine accumulation in leaves). In addition, a subset of lines (N=40) was phenotyped for reaction to drought as juvenile, potted plants in green-house. Heritabilities of traits varied between 0.61 < h² < 0.93 for reaction to frost, 0.62 < h² < 0.89 for physiological traits and 0.37 < h² < 0.68 for reactions to drought in green-house. The material was genotyped with 1147 AFLP and 175 SNP markers (MAF>5%), the majority of which are mapped. Association analyses (Tassel 3.0.169, MLM, K-matrix) yielded N=9 (7 AFLP and 2 SNP) putative QTL for frost tolerance and N=5 putative QTL for drought tolerance. A frost trait seems most promising for an immediate marker-assisted improvement: ‘maintenance vs. loss of leaf color and leaf turgor after frost‘, with seven QTL explaining singly from 9% down to 6% and together explaining 28% of the phenotypic variance. Analysis is ongoing; we will report on extent of marker-marker LD, phenotypic and genotypic correlations between traits, and deliberate on data’s impact on breeding of winter faba bean.