The Former Residence Becomes a Hospital

Used as a food warehouse for the American and British children’s aid programme, the Seed Department of the Austrian Agriculture Office and, later, an exhibition area of the Ethnological Museum—the ground floor rooms of the Neue Burg near the Burggarten have had an eventful history. After being converted into a reserve field hospital in the Second World War, a suite of rooms originally intended for the imperial family to live in became home to the Orthopaedic Hospital in March 1945. For more than ten years, part of the Neue Burg was used by the nuns of the Missionary Sisters Servants of the Holy Spirit as a temporary location for a hospital, after their traditional home on Gassergasse in the Fifth District suffered a direct hit in an air raid. A photo album that the nuns produced to mark their departure from the Hofburg in 1956 shows the difficult circumstances under which the hospital had to function in the completely unsuitable rooms of the Hofburg.