Servatius Hospital

The foundation before 1945

The house that carried the Servatius name was one of Augsburg’s oldest charitable institutions. A leper hospital without a patron saint is first recorded in 1264, and in 1288 Hartmann Langenmantel I endowed a house for eight sick people; from the fourteenth century the city appointed its administrators. After leprosy receded it sheltered women with scorbutic illness, was run jointly by the two confessions from 1649, and in 1738 was combined with the St Sebastian hospital into a house for incurable cases.

By the twentieth century the foundation ran a home for older people, and the 1947 report describes the sisters of the St Vincent convent, who had cared for its residents, still helping the displaced-persons hospital. That report tells the origin story differently, crediting a gift of 125 gold pounds and a rebuilding by a bishop named Servatius; the city lexicon’s version is the documented one. The endowment survives as the Paritätische St. Servatiusstiftung.

Inside the hospital

The hospital started immediately after the German capitulation. With American army approval a group of foreigners organised a hospital for foreigners, run separately from German institutions, because, as a May 1947 report put it, more than 25,000 homeless displaced people had no settled medical care. Work began in June 1945 and the building was repaired and then extended. That report identifies the institution as DP Hospital No. 1753 B, standing a short walk west of Hochfeld’s Baltic camp, with rooms for two to four patients and six in the largest.

Ten departments had grown up by 1947: internal and infectious diseases, surgery, a tuberculosis dispensary, radiology, skin and venereal medicine, gynaecology, children’s care, eye treatment, a dental room and a newly founded dental surgery department. Together they held 406 patients. Separate kitchens supplied ordinary and prescribed diets, and a laboratory, a pharmacy and four ambulances supported the wards.

The two largest departments were internal and infectious diseases, with more than 120 beds under a former dean of the Kaunas medical faculty, and surgery, with 80 beds, where more than 800 major operations had been carried out and the work had been commended by American army and UNRRA offices. Direction was shared rather than held by one person.

Screening for tuberculosis

Tuberculosis work gave the hospital its widest reach. A lung-disease department and a tuberculosis dispensary were organised in July 1945 and grew to 65 beds before the lung department moved elsewhere. Its head reported some 40,000 screenings, which found about 600 displaced people with active or chronic tuberculosis; they were taken into the dispensary or sent on to the sanatoria at Gauting or Neuburg. He said every displaced person in Augsburg had been examined and that the Swiss Red Cross had confirmed it. The hospital also taught, hosting a course in tropical diseases for displaced doctors of several nationalities given by a professor from Tübingen.

Treatment across a wider region

By May 1947 the hospital reckoned it served close to 40,000 displaced people living between Ulm, Dillingen, Schongau and Augsburg. Fifteen to twenty patients arrived on a typical day, and 4,161 people had been treated during 1946. A hospital record may therefore mark a stage of care rather than a change of home.

Ukrainians among the patients

The Ukrainian returns count 69 people in May 1947 and 72 in December. They establish a Ukrainian presence within a wider international institution; they do not identify the nationality of every patient or give the hospital’s total occupancy.

A Ukrainian paper published at Somme-Kaserne in October 1946 carried an appeal from an UNRRA welfare officer to the Augsburg scouts: about forty Ukrainians were in the DP hospital and needed slippers, which could be made from old material, and toys for the children, to be handed in at the Ukrainian social welfare office. The appeal does not name the hospital, but it shows Ukrainian patients supplied through their own community as well as by the institution.

Where it stood and how long it worked

A coroner’s document of 1949 stamped “DP 1753 B Hospital Servatius Stift Augsburg” gives the address as Lindauer Straße 32 and records a death there on 13 April 1949, in a case whose family was living in the Landsberg camp. The hospital was still working under the same number nearly four years after it opened. The foundation’s present care home is recorded at Windprechtstraße 32.

The later site

Municipal elder care continued the Servatius name long after the displaced-persons period. In October 2018 a replacement care centre opened a few metres from the previous location. That modern institution belongs to the site’s later history; it is not the building shown in the 1947 hospital photograph.