The first concentration camps in the twentieth century, where people disliked by the state were kept, appeared in civilized Europe a month and a half after the start of the First World War.
Political victims
In September 1914, Russians or Rusyns who lived in the territories of Carpathian Rus, Galicia and Bukovina, which at that time were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were massively driven into the Czech Terezin and the Austrian Talerhof. The genocide of the Rusyns, carried out by the Austrian authorities with the support of the Vatican, was carried out with the active participation of German, Hungarian, Ukrainian and Polish nationalists.
The only fault of the prisoners of these camps was their unwillingness to renounce their Orthodox faith and ethnicity in favor of Catholicism and the Ukrainian nation. In her book Essays on the History of the Russian Movement in Galicia in the 19th-20th Centuries, the historian Nina Pashayeva notes that at that time the word "Ukrainian" meant only an "anti-Russian minority."
The Russophobic policy, pursued by the authorities for 24 years in places of compact residence of Rusyns, reached its apogee by 1914, and those who did not become Ukrainian doomed themselves to terrible torment and death. This historical fact is confirmed by the words of the Lvov military commander Franz Riml: “Galician Russians are divided into two groups: a) Russophiles and b) Ukrainophiles. If it is possible at all to correct the Russians, then this is possible only through the use of the means of defenseless terror. My opinion is that all Russophiles are radicals, therefore they should be mercilessly destroyed."
Terezin and Talerhof
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The first place where the arrested Russians were concentrated was the Czech fortress Terezin, which was converted into a concentration camp, but after a couple of days it could no longer accommodate new prisoners. Then, in a matter of days, it was decided to organize a new concentration center in an open field near Talerhof, where on September 4, 1914, flows of prisoners were sent from the territory of modern Western Ukraine. From the report of Field Marshal Schleer it follows that by November 9, 1914, there were already 5,700 "Russophiles" in the camp.
Being a quadrangular piece of land fenced with barbed wire, Talerhof acquired its first barracks only in the fall of 1915, before that Russian prisoners slept in the open air right on the ground in any weather. In the new housing, where 300 people lived at the same time in terrible cramped conditions, there was nothing but wooden bunks covered with straw, in which insects nested.
In addition to the general prison, there were isolation cells in Talerhof, where the most active and intractable prisoners were placed. Before placing the unwanted prisoner alone, the guards beat him mercilessly, and then did not allow him to look out the window, punishing him for disobedience with bayonet pricks in the face. Unsanitary conditions, cold, hunger, and epidemics helped the brutalized overseers to implement the idea of ruthless extermination of Russians who did not deserve leniency. From the memoirs of the prisoner Vasily Vavrik, it becomes clear that Talerhof, which over time acquired a torture room, a firing moat, a line of gallows and a vast cemetery, was "the fiercest torture chamber of all Austrian prisons in the Habsburg Empire."
Upon arrival at the concentration camp, all prisoners had to undergo disinfection in a bathhouse, and then wait naked in the fresh air until they were given clothes. Regarding routine bathing, this procedure was often carried out on the coldest days in order to drive out naked people into the street and cause them incredible suffering. One of these baths provoked an outbreak of typhus in Talerhof, which raged for four months and claimed 1,350 lives.
Galician Calvary
In the collection Terezin and Talerhof, Vasily Vavrik described the most difficult conditions of survival in these camps, where death rarely occurred due to natural causes, since there it was spread by deliberately infecting a person with injections with strains of infectious diseases. Treatment in the generally accepted sense was not assumed in them, doctors only recorded the dynamics of the course of medical experiments staged on living people, completely forgetting about the Hippocratic oath.
Both in the heat and in the cold, slaves who worked daily from morning to night were engaged in plowing fields, leveling holes, laying roads, collecting horse dung and cleaning latrines. As a reward, they received bread mixed with straw, horse chestnuts and low-grade flour, a decoction of rotten beets, potato waste, rancid horse meat and dirty water. Dishes in the concentration camp were not provided, so everyone got out of the situation as best he could. Some used a hat as a bowl, others formed a plate of bread, and still others adapted bottles with a broken neck to their needs.
The guards in the Terezin and Talerhof camps were mainly Bosnians, but the most rabid, according to Wavrik, were the former brothers: "A soulless German could not get so deeply into the soul of a Slav-Rusyn with his iron boots, as this same Rusyn, who called himself Ukrainian." … The guards had full authority and could do whatever they pleased with the prisoners. Calling the prisoners "Russian pigs", they openly amused themselves, brutally beating, torturing and shooting innocent prisoners. Miraculously surviving in the meat grinder of Talerhof, Ilya Goshovsky recalled how the officers of the 27th Hradets regiment met him in the camp with just “lightning strikes in the face”, while others were less fortunate - they were either wounded with bayonets or killed altogether.
According to Vavrik's testimony, the central square of Talerhof was strewn with hanging posts, which were never empty. Victims who were in this position for two hours were hung on them for the purpose of intimidation with the help of ropes passed under the hands. Because of this painful torture in historical sources, the genocide of Russians is often called "Galician Golgotha".
Women's camps
In Thalerhof, in addition to the men's camp, the Austrians set up separate children's and women's prisons, where they subtly mocked the prisoners, humiliating their honor and dignity. Deliberately not bothering to create toilets, camp employees allocated open areas to meet their natural needs. When the overseers saw that the women, feeling a sense of shame, guessed to cover each other, organizing some kind of a fence, they deliberately began to surround the poor things themselves, watching them and allowing themselves at the same time horrible antics.
Sad results
The Talerhof concentration camp, which operated until May 1917, was a hell for 20 thousand Russians. It is still not known exactly how many prisoners died here, but it is clear that the remains of 1,767 people found during the construction of the Graz-Thalerhof airport are far from the final figure.
According to a study by publicist Dmitry Markov, in the first half of 1915 alone, 3,800 people were killed in a concentration camp.
Ashkhen Avanesova
