Thalerhof internment camp
The Thalerhof internment camp was an internment camp set up by the authorities of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy near Graz , which existed between September 4, 1914 and May 10, 1917 during the First World War . Officially it was called the kk internee camp . Here were Ruthenian ( Ukrainian ) inhabitants of Galicia and Bukovina deported, the perceived or real opponents to the war Russia sympathized.
Overview
In the Thalerhof camp near Feldkirchen south of Graz, a total of around 30,000 people from Eastern Europe (mainly Ukrainians, then known as "Ruthenians") were interned between 1914 and 1917, who were suspected of being "friendly to the Russians" by the Austro-Hungarian army. From 1917 to 1918 around 5,000 Russian prisoners of war were housed in the Thalerhof camp. In the winter of 1914/15 1380, a total of 1767 people, died there, primarily from cholera and typhus epidemics . The dead were buried in the area of the camp. During the construction of Graz Airport in 1936, their bones were reburied in a charnel house , an ossuary , at the Feldkirchen cemetery, the Graz Jewish cemetery or the Graz central cemetery. It was discussed whether this actually happened for all burials or whether there were still graves under the airport facilities, a scientific study in 2008 showed that this can be ruled out with certainty. This investigation, carried out on behalf of the Ministry of Defense, found a number of 2093 dead camp inmates buried.
history
The first group of kidnapped Galician Russophiles was admitted to Thalerhof on September 4, 1914. Until the winter of 1914/15 there were no barracks in Thalerhof. The people lay under the open sky, even in rain and snow. The internees were tortured and beaten. In an official report from November 9, 1914, it was stated that the camp contained about 5700 inmates at that time, including about 2000 Lemken . It was the largest of its kind, and around 890 Ruthenians were interned in Theresienstadt at the time.
In total, no less than 20,000 Pro-Russian Galicians and Bukovinians passed through the Thalerhof internment camp in the almost three years of its existence. Around 3,000 of them died in the first year and a half alone.
The camp was May 1917 on the orders of the last emperor I. Karl closed. The barracks stood until 1936 when they were finally demolished. 1767 corpses were exhumed and buried in a mass grave in the nearby village of Feldkirchen. The site of the former internment camp is now part of Graz Airport .
Conditions in the warehouse
Death in the Thalerhof internment camp rarely had natural causes. The disastrous hygienic conditions soon led to the outbreak of epidemics such as cholera and typhus . In the first winter of the war in 1914/15 alone, a third of the 7,000 prisoners died of typhus . There was a complete lack of any kind of medical care for the internees. The food was very bad and had hardly any nutritional value. Due to the lack of dishes, the inmates had to use their clothes like hats to fill up with soup-like liquid, and there was a great crowd. The violence of the guards against the inmates played a major role. To intimidate, corpses covered in blood were often lying in front of the entrances to the barracks, and badly battered people were often hung on stakes.
reception
In Austria, the camp was forgotten, research did not deal with it. An extradition request by the victorious powers for the commandant of the camp was not complied with. The claim that Thalerhof will remain an "eternal monument of shame for this state" turned out to be false.
In the Polish Galicia, on the other hand, a “Thalerhof Committee” organized congresses between 1919 and 1939, erected monuments and published memorial literature on the “Galician Golgotha ” Thalerhof. With the invasion of the Soviets in 1939 , the committee was banned. In Ukrainian domestic politics, however, Thalerhof has been increasingly instrumentalized in recent years and it has often found its way into political discussions. In October 2004 the Ukrainian parliament unanimously passed a resolution calling for the memory of Thalerhof. The pro-Russian forces in Ukraine emphasize that in Thalerhof “people died for their traditions, their Russian and their Orthodox faith, betrayed by Ukrainian nationalists and members of the Greek Catholic Church”.
The dialect poet Hans Kloepfer created a memorial to the Russian prisoners of war, who lived mainly in the Thalerhof camp and were used as forced laborers in the agriculture of western Styria during the First World War , with the poem “Da Ruß”. A statue by the sculptor Carl Hermann in St. Katharina in der Wiel shows this figure.
On December 11, 2012, 20 metal plaques with the names of 1,767 dead from the camp were ceremonially unveiled in the presence of representatives of former camp residents.
literature
- Georg Hoffmann, Nicole-Melanie Goll, Philipp Lesiak: Thalerhof 1914–1936. The story of a forgotten camp and its victims. In the series: Central European Studies. Series of publications by the Faculty of Central European Studies at the Andrássy Gyula German-speaking University of Budapest . ZDB ID 2381822-0 . Volume 4. Gabriele Schäfer Verlag, Herne 2010. ISBN 978-3-933337-76-4 .
Web links
- Died in the Thalerhof austria-forum camp with reference to the unveiling of the name plaques (accessed March 10, 2013)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Helmut Bast: Where planes roll over graves. Kleine Zeitung , news from Graz and the surrounding area, December 10, 2007.
- ↑ a b No more graves under Graz Airport. Daily newspaper Kleine Zeitung , news from Graz and the surrounding area. April 30, 2008.
- ↑ Torn from oblivion. In: Feldkirchner Nachrichten. Bulletin of the Mayor of the Marktgemeinde Feldkirchen, volume March 1, 2008, pp. 9-10.
- ↑ Research project on the internment cemetery Graz-Thalerhof on behalf of the BMLVS .
- ↑ a b I.R. Vavrik: Terezín and Talerhof. Publishing house of Archpriest RN Samelo, New York, 1966.
- ^ Terrorism in Bohemia .; Medill McCormick Gets Details of Austrian Cruelty There . New York Times (December 16, 1917).
- ↑ a b Bogdan Horbal Talerhof ( Memento from October 7, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Yearbooks for the History of Eastern Europe. New series, 1 (1953), p. 546.
- ↑ a b Hans Hautmann : The crimes of the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War and their failure to cope with after 1918. ( Memento from January 23, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ A description of the Theresienstadt and Thalerhof camps
- ↑ Karl Kraus : The last days of mankind. Stage version by the author. Eckart Früh (Ed.), Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-518-22091-8 , p. 252.
- ↑ a b The displaced camp. In: Falter 47/2005 from November 23, 2005 (full access subject to charge).
- ↑ Hans Kloepfer: In the year run. , first stanza: "A gfangana soot, a great mightana Monn, / Ban Zenz in da Wial kriagg an wehtandn Zohn; / And he jams and haust, and da Dokta so far, / and Oarbeit so gnedi and koans hot just time, / that dan obi kunnt füahrn except for Eibiswold no / - wall alloan derft a net, must be a Wochta with. "
- ↑ Der Russ Auf: Familia Austria - Austrian Society for Genealogy and History (original text and translation into standard German)