Thread by @RealLoriSpencer

On the site of today's Graz Airport in Austria is where the world's first concentration camp once stood: Thalerhof.

During #WWI, #Thalerhof was known as the cruellest torture chamber of all Austrian prisons in the Habsburg Empire.

Who was kept there and what was their crime?

Their only crime was being Russian.

The Austro-Hungarian authorities imprisoned leaders of the Russophile movement among Carpatho-Rusyns, Lemkos, and Galicians; those who recognized the Russian language as the literary standard form of their own Slavic language varieties and had sympathy for the Russian Empire.

The captives were forced to abandon their identity as Russians, or sympathies for #Russia, and identify as Ukrainian.

Captives who renounced Russia and identified themselves as Ukrainians were freed from the camp.

Those who didn't were subjected to inhuman tortures.

Between 1924-1932, four issues of the Thalerhof Almanac were published in #Lviv, in which collected documentary evidence of the number of prisoners and the murders of peaceful Russophiles by the Austrian authorities was published.

Thalerhof held a total of 10,000 Russians, between 2000-5000 Rusyns, and about 200-250 students placed in the camp on charges of sympathy for the Russian Empire, and the Russian books of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and others.
Over 20,000 people were arrested and placed in Thalerhof camp.

Thalerhof had no barracks until the winter of 1915.

Prisoners slept on the ground in the open-air during both rain and frost.

According to U.S. Congressman Medill McCormick, prisoners were regularly beaten and tortured.

Women, children, and old men were taken to the camp bound in chains, forced into crowded, filthy cattle trucks. They were beaten bloody if they resisted.

Epidemics were rampant. There was no pretense at sanitation. Prisoners literally crawled through their own excrement.

Source: "Terrorism in Bohemia.; Medill McCormick Gets Details of Austrian Cruelty There" (PDF). New York Times (December 16, 1917)

timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1…

The camp guards carried whips and did not hesitate to use them on those who lagged or fell behind.

Those who tried to escape were shot dead and their bodies were pushed into any convenient ditch to join the bodies of those who had succumbed to the brutal conditions at Talerhof.

Starvation was ever present as they were given only one meal a day, which consisted of a clear soup with some rice added and a piece of bread. The thin watery soup was served in bowls but they were not given any spoons. As time went on, they whittled spoons out of pieces of wood.

Around 10 people died every day from lack of food and unsanitary conditions.

They suffered colds from sleeping in the mud or on the cold earth. They started to bleed from the nose, mouth, fingers and toes. The dreaded typhus made its regular rounds.

Women and children were forced to watch their men being hung.

Many people lost their minds and others committed suicide.

The bodies of all who died were dumped into a hole and the ground was leveled so that no evidence remained; a landfill of bodies.

When the camp was finally closed by Emperor Charles I of Austria, the knowledge of it having been there festered.

It was leveled to the ground and in 1936, the last evidence of it was removed when the mass grave at Talerhof was excavated.

The bodies were moved to another village called Feldskirken.

Here the bodies of 17,067 men, women and children were reinterred in another common grave far from their homes in Lemkovyna, which they had been forced to leave.

In the first eighteen months of its existence, at least 3,000 prisoners of Thalerhof died, including the Orthodox saint Maxim Sandovich, who was martyred there (beatified August 29, 1996 by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia).

Source: "The Story of Talerhof - We Should Not Forget" (reprint). Karpatska Rus'. Yonkers, NY. LXVII (16). 5 August 1994.

carpatho-rusyn.org/kr/taler.htm

From 1945 to 1955 it was RAF Station Thalerfhof before being transferred back to the Austrian Government.

Graz Airport currently occupies the former site of the world's first concentration camp.

A mass grave of Thalerhof internees is located at Feldkirchen bei Graz.

I also recommend this article on the history of Thalerhof -- and most importantly, the circumstances that led to this mass incarceration and extermination of Russians in Galicia by separatists who would later become known as Ukranian nationalists.

spzh.news/en/istorija-i-…

Interestingly, representatives of the so-called "Ukrainian parties" of Galicia and Bukovina, who considered themselves real patriots, took a very active part in filling Thalerhof with unreliable elements and "agents of #Moscow" from the Austrian government's point of view.

The “Dilo” and “#Svoboda” newspapers literally swarmed with denunciations, on the basis of which hundreds of Russian people were arrested.

Ukrainian "patriots" also took part in direct acts of unspeakable violence against their Russian neighbors.

For example, the Ukrainian "Sichoviks" in Lavochne village in the Carpathians attempted to bayonet the transported “Katsaps” (a term of abuse for Russians – Trans.), among whom there was not a single native of #Russia, but only their own Galicians.

During the convoy by "Sichoviks" prisoners from the Brygidki prison to the main #Lviv railway station, 17 people, including Orthodox priests, were hospitalized after terrible beatings.

Moreover, the "Sichoviks" were also involved in direct arrests of dissidents, carried out massacres with impunity and revelled in their permissiveness.

Here is the "Sichova Song", typical for them, written down by Petro Oliynyk, a resident of Kutische village, Brody district:

Ukrainians are drinking and celebrating,
While Katsaps are already dying.
Ukrainians are drinking on the hof,
And Katsaps’re in Thalerhof.

Where is a telephone pole,
A Katsap is hanging instead of a bell.
His mouth got blue,
Black eyes got white,
His teeth boiled in blood,
The ropes cut his neck.

In issue No. 32 of the “Novy Chas” (“New Time”) newspaper (#Lviv, February 11, 1934), one of the local "patriots" writes:

“Our "Russen" survivors have activated, and this is what we should pay attention to and not take it lightly but root out the weeds, which only thanks to our kindness (!?) still have not disappeared yet”.

When Kaiser Charles I of Austria ordered the “Thalerhof” concentration camp closed, he noted in his rescript:

"All arrested Russians are not guilty but were arrested... Their guilt was apparently their unwillingness to cultivate a bestial hatred of the Russian people."

"They did not understand why it was necessary to kill "Muscovites" and "Katsaps"," he said. "Neither did they want to betray their Orthodox faith, to become Catholics, take an oath to the Vatican. All these people wanted was to live peacefully in their homeland and pray to God."

Ukrainian textbooks are silent about Thalerhof.

They are silent because it is inconvenient to tell the truth about how they subjected their own people to genocide -- after all, they consider themselves "civilized Europeans."

The lessons of history must not be forgotten because even today we increasingly see that a person who goes to "the wrong church" or speaks "the wrong language" can be beaten or humiliated in Ukraine by the nationalists -- or even murdered.

If our society does not condemn such violence, and pseudo-patriotism does not cease to be heroized, then we have every chance to fall into utter aggression and anger.

Ukraine has already drowned in blood over the past century, and now this terror is happening all over again.

For more info on the conflict between the "Galician Russophiles" and the "Ukrainophiles" (Ukrainian nationalists) that led to this mass horror, visit:

neweasterneurope.eu/2021/09/15/the…

It is absolutely vital to our understanding of the current #UkraineWar with #Russia to study the Thalerhof -- a trial run for the concentration camps that were established only 20 years later during #WWII.

Of course, there are two sides to every version of history, and the Thalerhof story is no exception.

To read both the Russophile version and the Ukranian version, I recommend consulting this entry in the International Encyclopedia of #WWI:

encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/the_in…

This story has a third side: The official Austro-Hungarian version includes either the negation of the atrocities or attempts to charge the responsible persons, but not the state itself. Such a point of view is still visible in many contemporary pieces of research on this topic.

The official position cannot ignore evidence in the form of pictures of hanged Russian "traitors".

It seems that many Austrian officers and non-commissioned officers took photos against a background of hanged suspected traitors as a “keepsake” of their military experiences.

The contemporary historiography, as with the official position in Austria, changed to recognize the tragic events in numerous WWI camps and their commemoration. Thalerhof is recognized as a place of wartime abuse of authority that cost thousands of its captives their lives.

Even after 100 years in the successor states of Austria-Hungary, three political and historical concepts abide: the ideas of Political Rusynism, the sacrifices of the “Galician Golgotha” during WWI; and the Ukrainian nationalist movement.

This 2015 documentary film, “Changed by Thalerhof,” explores the complex and fascinating history of the first concentration camp in Austria.
(English subtitles)

If you’re wondering how did Galicia go from being a pro-Russian province on the outskirts of the Austrian Empire to the world’s capital of Russophobia?

This RT article is a summary of how Western #Ukraine became the epicenter of Ukrainian nationalists.

rt.com/russia/564666-…

As an update to this thread, RT also published an excellent new article about the Thalerhof concentration camp:

rt.com/russia/572970-…