Thalerhof internment camp


Thalerhof was a concentration camp created by the Austro-Hungarian authorities active from 1914 to 1917, in a valley in foothills of the Alps, near Graz, the capital city of the province of Styria.

Overview

During World War I, Austro-Hungarian authorities imprisoned leaders and activists of the Russophile movement. Many members of the Carpatho-Rusyn, Lemko, and Galician populations in the eastern regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were also sent to the camp due to concerns that they might be sympathetic to the Russian Empire. This was seen as a liability the Austro-Hungarian authorities did not want to risk during the war.
Between 1924 and 1932, four issues of the Thalerhof Almanac were published in Lviv, documenting the number of prisoners and deaths, including official killings of peaceful Russophiles in the camp. Out of 5,500,158 inhabitants of Eastern Galicia in 1914, 2,114,792 were native speakers of Polish, and 3,385,366 were native speakers of Ruthenian. In the book "Habsburg national politics during the First World War", authors D.A. Akhremenko, chairman of a public organization called Historical Consciousness, and K.V. Shevchenko, a professor at Belarusian State University, state that Thalerhof held a total of 10,000 "Galician Russians", about 2,000 Rusyns, and about 200-250 students placed in the camp on charges of sympathy for the Russian Empire, and books of Grigory Skovoroda, Taras Shevchenko, Pushkin, Tolstoy and others. In total over twenty thousand 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. On 9 November 1914 an official report of Fieldmarshal Schleer said there were 5,700 Carpatho-Rusyns, Lemkos, and Ukrainians in Talerhof. In the winter of 1914–1915, a third of the roughly 7,000 internees died of typhus. The camp was closed by Emperor Charles I of Austria, 6 months into his reign.
In the first eighteen months of its existence, three thousand prisoners of Thalerhof died, including the Orthodox saint Maxim Sandovich, who was martyred here.
From 1945 to 1955 the site was used as an airbase by the RAF, and known, as RAF Station Thalerhof before being transferred back to the Austrian Government. Graz Airport currently occupies the former site of the camp.
The barracks were demolished in 1936. The corpses of 1,767 internees were then exhumed and reburied in a mass grave at Feldkirchen bei Graz.

People interned in Thalerhof