The first concentration camp of Europe was created for the Russians. One hundred years of unknown genocide

13
Now western areas (historical Galicia region) are considered the most anti-Russian in Ukraine. History has developed so that it was Zapadenshchina that in the first half of the 1940th century turned into a stronghold of Ukrainian radical nationalism, and in the 1950s and XNUMXs, anti-Soviet armed groups of Ukrainian nationalists acted here. But it was not always so. Modern political moods in the west of Ukraine are rooted in a hundred years ago and are associated not so much with the primordial preferences of the region’s inhabitants, but with the purposeful policies of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

In the middle of the XIX century, on the wave of the European revolutionary upsurge, a national revival began in the Slavic lands of the Austrian Empire. Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Croats, Serbs and, of course, the Rusins ​​who inhabited the west of modern Ukraine remembered their Slavic affiliation, thought about their political situation in the empire ruled by the German and (to a lesser extent) Hungarian aristocracy.



The first concentration camp of Europe was created for the Russians. One hundred years of unknown genocide


Naturally, the "beacon" for the Slavs of Eastern Europe at that time was Russia. No, the Russian Empire as a state, a monarchy, most of the Slavic national figures of that time were cool or even openly hostile, especially since Russia was a member of the Sacred Union along with Austria-Hungary. But the Russian world, the Russian language and the Russian civilization were perceived by the Slavs of Eastern Europe as a cultural phenomenon, which should be guided and which was the only alternative to the Germanic world, in which the Slavs had a place only on the lowest levels of the hierarchy.

For obvious reasons, in Austria-Hungary were very afraid of Russian influence. Although Russian emperors in the 19th century often spoke in alliance with Vienna, Austrian political circles understood the danger of pan-Slavic sentiments in Eastern Europe and considered it necessary to do everything possible to protect "their" Slavs from the dangerous neighborhood and influence of the Russian Empire. So, back in 1848, when Russia helped Austria-Hungary cope with the Hungarian revolution, the Galician governor, Count Stadion von Warthausen, said that Galicians should forget about their Russian origin and develop their own culture as a separate people from Russia.

The situation became particularly tense at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, when Austria-Hungary turned into a reliable ally of Germany and a likely opponent of Russia in the upcoming conflict (and that a major European war sooner or later came, many prominent European politicians of that time did not doubt ).

At the turn of the century, Galicia (Galicia) caused the greatest fears of the Austro-Hungarian authorities at the turn of the century. This region was then considered a stronghold of Russian and Orthodox influence in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The local population identified themselves as “Ruski”, a significant part of the Ruthenian population professed Orthodox Christianity and sympathized with Russia. Naturally, this situation was very strained by the Austro-Hungarian authorities, who saw in the Ruthenians, especially those professing Orthodoxy, a potential “fifth column” of the Russian Empire in the event of a conflict between the two states.

From the end of the 19th century, Austria-Hungary began to invest significant forces and resources in the formation of a new, previously unseen political construct - “Ukrainians”. Professor Mikhail Hrushevsky played a key role in this process. A man whose youthful and young years were spent in Russia, where he graduated from Kiev University, in 1894, Grushevsky received an offer to head the newly created department of general history with a special overview of the history of Eastern European Slavs at Lviv University. Lviv was then part of Austria-Hungary. Around this time, Grushevsky began his work as an ideologist of the pro-Austrian “Ukrainians”.

In 1914, the First World War began, in which Austria-Hungary allied with Germany against the Russian Empire and the Entente countries. But the vaunted Austro-Hungarian army almost immediately suffered a series of serious defeats from the Russian troops, as a result of which the Russians occupied Eastern Galicia and Bukovina. Fearing the start of the anti-Austrian and pro-Russian uprising in Galicia, the Austro-Hungarian regime began mass political repression. As expected, Orthodox Ruthenians, who were considered to be an extremely unreliable part of the population, became their main targets.

The first Austro-Hungarian special services began to identify and detain activists of the Russophile movement. So, in September, 1914. 28-year-old Orthodox priest Maxim Sandovich was shot in the prison of the Polish city of Gorlice. Shortly before the start of the war, in 1912, Sandovich was already arrested by the Austrian authorities, because he allegedly measured the length of a bridge in order to transfer this information to Russian intelligence. But then the priest was lucky - the time was pre-war and such an absurd accusation did not support even the Austrian court. Two years later, Sandovich was again arrested, but this time the Austrians no longer spared the Orthodox priest, who did not hide his pro-Russian sympathies.

Following the arrests of political activists, detentions of any Orthodox Rusyns began. Thus, in Lviv alone, two thousand people were arrested by the Austrian authorities - Orthodox Rusyns, who were suspected of insecurity and that they could potentially cooperate with Russian intelligence. Since there were not enough prisons for keeping such a large number of prisoners in Lviv, as in other cities of Galicia, the Austrian authorities got out of a difficult situation quite peculiarly - they decided to create a network of concentration camps in Galicia.

Before the outbreak of the First World War, concentration camps were created only by European powers in the African colonies. There were no concentration camps in Europe. The British created the first concentration camps in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902, and in 1904 in neighboring Namibia, the German colonial administration also created concentration camps to accommodate members of the insurgent local Herero and Hottentot peoples. But at that time no one dared to create concentration camps in Europe - it was believed that such measures were simply unacceptable with regard to the white European population.



Austria-Hungary became the first European country where this “taboo” was broken - in 1914, in Europe, and not somewhere, but in the foothills of the Alps, the first concentration camp, Thalerhof, appeared. At first, it was a typical alpine field, fenced with barbed wire and guarded by armed soldiers. People lived in this fenced field in the open air, despite the bad weather conditions. Only in the winter of 1915, the first barracks were built in Talerhof.

Food in Talerhof was designed for the slow death of the inhabitants of the camp. The prisoners were fed “bread”, made from the lowest grades of flour mixed with straw, and some beets or potatoes were also supposed to be fed. As a result, most of the prisoners in the camp, who did not have rich relatives or acquaintances who were able to provide more or less tolerable living conditions for bribes, if the word “tolerable” applied to such a place, went hungry, many people simply died from exhaustion.

Judging by the memoirs of contemporaries, the concentration camp was almost worse than the notorious “death camps” created by the Nazis during the Second World War. For example, the priest John Mashchak, who visited Talerhof, wrote that eleven people were simply killed by excessive lice infestation. Lice have eaten people! In an enlightened Europe, at the beginning of the twentieth century!

Naturally, it was not only the lice that killed the prisoners of Talerhof. Dysentery, typhoid fever, and tuberculosis spread at a tremendous speed in a concentration camp. During the first six months of the camp, every fifth of its prisoners died. But not only diseases and hunger, as well as intolerable living conditions ruined the prisoners in Talerhof. Many died at the hands of concentration camp guards, who cruelly mocked their wards, tortured them, and sometimes simply killed for fun, after writing off that such and such was killed while trying to escape or attacking guards.

The Rusyn writer and historian Vasily Vavrik, who went through the horrors of imprisonment in Talerhof and managed not only to survive, but also live to see 1970, recalled:

Death in Talerhof rarely happened naturally: there it was inoculated with poison of infectious diseases. Talerhof triggered a violent death. There was no talk of any treatment for the perishing. Even the doctors were hostile towards internees.
.

According to Vavrik, the concentration camp in Talerhof was the worst prison of the Austrian Empire. Only executed by order of the Austro-Hungarian authorities in Talerhof was 3800 people, and the number of deaths from starvation, disease, beatings can only be guessed.



Who were they, prisoners of Talerhof? All the fault of these unfortunate people was only in their wrong "national and religious affiliation. In Talerhof, Orthodox Rusyns were brought in from Galicia and Transcarpathia, mainly representatives of the Ruthenian intelligentsia - priests, teachers, doctors, journalists, in general - all those who, due to their education and professional activities, were able to influence public opinion in Galicia, to prevent the spread of pro-Austrian propagandists myths of "political Ukrainians". Between September 1914 and Spring 1917, over 30 thousands of people passed through the concentration camp in Talerhof. Given that the Rusins ​​of Galicia were not numerous, these are huge numbers in percentage terms. A huge blow was dealt to the Orthodox Rusyns.

Of course, someone from the prisoners of Talerhof was fortunate enough to pass through these circles of hell, to survive and even return to his homeland. But many of the tests that had been transferred were already complete disabled people with a broken psyche. So, the priest Ignatius Hudyma, a friend and colleague of the executed priest Maxim Sandovich, went mad. The fate of Ignatius Hudyma’s father was tragic - he went mad from torture in Talerhof, but he survived and returned to his homeland, and after 20 with over years, already a deeply sick man, during the Nazi occupation of Western Ukraine, he was captured by Gestapo men and shot.

In May 1917, the emperor of Austria-Hungary, Charles I of Habsburg, ordered the closure of the concentration camp at Talerhof. However, the remaining barracks from the camp were practically intact until 1936, when they were demolished. During their demolition, 1767 corpses reburied in a common grave in the neighboring Austrian village of Feldkirchen were exhumed.

Terrible Talerhof was not the only concentration camp of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where prisoners of the Ruthenians from Galicia and Transcarpathia were kept. In the area of ​​Litoměřice in the Czech Republic in the year 1914, the Terezín concentration camp was opened on the site of an old fortress prison. In Terezín, the murderer of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Serbian nationalist Gavrila Princip, died of tuberculosis. During World War II, the Nazis, as excellent heirs of Austro-Hungarian executioners who surpassed their mentors, opened the Teresienstadt concentration camp in Terezin, which mainly contained Jews, including cultural, scientific, and art figures known in Germany and other European countries.

What Austria-Hungary did during the First World War in relation to the Orthodox Ruthenian population of Galicia can be described only in one word - genocide. But now they prefer not to recall those tragic events, neither in Austria nor in Ukraine. After all, modern Ukrainian statehood is much closer to the ideology derived in the Austro-Hungarian "political test tubes", and its representatives and advocates - that part of the Ruthenians who preferred to change their faith, their Slavic and Russian identity for the comfortable life of Austro-Hungarian and German collaborationists.
Our news channels

Subscribe and stay up to date with the latest news and the most important events of the day.

13 comments
Information
Dear reader, to leave comments on the publication, you must sign in.
  1. +1
    10 October 2018 06: 00
    Well, this is Europe ... enlightened and tolerant .... It seems that now everything will be the same .... They never considered us as people ...
    1. +3
      10 October 2018 10: 26
      Still, the Ruthenian genocide in Austria began not during the First World War, but approximately at the same time as Grushevsky’s movement to Galicia. Here is an illustration with a great Rusyn Ivan Franco. Franco Ukrainians then saw so through and through that he is acutely relevant now. Pay attention to the years of poems.

      The fragment, which is in the picture in Russian, I bring in the mov. I could not find this poem in the original language - Ruthenian. It is not easy to find her in Ukrainian either. UkroInternet from uncomfortable Franco cleaned. All that remains is that now is not the grudge of the day.
      Navit in our souls, we were forgotten,
      vіru zmіinuyut, scho ours in nіy lived dіdi y vіttsі.
      The "Turkogrekami" bark us, chill us to the churches ...
      Orthodox - non-baptism and non-fulfillment live!
      Shche th bіskupіv-svyatokupіv to send, schob took us for a forelock,
      uninitiate call siluvany with Rome lover ...
  2. +5
    10 October 2018 06: 21
    I will add a couple of details that the author for some reason omitted, but which clearly reveal why Westerners are despised all over the world, even in Maidan Ukraine.
    * Well, first of all, the Austrians' obedience to ZapUkria turned out just fine. They hiss at Russia. Poland, even to the neighbors from the center of Ukraine, but Austria for them there is "Mamo-Austria", as if in the pose of a drinking horse it was Austria that did not bend and destroy them. Yes, and treated them worse than tripods to the Indians.
    * And secondly, which is even more significant, the Austrians did not strain too much with the servicing of this herd. They did it themselves. For example, it would be completely wrong to think that the counterintelligence and the police were knocked off their feet, looking for "unreliable" Rusyns. Everything is much simpler - small-spirited raguli, as they were given a cry - "you can knock!" at the moment the policemen were overwhelmed with tons of denunciations against their neighbors - the problem was not to find who to plant, and what to do with those for whom "there were not enough seats."
    That is, concentration camps, of course, contributed to the destruction of the progressive stratum in those parts, but on the whole they didn’t really influence - they were a herd of banderlogs before that, if you think that I’m unreasonably chasing a whole nation - read that the first head of state wrote about the Galicians Skoropadsky. If I said such a thing on my own, I would definitely be banned for propaganda nat. discord.
  3. +4
    10 October 2018 06: 57
    Around this time, Grushevsky’s activity as an ideologist of pro-Austrian “Ukrainians” began.

    It was this Ukrainianism that this nationalist introduced with the strongest support of the authorities in the Ukrainian SSR.
    What Austria-Hungary did during the years of the First World War with regard to the Orthodox Ruthenian population of Galicia can be described in just one word - genocide. But now they prefer not to recall those tragic events - neither in Austria nor in Ukraine.

    Nobody ever remembered this in the USSR either. Moreover, the leaders of the Rusyn Russophile organizations were sent .... to Soviet camps.
    And memorable dates and events in honor of the prisoners, Thalerhof conducted by Rusyns were banned.
    As a result, such a Ukrainianized Galicia was created, which the Ukrainian nationalists themselves had not dreamed of
  4. 0
    10 October 2018 08: 38
    Before the outbreak of World War I, concentration camps were created only by European powers in African colonies.

    The author is mistaken.
    The first such camp was organized by the Greeks on the island of Trikery in 1913, where they found the death of ~ 7000 Bulgarians. (Described in detail by the Czech journalist Vladimir Sis, who visited the island in 1914).
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srJEP99Z94g
    1. 0
      12 October 2018 09: 28
      Put as many cons as you want, but the truth will not change from this, regardless of whether you like it or not. The truth is one!
  5. +1
    10 October 2018 09: 52
    The policy of Ukrainization was carried out both after the revolution and after WWII; it was not so noticeable, but it was.
  6. Alf
    +1
    10 October 2018 21: 34
    Before the outbreak of World War I, concentration camps were created only by European powers in African colonies. There were no concentration camps in Europe

    In the USA were. Back in the civil war of 1861-1865.
    Among the southern concentration camps for prisoners of war, the most famous is Andersonville. The suffering that the captured soldiers of the federation endured in it is immortalized in literature, songs, films and many monuments. The conditions in the Andersonville concentration camp were terrible, and there were objective reasons for this, which historians do not hide. During the war, the southern states very quickly exhausted their resources, and they had nothing to feed even their soldiers, not like prisoners of war. And in Andersonville, so many captured federal soldiers suffered from hunger and disease. But along with them their jailers suffered exactly the same, who ate with prisoners from the same boiler and suffered from the same diseases.
    The northern states, unlike the southern ones, perfectly financed their army and had good material support, including food. But the authorities of the northern concentration camps, in which the confederates were held prisoners, considered it necessary to likewise starve these prisoners of war. Not because there wasn’t enough food, as in the South, but following our principles to make the conditions of the “Confederate rebels” as bad as possible.
    Here is some evidence left by eyewitnesses about one of the 11 northern concentration camps for the detention of Confederate prisoners - the Douglas camp. Only one monument was erected on the site of the northern Douglas camp near Chicago: on a mass grave, in which more than 6 The 000 Confederates who died at Douglas. This monument was erected in 1895, 30 years after the war, by the forces of southerners and their friends from Chicago.

    http://www.yandex.ru/clck/jsredir?bu=g3o5&from=www.yandex.ru%3Bsearch%2F%3Bweb%3B%3B&text=&etext=1936.mlJzlKajf8g_hVY8eoiYeetdJo8TUkPClRURy8WM1rkBxaieT602opJEwzLOZlL1oVGk2fUuw6Suk7rBT-94Dwg4n-JEbwtBHiF57pYikPmLAZ0_ASd61li63ZsF5z57.a1256d84dda7bfe7dfd79ed0c3afcc55a0fc199f&uuid=&state=PEtFfuTeVD5kpHnK9lio9dFa2ePbDzX7kPpTCH_rtQkH2bBEi5M--bO-cYhaTVRUoRk_ZWu4JsKOt-pLKnbYCLnvOrQJ4nVD&&cst=AiuY0DBWFJ4BWM_uhLTTxJEoxeGTyRT0a0ra-Ku82GjqJzW05x4NfY28rWLx9iRwkSDVxo0oXAmZmht95yBZYiEvRBQo-OHSZ7NLjGJrvX_rLHv9j4WFHuY7gSyvvqFUYTDjYPTBE4RCu-gRl1zx8CUHnFHjqPb7tk797txpbvlMZyvucfVUYCvq4EW0o5VrFWDK9qQ--gCNdYA8PvJFteeExOZNn5ZunStlkThH6qkKC9FSFkGXubDHJ4NrOJQoH86GD2crvgVVFD2rphm7quHQ7VCQ3ir2LcqB8iNy6bAoKBpAbqQeMT4kMLN1XdATi_WKccUxKIbYfIURS2PVe92guQQpa-rCJ8rvNcuNDobzYIYlNCExq_NxfrBsD7acw_eVVzagyOwJcEsT1WG-1EMrU-fozI-RFv1CbX3Ju8fjNvuJ7D7udi7ClkB3o7da6N30fS9BA1TsLQkezJg3b1EV7UJLeE0U2eSb-9QsMMrMGhg3IK_ziJuB-CSonRTkvR2T3pCK49Roy_Rk2a8NirDnVZxe6OVEstx-KKErgcgXRRYd85x_kBlTsLlzHTINMCEuiKLMV5Tqlv7o8sgX-6L5dshqjKX-ODFBT7t10jxc04CLsoV7D_5jKpX8I41F7t_on8Bpf1zwyz1zZjruWCBIjAOn5zGVaqUdm-kP1YLKM7BGuuwRCcv_hTMxSi4qrsiy4s9EhrM,&data=UlNrNmk5WktYejR0eWJFYk1LdmtxblUyTXRpeHB0TzJzLXlxWmF6eWFCbHFxQW9EalhiTDFfVXN3LWVPeWV5dkZSZEtaZEJxM2NlN3phX21zcGl1ZWdQU1QtdjdfZGxQb0tRcWFxZ09JMjlnV2ExeERNeFY5NHBNd09qU2Q4cllIRWxxNDkyT3ZTZyw,&sign=f67e246aebf6b6b8d362b7369063c034&keyno=0&b64e=2&ref=orjY4mGPRjlSKyJlbRuxUg7kv3-HD3rXazzUqf4eOhKOO1MbZHXoWTR2E5J8k_CmtmB3E2MT-PPpAvxlp3BQQmIzd6PfU5QlOhUd6Bd5xO0d6y3pTsaXygKV6RFwDHnDBx-73oxcSfImkTSJS3g85_TAO1YMQ2Rjv-VOw884wFCVkiGicvCGRYGhYc75Xx3ODrPk8dsEvkoaJ4CSWV5zzARAXWGhn8EIORMoTaJGmt1641ag8tVOu3VMFudAiAQO7eDvni-pTC6ta3GZGa724DZrEoKHspPvp_0NJfyNrd7A1wpnVO-EPu5K9cGkOGqKbqG_oJzPi44aGJk-Fto1hSqEwbHA36m1RaJILIpJnMACtn4ptKkIGg,,&l10n=ru&rp=1&cts=1539196459528&mc=3.8219280948873617&hdtime=421337
    1. Alf
      0
      10 October 2018 23: 06
      Refute the minuser!
    2. +1
      11 October 2018 13: 03
      And in the 19th century, the USA were Europe ???
      1. Alf
        0
        11 October 2018 19: 58
        Quote: Gopnik
        And in the 19th century, the USA were Europe ???

        Before the outbreak of World War I, concentration camps were created only by European powers in African colonies.

        This proposal has a hidden meaning - white people created concentration camps only for other colored ones and only in colonies. The USA at the end of the 19th century was also a state of whites, while the USA organized concentration camps for the same whites in its territory.
  7. 0
    16 October 2018 11: 04
    But now they prefer not to recall those tragic events - neither in Austria nor in Ukraine. Indeed, modern Ukrainian statehood is much closer to the ideology deduced in the Austro-Hungarian “political test tubes”, and its representatives and advocates are that part of the Rusyns who preferred to exchange their faith, their Slavic and Russian identities for a comfortable life of Austro-Hungarian and German collaborators.

    Of course, it’s convenient to write all kinds of nonsense
    What is that?

    It doesn’t matter who they were, Rusyns, Muscophiles, Russophiles, Ukrainophiles Lemkos or others! They were ours. In any sense. And the tragedy of Thalerhof and Terezin is precisely the Ukrainian tragedy. On our land and with our people.
    On October 8, 2004, No. 2-I / - the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted the Decree “On the 84th anniversary of the tragedy in the Talerhof concentration camp.” Its preamble stated: "... this fall marks 90 years of tragedy in the Talerhof concentration camp near the Austrian city of Graz." As follows from the text of the resolution, all responsibility for those tragic events rests solely with the authorities of the then Austro-Hungarian Empire.
    The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted a resolution on the 90th anniversary of the tragedy of the Talerhof concentration camp and on the 60th anniversary of the Roma Holocaust in Ukraine. These decisions were supported by 230 and 226 out of 254 MPs registered in the hall, respectively.
    Speaking at a parliamentary session, Gennady Udovenko, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Human Rights, National Minorities and International Relations, said that the resolution on commemorating the victims of Thalerhof (an Austrian concentration camp that operated before the start of World War I) is very important in view of the fact that in Little has been done for Ukraine to return from oblivion the memory of those who perished there.
    But in the Russian Federation there is no Talerhof and Terezin. Only in the context that the "vile Ukrainians" sent the Russians to the AB camps ...
    And officially there were no camps and no memory. So why accusations against Ukraine and Ukrainians, if we have the tragedy itself, and monuments and an official decree? And in the Russian Federation there is no all this, only an article about the "Russian genocide" and bad Ukrainians? Unclear.
    Vaughn was recently asked to name the actions of AB officially the genocide through a letter from the President, what the author writes about ... so it turns out that the Ukrainians do what the author describes, only he says that we don’t remember anything.
  8. 0
    18 November 2018 12: 41
    They just decided to hang such issues as Ruthenian in 1914, burn them in 2014. Well, we transported them to .. whether, well, what about Europe and our "lost brothers." We did not have a well-thought-out national policy a hundred years ago, and now we do not. People who were drawn to Russia were betrayed for the sake of the class interests of the "elite." both then and now.

"Right Sector" (banned in Russia), "Ukrainian Insurgent Army" (UPA) (banned in Russia), ISIS (banned in Russia), "Jabhat Fatah al-Sham" formerly "Jabhat al-Nusra" (banned in Russia) , Taliban (banned in Russia), Al-Qaeda (banned in Russia), Anti-Corruption Foundation (banned in Russia), Navalny Headquarters (banned in Russia), Facebook (banned in Russia), Instagram (banned in Russia), Meta (banned in Russia), Misanthropic Division (banned in Russia), Azov (banned in Russia), Muslim Brotherhood (banned in Russia), Aum Shinrikyo (banned in Russia), AUE (banned in Russia), UNA-UNSO (banned in Russia), Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People (banned in Russia), Legion “Freedom of Russia” (armed formation, recognized as terrorist in the Russian Federation and banned)

“Non-profit organizations, unregistered public associations or individuals performing the functions of a foreign agent,” as well as media outlets performing the functions of a foreign agent: “Medusa”; "Voice of America"; "Realities"; "Present time"; "Radio Freedom"; Ponomarev; Savitskaya; Markelov; Kamalyagin; Apakhonchich; Makarevich; Dud; Gordon; Zhdanov; Medvedev; Fedorov; "Owl"; "Alliance of Doctors"; "RKK" "Levada Center"; "Memorial"; "Voice"; "Person and law"; "Rain"; "Mediazone"; "Deutsche Welle"; QMS "Caucasian Knot"; "Insider"; "New Newspaper"