Thalerhof internment camp

Thalerhof (also transliterated as Talerhof from Cyrillic-based East Slavic texts) was a concentration camp created by the Austro-Hungarian authorities during 4.09.1914 — 10.05.1917, in a valley in foothills of the Alps, near Graz, the main city of the province of Styria

The Austro-Hungarian authorities imprisoned the Carpatho-Rusyns, lemko-Rusyns and Galician Russophiles in a concentration camp, who recognized the Russian language as a literary language and had sympathy for the Russian empire. Thus, the captives were forced to abandon their identity as Russians and obtain a Ukrainian identity. Captives who identified themselves as Ukrainians were freed from the camp. In 1924-1932, four issues of the Thalerhof Almanac were published in a Lviv, in which published documentary evidence was collected of the number of prisoners and the murders of peaceful Russophiles by the Austrian authorities during the war years. In 1914, out of 5,500,158 residents of Eastern Galicia (Galicia), the Polish language was native to 2,114,792 inhabitants (39.8%), and Ruthenian - Russian to 3,385,366 (58.9%). In the book “Habsburg national politics during the First World War” (the authors of the book are the chairman of the public organization “Historical Consciousness” D.A. Akhremenko and professor of the Minsk State University K.V. Shevchenko) they state that in Thalerhof at that time from 1914 there were 10,000 Russians, about 2,000 (according to other sources up to 5,000) Rusyns, and about 200-250 students placed in the camp on charges of sympathy for the Russian Empire, and the Russian books of Grigory Savvich Skovoroda, Taras Grigorievich Shevchenko, Pushkin, Tolstoy and others found from them were evidence of this

[1] Over twenty thousand people were arrested and placed in the Austrian internment camp in Thalerhof.[2]

Until the winter 1915, there were no barracks in Thalerhof. Prisoners slept on the ground in the open-air during rain and frost. According to U.S. Congressman Medill McCormick, prisoners were beaten and tortured.[3] On November 9, 1914 official report of field marshal Schleer said there were 5,700 Carpatho-Rusyns, Lemkos, and Ukrainians in Talerhof. In all, 20 thousand people were prisoners of Talerhof from September 4, 1914 to May 10, 1917. The camp was closed by Emperor Charles I of Austria, after the first 6 months of his reign.[4]

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

The Graz Airport is located at the camp site now.

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