Page - 806 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

806 Camps Strangers in the Homeland Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia and the start of the deployment in the south, as well as the beginning of the war against Russia in its entirety, triggered almost immediate evacuation measures. Flight and expulsion commenced. This applied to the territories of the Habsburg Monarchy bordering Serbia and Montenegro, as well as the crown lands in the east.1883 Around Kotor and the war ports on the Adriatic coast, ci- vilians were also evacuated, since bombardments from the sea were expected. The mem- bers of the naval crews had to leave harbours and garrisons. As many as 8,000 people were forced to look for new homes. If they did not find their own accommodation, they were distributed predominantly among Croatian and Slovenian farms. Then the areas bordering Serbia and Montenegro followed suit. Whereas the civilian population was forced to flee from Syrmia, Bačka, the Banat and Bosnia-Herzegovina, around 10,000 people after all, was mostly housed not far from its homes, a mass migration to the interior of the Dual Monarchy began in Galicia and Bukovina in August 1914. Initially, this was all still manageable and had its own logic, which was based in the conduct of the war. In accordance with an imperial decree, civilians were to be ‘forcibly removed from their places of residence for the purposes of conducting the war’.1884 The estab- lishment of a war zone commenced, as well as the transfer of most civilian functions to the military authorities. The imperial decree, however, had prefixed the formulation on the forced removal of civilians from the war zone with an important and frequently overlooked word, namely ‘protection’. In this way, at least in terms of intent, attention was by all means given to the human aspect. It was a question of protecting the pop- ulation endangered by hostilities. The fact that the people were to be removed from the probable base zone or operations areas in order to conceal the Austro-Hungarian movements and the identity of the troop bodies was an unspoken but, at least in the eyes of the military, additional and indeed dominant consideration. The regions directly at the borders were emptied. Around 1.2 million soldiers were to be brought into a country that mutated from Austria’s settlement area and granary into a deployment zone, and a supply organisation set up there that was needed in order to equip four ar- mies with everything they needed. For this task, barely two weeks were available. Ruth- lessness was one of the side effects of this deployment. If we take the city and fortress of Przemyśl as an example, then in spite of the fact that the Army High Command was accommodated in this city and the fortress  – as a storage fortress  – boasted a garrison that rapidly shifted but barely dropped below 100,000 soldiers, the forced evacuations certainly did not initially have priority. To begin with, Przemyśl had in turn become a destination for refugees. It was only the defeats in the battles and encounters at the end of August and the beginning of September 1914 that led to the spread of chaos. At this point, all refugees and some of the inhabitants were forcibly evicted. In the city’s