Page - 810 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

810 Camps detainees be taken as far as possible into the hinterland. A few regions in the interior of Austria, as well as Bohemia and Moravia, therefore had to take in the bulk of the refu- gees. The initial transports here also made it clear that it was first necessary to find one’s bearings in this new situation. As a matter of priority, railway employees were brought first of all into the reception area, since it was intended that they continue to carry out their duties. All transportation personnel, but also artificers, depot clerks, boiler makers, painters and decorators, therefore, soon continued to pursue their occupations but were simply relocated to another railway division. They were not welcome everywhere. Thus, the Governor of Tyrol, Count Toggenburg, argued that in his administrative ambit there was insufficient accommodation and food shortages, and the mood towards the Ruthenians was anything but friendly. The railway workers arrived  – with a certain degree of naivety  – with cows, pigs and chickens. The people of Styria, however, were evidently untroubled by this.1895 Then the first real refugee transports arrived. They had needed weeks to reach the reception areas. Soon, little was left of the initial generosity and the partial understanding. The Galician refugees arrived with a few possessions. Like the soldiers going to the front, they were transported in freight trains, which bore the following inscription typical for military transports : ‘40 men or 6 horses’. Those who, like the railway employees, received a regular income because they had been in the civil service somewhere in Galicia or Bukovina, or already drew a pension, were housed in private quarters. The destitute refugees, however, were to be accommodated in camps, which had mostly been constructed by captive Russians and private firms. Most of them, however, were not yet ready to move into even in October 1914. Poles and Ruthenians who had fled to the west to escape the Russians naturally sought out the large cities. In November 1914, Vienna already counted around 140,000 refugees from Galicia and Bukovina, and in Prague, Brno (Brünn) and Graz there were a further 100,000 destitute refugees.1896 In Vienna, there were days in November 1914 on which as many as 3,000 refugees arrived. A large proportion of them were Jews. Then, on 10 December, the influx into Vienna was stopped. Prague, Brno and Graz followed with similar measures. At the turn of the year, however, Vienna counted almost 200,000 refugees, of whom around 150,000 had to be accommodated and fed in a makeshift way, since they were penniless.1897 For a short time, the flow of refugees appeared to dry up, but the advance of the Russians in November as far as Kraków and the fighting in the Carpathian Arc again forced 250,000 people to flee. Once more, a large proportion of them had to seek accommodation in the camps in Lower Austria, Upper Austria, Styria, Bohemia and Moravia. The barrack camps, in which they arrived en masse, did not have any solid buildings, but instead at best provisional, hastily erected structures that had been set up within the space of two or three months. Until then, the refugees were accommodated in empty buildings, barns and tents. In Wagna, near Leibnitz, to take one of the largest