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The Internees 819
were either not believed or had no impact. So many people were dying anyway in this
war.
The Internees
Alongside the refugees and the forced evacuees who were accepted into the commu-
nities and camps in the crown lands to which they were assigned, there was another
category that encountered from the outset far more distrust and rejection than even
the refugees : the internees. They embodied a grave difference to the ‘normal’ refugees.
Most things that applied as a rule to the refugees did not apply to the internees,
namely an at least official welfare support and a certain freedom of movement. It was
also not the case for the internees that they were to be repatriated at the first available
opportunity. They were quasi prisoners.
First of all, the members of the nations waging war against the Habsburg Mon-
archy – hardly surprisingly – fell into this category. This was a few dozen British and
French on whom enforced stays in Lower Austria and Upper Austria were inflicted.
There, in Drosendorf, Raabs, Waidhofen an der Thaya and Kautzen, they encountered
Russians, most of them refugees and deserters who wanted to escape service in the
army of the Tsar. Literally from one day to the next, they had become enemy foreigners.
Their fate was not very different, however, to that of the members of the Habsburg
Monarchy who had the misfortune of being at the outbreak of the conflict in one of
the states now waging war against Austria-Hungary. Hundreds and then thousands
fulfilled the criteria in Great Britain, France and, above all, Russia of ‘enemy foreigners’.
Austro-Hungarian citizens were likewise interned in Algeria, Cyprus and Madagascar.
Hardest hit were the 80,000 (!) Ruthenians working in Canada, of whom 6,000 were
sent to camps.1932 Women, children and men over the age of 60 were as a rule permitted
to return home. If those remaining were not subsequently repatriated, however, or –
which frequently happened – were exchanged for internees of the enemy states, they
remained incarcerated for years. This applied above all to the men of military service
age, since of course no state had a particular interest in augmenting the number of
enemy soldiers.
Within the space of weeks and months, the measures taken against the ‘enemy for-
eigners’ by the Austrian authorities were tightened. Initially, they were only instructed
to report regularly, but then those fit for military service were hindered from departing,
those who appeared suspicious were arrested and brought to prison, and eventually
the authorities began confining them to certain localities or detaining them in empty
barracks or other buildings. In the end, internment camps existed that differed from
the refugee and prisoner of war camps primarily in that they were considerably smaller.
THE FIRST WORLD WAR
and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918
- Title
- THE FIRST WORLD WAR
- Subtitle
- and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918
- Author
- Manfried Rauchensteiner
- Publisher
- Böhlau Verlag
- Location
- Wien
- Date
- 2014
- Language
- English
- License
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-3-205-79588-9
- Size
- 17.0 x 24.0 cm
- Pages
- 1192
- Categories
- Geschichte Vor 1918
Table of contents
- 1 On the Eve 11
- 2 Two Million Men for the War 49
- 3 Bloody Sundays 81
- 4 Unleashing the War 117
- 5 ‘Thank God, this is the Great War!’ 157
- 6 Adjusting to a Longer War 197
- 7 The End of the Euphoria 239
- 8 The First Winter of the War 283
- 9 Under Surveillance 317
- 10 ‘The King of Italy has declared war on Me’ 355
- 11 The Third Front 383
- 12 Factory War and Domestic Front, 1915 413
- 13 Summer Battle and ‘Autumn Swine’ 441
- 14 War Aims and Central Europe 469
- 15 South Tyrol : The End of an Illusion (I) 497
- 16 Lutsk :The End of an Illusion (II) 521
- 17 How is a War Financed ? 555
- 18 The Nameless 583
- 19 The Death of the Old Emperor 607
- 20 Emperor Karl 641
- 21 The Writing on the Wall 657
- 22 The Consequences of the Russian February Revolution 691
- 23 Summer 1917 713
- 24 Kerensky Offensive and Peace Efforts 743
- 25 The Pyrrhic Victory : The Breakthrough Battle of Flitsch-Tolmein 769
- 26 Camps 803
- 27 Peace Feelers in the Shadow of Brest-Litovsk 845
- 28 The Inner Front 869
- 29 The June Battle in Veneto 895
- 30 An Empire Resigns 927
- 31 The Twilight Empire 955
- 32 The War becomes History 983
- Epilogue 1011
- Afterword 1013
- Acknowledgements and Dedication 1019
- Notes 1023
- Selected Printed Sources and Literature 1115
- Index of People and Places 1155