Page - 819 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

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.