Page - 821 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Internees 821 all to Katzenau near Linz.1937 In Katzenau there was already an infrastructure, since a prisoner of war camp had already been established for Russians. There were 38 bar- racks.1938 If we take the number of people arriving in Linz from the south-west of the Monarchy as our yardstick, on 27 May 1915, 600 of around 2,400 evacuees were regarded as politically suspect or identified as ‘imperial Italians’ and sent to the intern- ment camp in Linz-Katzenau. Two days later, 250 of the more than 5,000 arrivals from the territories bordering Italy were transferred to the Katzenau,1939 and in the days and weeks that followed the internment camps near Linz, Graz and Oberhollabrunn filled up. On balance, five per cent of those evacuated from the regions bordering Italy were thus sent to the internment camps.1940 Others were sent to confinement stations, i.e. places they were not allowed to leave, where they had to report regularly and where they had to submit their correspondence for attestation.1941 Their transfer to the camps and the confinement stations was justified with reference to the emergency decrees. The arrest of women and, above all, children could hardly be justified, however. The greatest problem though was that  – in contrast to the interned foreigners  – neither protecting powers nor the Red Cross took care of the members of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and private aid organisations did so only relatively late in the day. The camp inmates could only hope that the suspicion and accusations raised against them would prove to be unfounded. Petitions could be drawn up, reasons invoked, attempts made to refute allegations and to prove that one was not a spy, had not conspired with Serbs, Russians or Italians, and was no irredentist but instead a completely normal citizen.1942 Some of the internees were indeed actually released in this way. Eventually, aid committees were established that took care of the internees and, above all, pursued their repatriation.1943 Many of them were downgraded to the category ‘harmless’. From February 1917, a proportion of the internees was pardoned by Emperor Karl. Immediately afterwards, the internment camps began to fill up again. Like the war refugees, the internees were repeatedly relocated until at the beginning of 1917 a comparatively clear distinction emerged : around 6,000 people were counted in the Austrian internment camps. Russophile Ruthenians and Poles were accommo- dated in Graz-Thalerhof, whilst Italians, but also Belgians, French and British were in Katzenau near Linz and in Oberhollabrunn. Ultimately, these were only the survivors, since in the camp in Thalerhof a large number of internees were said to have died dur- ing the first winter of the war alone.1944 As in the refugee and prisoner of war camps, epidemics raged among the camp inmates, whose resilience had been dramatically im- paired by the external conditions of the camps and, above all, by the poor nutrition and care. Since the internees were regarded as particularly dangerous individuals, however, for whom neither refugee aid nor a certain goodwill felt towards a defeated and captive enemy should apply, the guards often showed no regard. In 1917 it became known that there were punishment stations where internees who had behaved defiantly or had ac-