Page - 838 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

838 Camps trained, inadequately armed or simply badly led could no longer apply.1997 Now the Ger- mans were leading, the Imperial and Royal officers were experienced in battle, the troops were different and distributed according to their national origin, the weaponry was good and the level of training of the troops was, as a rule, no poorer than that of the Germans. There must, therefore, be other reasons to explain why they surrendered to the Russians. At the Moscow collection and evacuation point of Ugreshskaya, which was initially intended not for Austro-Hungarian prisoners but for Germans, the Imperial and Royal soldiers also ultimately comprised the majority of the 20,000 people registered there. In Darnytsia on the banks of the Dnieper, a new collection and distribution point was created. Marching columns of up to 7,000 prisoners set off for there. The collection point fulfilled only the function of a transit camp but still earned itself a particularly poor reputation, since the selection took place here of those who wanted to remain loyal to the Habsburg Empire and those who declared themselves to be deserters and began to plunder and persecute their own comrades.1998 The many Czechs who were utilised as camp personnel in Darnytsia, participated in the ‘filtration’ and bullied their comrades gave the camp the label ‘Czech household’.1999 Abuse by the Russian guards, a lack of infrastructure, starvation and cold also made the camp a terrible place. The onward transportation to the governorates in Ukraine and the Russian interior was then something akin to salvation. It took place with trains containing up to 2,000 men. At the collection points Kharkiv and Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk) conditions were then similar to those at the distribution stations. The final destinations were gen- erally, and after many months had passed, camps along the construction sites of the Kirov Railway and in Turkestan. In Turkestan, there were already more than 200,000 prisoners of war as of September 1916. Following the evacuation of the German Austrian and Hungarian prisoners of war from Darnytsia, those who remained  – predominantly members of Slav nationalities as well as Romanians and Italians  – were divided up among the camps in the European part of Russia. The Tambov camp, for example, situated 500 kilometres south-east of Moscow, was a camp for Italians.2000 In the camps for enlisted men, 25,000 to 35,000 people were packed together like sardines. Officers’ camps were considerably smaller, but reached sizes of 3,000 to 4,500 prisoners.2001 The Russian hopes that the northern and southern Slav prisoners of the Imperial and Royal Army could be turned into compliant supporters of the Tsar by means of better treatment proved to be wrong, however. They found enough people who volunteered for guard duty, but most of them showed no inclination to join the Czech Legion. Many attempted to flee the camps and were eventually sent to Siberia, just like the German Austrians and the Hungarians.2002 From the end of June 1916, tens of thousands of Imperial and Royal soldiers swelled the population of the main camps. In July and August, the prisoners of the Brusilov