Seite - 841 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Italy 841 front and in the prisoner of war camps and, by the same token, the Russians in Aus- tria, and the enormous losses in terms of people that the Habsburg Monarchy had to accept in the category ‘prisoner of war captivity’ alone  – all these things only become clear when we begin to read the statistics from the end of the war. During the course of the conflict, the Russians  – according to the figures of the Swedish philanthropist Elsa Brändström, known as the ‘Angel of Siberia’  – took 2,050,000 men and 54,146 Austro-Hungarian officers, including doctors, apothecaries, military officials and mil- itary chaplains. There is also data, however, according to which only half, i.e. a million members of the Austro-Hungarian military, fell into Russian captivity. The explana- tion that as many as 40 per cent of the prisoners of war had somewhere and some- time disappeared, would certainly explain the discrepancy, but whether the statement is well-founded is another question.2010 A comparison with the prisoners of war of the German Army is in any case illuminating : 165,000 men and 20,082 officers of the ally were taken captive by the Russians. Once can assume, therefore, that Austro-Hungary forfeited at least ten times as many prisoners of war on the north-western front as the German Empire. During the war, 22,000 Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war, most of them invalids, were repatriated in the course of the various prisoner exchanges. Ap- proximately 10,000 of them succeeded in escaping. The Russians transported 40,000 Czechs, Serbs, Romanians and also a number of Alsatians to the Entente states.2011 Italy Italy should actually have been prepared for prisoners of war. For one thing, it had been able to follow for long enough how the question of the accommodation and treatment of prisoners of war had developed into a problem and how the dimensions were also a cause for concern. Furthermore, Italy had been able to gather direct experiences itself during the course of the war in Libya. Finally, and this must also have played a role, the Italian Army Command envisaged advancing via the Ljubljana Basin and Klagenfurt as far as Vienna within a few weeks. And this would have involved the capture of a large number of prisoners of war. The reality looked different, and one gets the impression that thought was given to many things, but least of all to the provision of shelter for a large number of prisoners. Only in June 1915 was a Military Commission for Prisoners of War created under General Paolo Spingardi. It was to attend to the prisoners in Italy, just as a commission under Senator Giuseppe Frascara with the help of the Red Cross would take care of those Italians who had fallen into Austro-Hungarian captivity. This appeared adequate to the Italian Army Command. It provided for the evacuation of the prisoners and for their custody, and it strove to adhere strictly to the provisions inferred from the Ge-