The Austro-Hungarian authorities imprisoned leaders of the
Russophile movement among
Carpatho-Rusyns,
Lemkos, and
Galicians (see
Galician Russophilia); those who recognized the
Russian language as the
literary standard form of their own
Slavic language varieties and had sympathy for the
Russian Empire. Thus, the captives were forced to abandon their identity as
Russians, or sympathies for Russia, and identify as
Ukrainian. Captives who identified themselves as Ukrainians were freed from the camp. Between 1924-1932, four issues of the Thalerhof Almanac were published in
Lviv, in which collected documentary evidence of the number of prisoners and the murders of peaceful Russophiles by the Austrian authorities was published. Out of 5,500,158 inhabitants of
Eastern Galicia in 1914, 2,114,792 (39.8%) were native speakers of
Polish, and 3,385,366 (58.9%) were native speakers of
Ruthenian (
Rusyn or
Ukrainian). In the book "Habsburg national politics during the First World War", authors D.A. Akhremenko, chairman of a public organization called Historical Consciousness, and K.V. Shevchenko, a professor at
Belarusian State University, state that Thalerhof held a total of 10,000 "Galician Russians", about 2,000 Rusyns (according to other sources up to 5,000), and about 200-250 students placed in the camp on charges of
sympathy for the Russian Empire, and books of
Grigory Skovoroda,
Taras Shevchenko,
Pushkin,
Tolstoy and others. In total over twenty thousand people were arrested and placed in Thalerhof camp. Thalerhof had no barracks until the winter of 1915. Prisoners slept on the ground in the open-air during both rain and frost. According to
U.S. Congressman Medill McCormick, prisoners were regularly beaten and tortured. On 9 November 1914 an official report of Fieldmarshal Schleer said there were 5,700 Carpatho-Rusyns, Lemkos, and Ukrainians in Talerhof. In the winter of 1914-1915, a third of the roughly 7,000 internees died of typhus. The camp was closed by Emperor
Charles I of Austria, 6 months into his reign. In the first eighteen months of its existence, three thousand prisoners of Thalerhof died, including the Orthodox saint
Maxim Sandovich, who was martyred here (beatified August 29, 1996 by the
Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia). From 1945 to 1955 the site was used as an airbase by the RAF, and known, as RAF Station Thalerhof before being transferred back to the Austrian Government.
Graz Airport currently occupies the former site of the camp. The barracks were demolished in 1936. The corpses of 1,767 internees were then exhumed and reburied in a mass grave at
Feldkirchen bei Graz. ==People interned in Thalerhof==