
© Getty Images/Atit Phetmuangtong/EyeEmChained Hands
Troops shot in the legs screaming in pain. Others dying from blood loss and shock. With no one around to provide medical assistance. A Russian soldier
crucified on an anti-tank barrier, chained to a metal 'hedgehog' and then burned alive...
For many, graphic
footage of Russian servicemen tortured and killed by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and nationalist battalions, came as a real shock.
But this did not surprise those who are familiar with the 'traditions' of Ukraine's 'fighters for national freedom', as they have more than a century of history in this sort of thing.Europe's First Concentration CampsThe first concentration camps in Europe -
Terezin and Thalerhof - were established in Austria-Hungary in the fall of 1914, not to hold prisoners of war,
but the empire's own citizens. This is how Vienna, then the 'sick man of Europe', tried to protect its eastern border areas from members of its population which sympathized with neighboring Russia. Fighting between the two countries had broken out just before the beginning of the First World War. Austria-Hungary's last emperor, Charles I,
confessed in his edict of May 7, 1917:
"All the arrested Russians are innocent, but they were detained to prevent them becoming guilty."
People from Galicia who did not want to call themselves Ukrainians, as the Austrian authorities insisted, and continued to use the name 'Rusyns', were arrested and incarcerated in two places - in a garrison fortress in Terezin and in a valley near Graz, the capital of Styria. While the prisoners in Terezin were held in the vaults and dungeons of the fortress, with the support of local Czechs, the concentration camp later known as Thalerhof was little more than a bare field fenced in with barbed wire.
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