The mythologization of Thalerhof: from commemoration to political myth

The problem of the development of the political myth around the Austro-Hungarian internment camp Thalerhof, which operated during World War I near the Austrian city of Graz, takes an important place in the study of the history of the Rusyn people. Given the possibility of a comparative analysis of German and Ukrainian lists of prisoners of the camp, we offer a new assessment of domestic and foreign sources on the subject under study, which for a long time served as the basis for the development of a widespread historiographical image of the camp. As a result of the study, the key milestones and episodes of V.R. Vavrik’s development of the political myth around Thalerhof as a concentration camp for the extermination of representatives of the Rusyn population are clarified. The research shows that other well-known inter-war assessments of the nature of the Thalerhof camp, usually referring only to the works of V.R. Vavrik, substantially exaggerated the extent of the tragedy due to a lack of alternative data. The results of the work indicate that the history of Thalerhof cannot be elevated to a higher rank than the national tragedy of the Rusyn population of Galicia and Bukovina. It was also defined that the history of the camp has become a politicized myth about the intentional “genocide” and “Calvary” of the Rusyn population, necessary for narrow political circles to solve the problems of nation-building and, unfortunately, taken seriously by the absolute majority of national historians. The study expands the field for substantive discussions of the history of one of the most politicized camps of the World War I and offers a different approach to the assessment of the events of the studied period.