Although the fortress at Terezín attained a dubious international distinction during World War II as the Nazi concentration camp. Theresienstadt, it already possessed a gloomy history as a place of imprisonment, having held Austrian political offenders since the first half of the nineteenth century. Gavrilo Princip had been confined there along with his fellow conspirators after assassinating Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo; the young man ultimately died in the garrison hospital. During World War I, Terezín became the largest prisoner-of-war camp in Bohemia, housing its mostly Russian prisoners in makeshift subcamps scattered outside the fortress. In 1919 the new Czechoslovak state employed some of these same facilities to intern various “suspicious elements” from Slovakia. Unfortunately the zeal with which the authorities took people into custody produced a flood of internees for which Terezín was ill prepared, and conditions in the debilitated Austrian camp soon threatened to provoke a public scandal. The circumstances of this rather unpleasant episode provide a revealing—though ambiguous—glimpse of the sterner side of the Czechoslovak First Republic, and by extension, post-Habsburg Central Europe.