German troops registering people from Kragujevac and its surrounding areas prior to their execution
The Kragujevac massacre was the
mass murder of between 2,778 and 2,794 mostly
Serb men and boys in
Kragujevac by
German soldiers on 21 October 1941. It occurred in the
German-occupied territory of Serbia during
World War II, and came as a reprisal for insurgent attacks in the
Gornji Milanovac district that resulted in the deaths of ten German soldiers and the wounding of 26 others. The number of
hostages to be shot was calculated as a ratio of 100 hostages executed for every German soldier killed and 50 hostages executed for every German soldier wounded, a formula devised by
Adolf Hitler with the intent of suppressing anti-Nazi resistance in Eastern Europe.
After a punitive operation was conducted in the surrounding villages, during which over 400 males were shot and four villages burned down, another 70 male
Jews and
communists who had been arrested in Kragujevac were killed. Simultaneously, males between the ages of 16 and 60, including high school students, were assembled by German troops and local
collaborators, and the victims were selected from amongst them. The selected males were then marched to fields outside the city, shot with heavy machine guns, and their bodies buried in
mass graves. Contemporary German military records indicate that 2,300 hostages were shot. After the war, inflated estimates ranged as high as 7,000 deaths, but German and Serbian scholars have now agreed on the figure of nearly 2,800 killed, including 144 high school students. As well as Serbs, massacre victims included Jews,
Romani people,
Muslims,
Macedonians,
Slovenes, and members of other nationalities. (Full article...)
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