Kragujevac massacre, 1941, testimony and reconstruction - Holocaust in Serbia (English subtitles)

The Kragujevac massacre was the murder of Serbs, Jewish and Roma men and boys in Kragujevac, Serbia, by German Wehrmacht soldiers on 20 and 21 October 1941. All males from the town between the ages of sixteen and sixty were assembled, including high school students, and the victims were selected from amongst them. On 29 October 1941, Felix Benzler, the plenipotentiary of the German foreign ministry in Serbia, reported that 2,300 people were executed. Subsequently, scholars have agreed on the figure of persons. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel had issued an order on 16 September 1941 (OKW-Befehl Nr. 888/41), applicable to all of occupied Europe, to kill 50 communists for every wounded German soldier and 100 for each German soldier killed. In early October Communist Partisans under Tito, and Serbian Chetniks under Draza Mihajlovic, attacked German forces near Gornji Milanovac, killing 10 and wounding 26. The massacre was a direct reprisal for the German losses in that battle. A German report stated that: “The executions in Kragujevac occurred although there had been no attacks on members of the Wehrmacht in this city, for the reason that not enough hostages could be found elsewhere.“ On 18 October 1941, all of the Jewish males in Kragujevac were arrested, and along with some alleged communists this group numbered about 70 men. As this number was insufficient to meet the quota, over the period of 18–21 October, the entire city was raided. Around 10,000 male civilians, aged 16–60, were arrested. The arrested were teachers, students, Jews, and any others who had been captured in the German round-up. A whole generation of high school students was taken directly from their classes. The executions started at 6 pm on the following day. People were shot in groups of 400. The shootings continued into the next day, at a lesser pace. The remaining prisoners were not released, but held as hostages for further reprisals. On 31 October 1941, Franz Böhme, the Commanding General in Serbia, sent a report to Walter Kuntze of the shootings that took place in Serbia: “Shooting: 405 hostages in Belgrade (total up to now in Belgrade, 4,750). 2,300 hostages in Kragujevac. 1,700 hostages in Kraljevo.“ Kuntze issued a directive on 19 March 1942: “The more unequivocal and the harder reprisal measures are applied from the beginning the less it will become necessary to apply them at a later date. No false sentimentalities! It is preferable that 50 suspects are liquidated than one German soldier lose his life... If it is not possible to produce the people who have participated in any way in the insurrection or to seize them, reprisal measures of a general kind may be deemed advisable, for instance, the shooting to death of all male inhabitants from the nearest villages, according to a definite ratio (for instance, one German dead 100 Serbs, one German wounded 50 Serbs).“ Franz Böhme went on trial for the Kragujevac massacre among other war crimes. After being captured in Norway, he was brought before the Hostages Trial, a division of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, and charged with war crimes committed in Serbia, during his 1941 control of the region. When his extradition to Yugoslavia seemed imminent, Böhme committed suicide by jumping from the 4th storey of the prison in which he was being held. To commemorate the victims of the massacre, the whole of Šumarice, where the killings took place, was designated a memorial park. There are several monuments there; the “Interrupted Flight“ monument to the murdered schoolchildren and their teachers, the monument of “Pain and Defiance“, the monument “One Hundred for One“, and the monument “Resistance and Freedom“. Desanka Maksimović wrote a poem about the massacre titled “Krvava Bajka“ (“A Bloody fairy tale“). The Belgian poet Karel Jonckheere (1906-1993) wrote in 1965 the poem Kinderen met krekelstem [Children with cricket voices] about the Kragujevac massacre. An English poet, Richard Berengarten, wrote a book of poetry, The Blue Butterfly, based on his experiences of visiting the commemorative museum at Šumarice in 1985 when a blue butterfly landed on his hand at the entry to the museum. In 2007, the title poem from the book provided the oratorio at the open-air memorial event for the victims at the annual commemoration of the massacre. Production: