The medium-sized city of Kragujevac, in central Serbia, was the stage for one of the most brutal acts of German reprisal during the Second World War. From the excerpt above, it is clear that the Germans calculate the number of dead to be 2,300, but as is the case so often with internal Nazi sources, a post-war investigation proved the figure to be much higher. At the Nuremberg Trials in 1947, according to an eyewitness account from Zivojin Jovanonvic, the Germans executed nearly 7,000 people on October 20 and 21, 1941 at a site near Kragujevac.14 The number of victims was again revised to 5,000 in the mid-1960s with yet another investigation.15 Needless to say, complete consensus regarding the number of victims is not necessary to realize the tragic immensity of the 1941 massacre at Kragujevac. The course of the events directly preceding the mass execution at Kragujevac in no way justifies the final bloody act itself. However, a discussion of the circumstances behind it is necessary to give the tragedy its proper historical context before we consider how the historical memory of Kragujevac has been preserved. The Kragujevac massacre was in line with a directive to the Werhmacht High Command, issued by Hitler himself on September 16, 1941, in which he established the 100 for 1 reprisal ratio. However, it was Franz Boehme, German commanding general in Serbia, who chose to implement Hitler's order in such a "draconian manner."16 The Germans, of course, are ultimately responsible for the Kragujevac atrocity, but what was the reasoning behind Boehme's drastic action?
First, let us look to the summer of
1941 to see how things stood with Tito in Yugoslavia on
the eve of the autumn tragedy in Kragujevac. Seeing an
opportunity to bring the Communist Party of Yugoslavia
into power with himself at the helm, Tito called a
meeting of the Yugoslav Politburo in a suburb of Belgrade
on July 3, 1941 in response to Stalin's call for
Communist resistance in occupied areas after the German
invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.17
As a result of that meeting, a proclamation was issued on
July 4, 1941 in which the Yugoslav Communists vowed to
lead and sustain Presumably, because of the German successes against the Red Army, Tito continued and intensified his military efforts against the Germans during late September 1941. Approximately a month later, 5,000 people, including a large number of students from the local high school, were massacred at Kragujevac. The October massacre at Kragujevac was, according to Tito's flattering biography by Phyllis Auty, "in retaliation for a nearby Partisan raid two days previously in which ten German soldiers had been killed and twenty wounded."19 Mihailovic's distaste for direct conflict with the Germans is well documented and accepted by almost all sources and his resistance group would be the only other possible culprits. Thus, logic adds credence to Tito's assertion in his self-commissioned biography, as referenced above, that Partisan raids triggered the Kragujevac reprisal. In a report from a representative of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs to his superiors, dated October 29, 1941, the reasoning behind the decision to execute people from Kragujevac is revealed: "The executions in Kragujevac occurred although there had been no attacks of the Wehrmacht in this city, for the reason that not enough hostages could be found elsewhere."20 The fate of thousands of people from Kragujevac was sealed by simple geographic proximity to Partisan raiding targets and its population happened to be sufficient to supply the desired number of victims by the Germans. All sources agree that Communists and their sympathizers were specifically targeted at Kragujevac. In fact, the German sources even indicate this fact explicitly. Tito's biography also emphasizes this fact and goes on to remark that Kragujevac was one of a "few industrial centres in Serbia," thus explaining the concentration of Communists and their sympathizers there.21 Surely, the Germans calculated this fact into their decision to chose Kragujevac as the site for their reprisal measure, but the event, due to the sheer number of victims, can still be described as "insanely indiscriminate."22 The German definition of "sympathizer" was quite broad. It included teachers, women, men, schoolchildren, Jews, and any others who had the misfortune to be captured in the German round-up; all shared the same fate. Auty's biography of Tito further asserts that the children "were marched out of school to be shot."23 This implies that the children were not arbitrary victims who died alongside their families, rather, the students were deliberately chosen because of their age and their innocence. Obviously, the Germans wanted to leave the resistance movements and their potential pool of participants with a tragedy of such immense proportions that they would either give up the struggle willingly or be forced out of action due to public pressure. The Germans certainly made a lasting impression at Kragujevac, and that impression would continue to permeate Yugoslav and Serbian national consciousness throughout the post-war era. Once news of the tragedy had spread, the impact on the morale of the Partisan resistance must have been profound. The Partisans responded with rage and new, more pronounced resolutions to rid their homeland of the Fascist aggressors who would dare to find revenge at the expense of thousands of innocent lives.24 Thousands of partisans died either fighting the Germans directly or as victims of harsh reprisal measures. Kragujevac and the chaos of a many-sided military conflict, with the consequent enormous loss of life, had become narrowly, a part of Serbian history, and in a larger sense, of Yugoslav history. |
