Today is the 80th anniversary of the Oct 14th massacre of approximately 2000 civilians in Kraljevo, Serbia by Wehrmacht soldiers during WWII. This memorial park was created in 1970 at the site of the tragedy, to mark this event.
Today is the 80th anniversary of the Oct 14th massacre of approximately 2000 civilians in Kraljevo, Serbia by Wehrmacht soldiers during WWII. This memorial park was created in 1970 at the site of the tragedy, to mark this event.
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> The number of hostages to be shot was calculated based on 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.
> The Wehrmacht initially responded by rounding up and executing 300 Serbian civilians, described in contemporary documents as “communists, nationalists, democrats and Jews.” Over the following several days, all men between the ages of 14 and 60 were arrested and herded into a makeshift detention centre at the local rolling-stock factory. Once there, their papers were checked and their names entered into a ledger. When the camp was full, the Wehrmacht ordered groups of 100 prisoners to march to pre-dug mass graves, where they were executed with heavy machine guns.
> The bodies were then examined for any signs of life; victims that had survived the initial volley were dealt a single bullet to the head. Once the first group had been liquidated, the soldiers returned to the factory and collected the next 100 victims. This process continued until all the men that were rounded up had been killed. The reprisals lasted several days. Following the shooting of hostages from the rolling-stock factory, the Wehrmacht deployed through the surrounding villages, burning homes and killing indiscriminately.
> The massacre at Kraljevo, as well as a similar and nearly concurrent massacre in nearby Kragujevac, convinced German commanders that mass killings of Serbian hostages were not only ineffectual but also counterproductive, as they drove locals into the hands of insurgents and sometimes resulted in the deaths of factory workers contributing to the German war effort. Following the war, several senior German military officials were tried and convicted for their involvement in the reprisal shootings at the Nuremberg Trials and the Subsequent Nuremberg trials.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraljevo_massacre?wprov=sfla1
Incoming clean Wehrmacht (>!myth!<) idiots…
but you still see the clean weramacht myths upvoted here