80 years ago today the Kragujevac October happened. At least 2778 civilian men and boys were killed.

16 comments
  1. 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. Massacre victims also included Jews, Romani people, Bosniaks, Macedonians, Slovenes, and members of other nationalities, and included 144 high school students.

    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 10 German soldiers and the wounding of 26 others. The number of people to be shot was calculated based on a ratio of 100 executed for every German soldier killed and 50 executed for every German soldier wounded.

    There’s a vast Memorial park with numerous monuments and a museum to commemorate the event:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0umarice_Memorial_Park

    The massacre happened just a day after the Kraljevo massacre of 1,800 people, which I made a post about yesterday, ended:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/qbv2je/80_years_ago_on_this_day_the_kraljevo_massacre/hhc4tjw/

    And just two days after the Draginac massacre of 2950 people ended (can’t find an English wiki link, but I’ll link to the Spomenik database and to Serbian wikipedia):

    https://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BA%D1%80_%D1%83_%D0%94%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B3%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%86%D1%83

    https://www.spomenikdatabase.org/draginac

  2. It’s disgusting what atrocities usual german soldiers in Wehrmacht were commiting in Yugoslavia and then they tried to hide that facts.

    What’s even worse is that Germans were not the only ones who tried to hide this with ‘clean Wehrmacht’ myth

    Italians had “Good Italian” myth which characterized Italian national identity. Italian romance, Christianity and approachability have been put at the forefront of
    narratives of “Italianness,” and postwar popular narratives portray that this attitude held fast amongst Italian citizens and soldiers even during wartime.

    The actions of individuals like General Mario Roatta (responsible for Italian military invasion of Croatia) and his men, who killed and/or deported to concentration camps tens of thousands of people from occupied
    Yugoslav territories between 1941 and 1943, were portrayed by popular postwar narratives as an anomaly.

    I their postwar narrative, It was only Mussolini and “henchmen” like Roatta who were responsible for war
    crimes and Fascist brutality, while the rest of the Italian population were innocent and unwilling bystanders.

  3. It is interesting that US never experienced Nazi atrocities on its soil, but its culture and media are the most obssessed ones with fear of Nazis, and throw the word around like free candy.

  4. It’s hard to believe things like this happened within living memory , what kind of people would do this ? What kind of mindset did they have ? How could any human sleep at night after doing this ? Never forget

  5. Its a war crime no doubt.

    Just like it would have been if they firebombed civilian city centres.

    The method of terrorising civilians and killing them makes no difference to me.

  6. You can just try to imagine what kind of a horror WW2 was when killing almost 3.000 innocent people in a day got such a small, random memorial.

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