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98-564: Konstantin Mušicki ( Serbian Cyrillic : Константин Коста Мушицки ; 7 April 1897 – 17 July 1946) was a Yugoslav brigadier general who commanded the collaborationist Serbian Volunteer Corps during World War II . He was captured by the British Army at the end of the war, but was subsequently handed over to the Yugoslav authorities, who tried and executed him for war crimes. Kosta Mušicki

196-808: A 2014 survey, 47% of the Serbian population write in the Latin alphabet whereas 36% write in Cyrillic. The following table provides the upper and lower case forms of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, along with the equivalent forms in the Serbian Latin alphabet and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) value for each letter. The letters do not have names, and consonants are normally pronounced as such when spelling

294-467: A book listing the names and personal data of 2,794 victims. Of the total killed, 144 were high school students, and five of the victims were 12 years old. The last living survivor of the massacre, Dragoljub Jovanović, died in October 2018 at the age of 94. He survived despite sustaining eleven bullet wounds and had to have one of his legs amputated. After the war, he was appointed the inaugural director of

392-539: A challenge in Unicode modeling, as the glyphs differ only in italic versions, and historically non-italic letters have been used in the same code positions. Serbian professional typography uses fonts specially crafted for the language to overcome the problem, but texts printed from common computers contain East Slavic rather than Serbian italic glyphs. Cyrillic fonts from Adobe, Microsoft (Windows Vista and later) and

490-465: A few days before Captain Bill Hudson , a Special Operations Executive officer, met with Mihailović at his Ravna Gora headquarters. Hudson witnessed the aftermath of the massacre and noted the psychological toll it exacted. "Morning and night was the most desolating atmosphere," he recounted, "because the women were out in the fields, and every sunrise and sunset you would hear the wails. This had

588-457: A few other font houses include the Serbian variations (both regular and italic). If the underlying font and Web technology provides support, the proper glyphs can be obtained by marking the text with appropriate language codes. Thus, in non-italic mode: whereas: Since Unicode unifies different glyphs in same characters, font support must be present to display the correct variant. The standard Serbian keyboard layout for personal computers

686-558: A former motorised battalion at Stanovija Field. Over 7,000 hostages were assembled. German troops and ethnic German units from the Banat were involved in the round-up, as was the 5th Regiment of the SDK, under the command of Marisav Petrović. According to von Bischofhausen, König permitted several classes of males to be excluded from the round-up, including those with a special pass issued by von Bischofhausen's district headquarters, members of

784-434: A joint Partisan-Chetnik attack on Kraljevo , a city about 150 kilometres (93 mi) south of Belgrade and 50 kilometres (31 mi) southeast of Gornji Milanovac. On 15 October, troops of the 717th Infantry Division shot 300 civilians from Kraljevo in reprisal. These reprisal killings continued over the following days, and by 17 or 20 October, German troops had rounded up and shot 1,736 men and 19 "communist" women from

882-525: A morning attack against the school. Although they were successful in overrunning the sentry posts, the Germans' heavy machine guns soon stopped the assault. In 90 minutes of fighting, ten Germans were killed and 26 wounded. The two insurgent groups judged that continuing the assault would be too costly and Vučković suggested negotiating with the Germans. Knowing the Germans would be far more likely to carry out negotiations with royalists than with communists,

980-487: A population of 3.8 million. Hitler had briefly considered erasing all existence of a Serbian state, but this was quickly abandoned and the Germans began searching for a Serb suitable to lead a puppet government in Belgrade. They initially settled on Milan Aćimović , a staunch anti-communist who served as Yugoslavia's minister of internal affairs in late 1939 and early 1940. Two resistance movements emerged following

1078-474: A population of more than 40,000 in 1941, and was the headquarters of a German military district. The city was also home to Yugoslavia's largest armaments factory , which had between 7,000 and 8,000 workers before the invasion. A report was written by the military district commander in Kragujevac, Hauptmann Otto von Bischofhausen, immediately after the massacre. This report was addressed to Böhme, and

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1176-511: A profound effect on the course of the war in Yugoslavia . It exacerbated tensions between the two guerrilla movements, the communist-led Partisans and the royalist, Serbian nationalist Chetniks , and convinced Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović that further attacks against the Germans would only result in more Serb civilian deaths. The Germans soon found mass executions of Serbs to be ineffectual and counterproductive, as they tended to drive

1274-579: A very strong effect on Mihailović." "The tragedy gave to Nedić convincing proof that the Serbs would be biologically exterminated if they were not submissive," Djilas wrote, "and to the Chetniks proof that the Partisans were prematurely provoking the Germans". Mihailović's decision to refrain from attacking the Germans led to a rift with Tito and the Partisans. The Chetniks' non-resistance made it easier for

1372-451: A vital profession or trade, and those who were members of Ljotić's movement. When too few adult males could be located, high school students were also rounded up. Also seized were priests and monks from the city's churches. Each hostage was registered and his belongings noted meticulously. The hostages were held overnight on a public plaza in the town. In his version of events, von Bischofhausen claimed that he made objections to König, but

1470-611: Is as follows: Kragujevac massacre 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

1568-636: Is necessary (or followed by a short schwa , e.g. /fə/).: Summary tables According to tradition, Glagolitic was invented by the Byzantine Christian missionaries and brothers Saints Cyril and Methodius in the 860s, amid the Christianization of the Slavs . Glagolitic alphabet appears to be older, predating the introduction of Christianity, only formalized by Cyril and expanded to cover non-Greek sounds. The Glagolitic alphabet

1666-646: Is now known as the October in Kragujevac Memorial Park , and covers 353 hectares (870 acres) encompassing the area that contains the mass graves. The 21st October Museum was founded within the park on 15 February 1976. Šumarice is the site of a televised annual commemoration known as the Grand School Lecture (Serbian: Veliki školski čas ) that attracts thousands of attendees every year. The park contains several monuments, including

1764-604: Is seen as being more traditional, and has the official status (designated in the constitution as the " official script ", compared to Latin's status of "script in official use" designated by a lower-level act, for national minorities). It is also an official script in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro , along with Gaj's Latin alphabet . Serbian Cyrillic is in official use in Serbia , Montenegro , and Bosnia and Herzegovina . Although Bosnia "officially accept[s] both alphabets",

1862-477: Is the only one in official use. The ligatures : were developed specially for the Serbian alphabet. Serbian Cyrillic does not use several letters encountered in other Slavic Cyrillic alphabets. It does not use hard sign ( ъ ) and soft sign ( ь ), particularly due to a lack of distinction between iotated consonants and non-iotated consonants, but the aforementioned soft-sign ligatures instead. It does not have Russian/Belarusian Э , Ukrainian/Belarusian І ,

1960-856: The Axis powers and Mušicki remained in Slavonski Brod for several months after the conquest. He attempted to join the Ustaše Militia there, but was rejected. He went to Belgrade in mid-August, where he was received by Zbor leader Dimitrije Ljotić . On 6 October, Milan Nedić , the Prime Minister of the Axis-installed puppet Government of National Salvation , appointed Mušicki to lead the Serbian Volunteer Command ( Serbian : Srpska dobrovoljačka komanda , SDK). In

2058-579: The Holocaust historian Mark Levene writes, "Germans in uniform were not that particular about whom they shot in reprisal, especially in the Balkans, where the populace were deemed subhuman." Victims of the mass executions included Serbs, Jews, Romani people , Muslims , Macedonians , Slovenes and members of other nationalities. Following the massacre, the Wehrmacht held a military parade through

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2156-474: The Kragujevac massacre . He was found guilty of collaborating with the Germans, sentenced to death, and was executed by firing squad in Belgrade on 17 July 1946. Serbian Cyrillic alphabet Reformed Serbian based its alphabet on the previous 18th century Slavonic-Serbian script, following the principle of "write as you speak and read as it is written", removing obsolete letters and letters representing iotated vowels , introducing ⟨J⟩ from

2254-536: The Latin alphabet instead, and adding several consonant letters for sounds specific to Serbian phonology . During the same period, linguists led by Ljudevit Gaj adapted the Latin alphabet, in use in western South Slavic areas, using the same principles. As a result of this joint effort, Serbian Cyrillic and Gaj's Latin alphabets have a complete one-to-one congruence, with the Latin digraphs Lj, Nj, and Dž counting as single letters. The updated Serbian Cyrillic alphabet

2352-566: The Nazi puppet Independent State of Croatia banned the use of Cyrillic, having regulated it on 25 April 1941, and in June 1941 began eliminating " Eastern " (Serbian) words from Croatian, and shut down Serbian schools. The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet was used as a basis for the Macedonian alphabet with the work of Krste Misirkov and Venko Markovski . The Serbian Cyrillic script was one of

2450-540: The Serbian Volunteer Command ( Serbo-Croatian : Srpska dobrovoljačka komanda ; SDK), an auxiliary paramilitary formation to help quell anti-German resistance. In effect, the SDK was the military arm of the fascist Yugoslav National Movement (Serbo-Croatian: Združena borbena organizacija rada , Zbor ), led by Dimitrije Ljotić . It was originally intended to have a strength of 3,000–4,000 troops, but this number eventually rose to 12,000. It

2548-522: The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and subsequent Austro-Hungarian military defeats at the hands of the Royal Serbian Army , which he thought could only be rectified by the reprisal shooting of Serbian civilians. "Your objective", Böhme declared, "is to be achieved in a land where, in 1914, streams of German blood flowed because of the treachery of the Serbs, men and women. You are the avengers of those dead." By late September 1941,

2646-495: The djerv (Ꙉꙉ) for the Serbian reflexes of Pre-Slavic *tj and *dj (* t͡ɕ , * d͡ʑ , * d͡ʒ , and * tɕ ), later the letter evolved to dje (Ђђ) and tshe (Ћћ) letters . Vuk Stefanović Karadžić fled Serbia during the Serbian Revolution in 1813, to Vienna. There he met Jernej Kopitar , a linguist with interest in slavistics. Kopitar and Sava Mrkalj helped Vuk to reform Serbian and its orthography. He finalized

2744-485: The firing squad , many hostages sang the patriotic song " Hey, Slavs ", which became Yugoslavia's national anthem after the war. One German soldier was shot for refusing to participate in the killings. A German report stated: "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." Even some German informants were inadvertently killed. "Clearly",

2842-774: The 125th Infantry Regiment from Greece and the 342nd Infantry Division from France to help put down the uprising in Serbia. On 16 September, Hitler issued Directive No. 312 to Generalfeldmarschall ( field marshal ) Wilhelm List , the Wehrmacht commander in Southeast Europe, ordering him to suppress all resistance in that part of the continent. That same day, the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces ( Oberkommando der Wehrmacht ; OKW) issued Hitler's order on

2940-591: The 21st October Museum. In Yugoslav popular memory, the massacre at Kragujevac came to symbolise the brutality of the German occupation. It has drawn comparisons to the Germans' destruction of the Czechoslovak village of Lidice in June 1942 and the massacre in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane in June 1944. To commemorate the victims, the whole of Šumarice was designated as a memorial park in 1953. It

3038-557: The 3 and 13 October 1914 banned the use of Serbian Cyrillic in the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia , limiting it for use in religious instruction. A decree was passed on January 3, 1915, that banned Serbian Cyrillic completely from public use. An imperial order on October 25, 1915, banned the use of Serbian Cyrillic in the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina , except "within the scope of Serbian Orthodox Church authorities". In 1941,

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3136-493: The Germans by the puppet government, who also paid the troops at the same rates as the Serbian police. The service oath of this latter SDK was amended to state that the members of the SDK would fight, to the death if necessary, both the Yugoslav Partisans and the Chetniks. Neither organisation was able to infiltrate the SDK due to its indoctrination with the ideas of Ljotić. Mušicki was re-appointed as its commander in

3234-463: The Germans increased in the first half of the year and Serbia once again became a war zone. German troops fanned through the countryside burning villages, taking hostages and establishing concentration camps. The first mass executions of hostages commenced in July. The strengthening of Germany's military presence in Serbia resulted in a new wave of mass executions and war crimes . The commanders who bore

3332-454: The Germans to confront the Partisans, who for much of the remainder of the war could not defeat them in open combat. On 11 November 1941, the Partisans captured a Wehrmacht officer named Renner, the area commander in Leskovac , who was taking part in an anti-Partisan sweep around Lebane . Mistaking him for König, who by some accounts had given Renner a cigarette case engraved with his name,

3430-540: The III. Battalion of the 749th Infantry Regiment and the I. Battalion of the 724th Infantry Regiment, part of the 704th Infantry Division. In response to this proposal, von Bischofhausen claimed that he suggested to the garrison commander, Major Paul König, that instead of using the population of Kragujevac, the required hostages be gathered from surrounding villages which were known to be "completely strewn with communists". According to von Bischofhausen's account, this suggestion

3528-494: The III. Battalion to Rudnik to relieve the unit. Assuming he would have to pass through Gornji Milanovac on his way back, he decided to postpone the taking of hostages in Gornji Milanovac and the razing of the town until his return from Rudnik. Contrary to Fiedler's expectations, the battalion was ordered back to Kragujevac immediately after relieving the unit at Rudnik, and was thus unable to raze Gornji Milanovac. Böhme

3626-496: The III. Battalion's commanding officer, hoped to use this man to contact the Chetnik command and organize a prisoner exchange . Fearing that such an action would jeopardize the recovery of the German prisoners, Fiedler decided not to raze Gornji Milanovac. Around this time, Fiedler received an SOS signal from nearby Rudnik , where another German unit was involved in heavy fighting with the guerrillas. Fiedler decided to redirect

3724-765: The Interrupted Flight monument to the murdered high school students and their teachers, and the monuments Pain and Defiance, One Hundred for One, and Resistance and Freedom. The site sustained damage during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. In 2012, the National Assembly of Serbia passed a law declaring 21 October the Day of Remembrance of the Serbian Victims of World War II. Germany's Federal Cabinet has never officially apologized for any of

3822-645: The Latin script is almost always used in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina , whereas Cyrillic is in everyday use in Republika Srpska . The Serbian language in Croatia is officially recognized as a minority language; however, the use of Cyrillic in bilingual signs has sparked protests and vandalism . Serbian Cyrillic is an important symbol of Serbian identity. In Serbia, official documents are printed in Cyrillic only even though, according to

3920-400: The Partisans allowed the Chetniks to conduct the negotiating in order to lure the garrison out of the town. A Chetnik envoy delivered an ultimatum to the garrison, demanding that it surrender to the guerrillas. The ultimatum was rejected. Thirty minutes later, a second Chetnik envoy appeared, guaranteeing the 6th Company unmolested passage to Čačak on the condition that it left Gornji Milanovac

4018-548: The Partisans and Chetniks were carrying out joint attacks against the Germans. The Partisans were well organised and many of their commanders had ample military experience, having fought in the Spanish Civil War . Within several months of the invasion, they had 8,000 fighters spread across 21 detachments in Serbia alone. Many Chetniks were either veterans of the Balkan Wars and World War I or former members of

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4116-420: The Partisans and Chetniks. They also convinced Mihailović that active resistance was futile for as long as the Germans held an unassailable military advantage in the Balkans, and that killing German troops would only result in the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Serbs. He therefore decided to scale back Chetnik guerrilla attacks and wait for an Allied landing in the Balkans. The killings occurred only

4214-482: The Partisans executed Renner as a war criminal. For almost fifty years, it was widely believed that König, and not Renner, had been killed by the Partisans. In 1952, a plaque was erected at the place where König was purported to have been killed, and a song was written about the incident. In the 1980s, it was conclusively proven that the German officer executed by the Partisans in November 1941 was not König. A new plaque

4312-475: The Partisans sought to turn Yugoslavia into a communist state under Tito's leadership, the Chetniks sought a return to the pre-war status quo , whereby the Yugoslav monarchy—and, by extension, Serb political hegemony—would be restored. Communist resistance commenced in early July, shortly after the invasion of the Soviet Union, targeting both the Germans and the puppet authorities. By late August 1941,

4410-714: The Royal Yugoslav Army. They boasted around 20,000 fighters in the German-occupied territory of Serbia at the time of the massacre. On 29 August, the Germans replaced Aćimović with another fervent anti-communist, the former Minister of the Army and Navy and Chief of the General Staff , General Milan Nedić , who formed a new puppet government . In September, the Nedić government was permitted to form

4508-438: The Wehrmacht be forgotten," she remarked, "and that, building on that remembrance, we want to foster good and friendly relations with our Serbian friends and partners." The Serbian poet and writer Desanka Maksimović wrote a poem about the massacre titled Krvava bajka ("A Bloody Fairy Tale"). The poem was later included in the Yugoslav secondary school curriculum and schoolchildren were required to memorise it. It ranks among

4606-493: 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

4704-576: The alphabet in 1818 with the Serbian Dictionary . Karadžić reformed standard Serbian and standardised the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet by following strict phonemic principles on the Johann Christoph Adelung ' model and Jan Hus ' Czech alphabet . Karadžić's reforms of standard Serbian modernised it and distanced it from Serbian and Russian Church Slavonic , instead bringing it closer to common folk speech, specifically, to

4802-517: The city and its outskirts, despite attempts by local collaborationists to mitigate the punishment. These executions were personally supervised by the commander of the 717th Infantry Division, Generalmajor ( brigadier general ) Paul Hoffmann  [ nl ] . Kragujevac is an industrial city in Central Serbia , about 100 kilometres (62 mi) south of Belgrade, and 37 kilometres (23 mi) east of Gornji Milanovac. It had

4900-399: The city centre. On 31 October, Böhme sent a report to the acting Wehrmacht commander in Southeast Europe, General der Pioniere (lieutenant general) Walter Kuntze , reporting that 2,300 hostages had been shot in Kragujevac. The Partisan commander and later historian Milovan Djilas recalled in his memoirs how the Kragujevac massacre gripped all of Serbia in "deathly horror". Throughout

4998-626: The combined strength of the Axis powers and surrendered in less than two weeks. The government and royal family went into exile, and the country was occupied and dismembered by its neighbours. The German-occupied territory of Serbia was limited to the pre- Balkan War borders of the Kingdom of Serbia and was directly occupied by the Germans for the key rail and riverine transport routes that passed through it, as well as its valuable resources, particularly non-ferrous metals . The occupied territory covered about 51,000 km (20,000 sq mi) and had

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5096-478: The country's regent , Prince Paul , in a bloodless coup d'état . They placed his teenage nephew, Peter , on the throne and brought to power a "government of national unity" led by the head of the Royal Yugoslav Air Force, General Dušan Simović . The coup enraged Hitler, who immediately ordered the country's invasion , which commenced on 6 April 1941. Yugoslavia was quickly overwhelmed by

5194-563: The dialect of Eastern Herzegovina which he spoke. Karadžić was, together with Đuro Daničić , the main Serbian signatory to the Vienna Literary Agreement of 1850 which, encouraged by Austrian authorities, laid the foundation for Serbian, various forms of which are used by Serbs in Serbia , Montenegro , Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia today. Karadžić also translated the New Testament into Serbian, which

5292-483: The efficacy of such killings, as they pushed thousands of Serbs into the hands of anti-German guerrillas. In Kraljevo, the entire Serbian workforce of an aeroplane factory producing armaments for the Germans was shot. This helped convince the OKW that arbitrary shootings of Serbs not only incurred a significant political cost but were also counterproductive. The killings at Kragujevac and Kraljevo exacerbated tensions between

5390-483: The evening of November 31 1941 Chetnik commander Predrag Raković met with Mušicki in Čačak . Mušicki was in charge of forces of quisling government in destroying remnants of Yugoslav Partisans in western Serbia, following suppression of Uprising in Serbia . After the meeting, Raković wrote a report to Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović that destruction of communists was goal of both Chetniks, as well as Germans and Ljotić's men, so they became allies in this job. Mušicki

5488-408: The exclusion of those that were deemed by Zbor to be worth saving. On the morning of 21 October, the assembled men and boys were marched to a field outside the town. Over a period of seven hours, they were lined up in groups of 50 to 120 and shot with heavy machine guns. "Go ahead and shoot", said an elderly teacher, "I am conducting my class". He was shot together with his students. As they faced

5586-536: 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. 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 . The massacre had

5684-403: The foremost authority on German terror in Serbia, Venceslav Glišić, placed the figure at about 3,000. In 2007, Pavlowitch wrote that inflated figures of 6,000–7,000 victims were advanced and widely believed for many years, but that German and Serbian scholars had recently agreed on the figure of 2,778. In the same year, the curator of the 21st October Museum at Kragujevac, Staniša Brkić, published

5782-457: The hostage pool were accused of being communists or spreading "communist propaganda". The Zbor officials told them they were not "worth saving" because they had "infected the younger generation with their leftist ideas." The Germans considered Zbor' s involvement to be a "nuisance". According to the social scientist Jovan Byford, it was never intended or likely to reduce the overall number of hostages killed in reprisal, and served only to ensure

5880-616: The invasion: the communist -led, multi-ethnic Partisans , and the royalist, Serbian nationalist Chetniks , although during 1941, within the occupied territory, even the Partisans consisted almost entirely of Serbs. The Partisans were led by the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia , Josip Broz Tito ; the Chetniks were led by Colonel Draža Mihailović , an officer in the interwar Royal Yugoslav Army . The two movements had widely divergent goals. Whereas

5978-522: The king's assassination in 1934. Mušicki was stationed in Slavonski Brod at the time of the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 and served as the Royal Yugoslav Army commander responsible for the railroad between Belgrade and Zagreb in the rank of colonel . He demonstrated his support for the Germans by helping their forces during the invasion. Yugoslavia was quickly conquered by

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6076-457: The latter insisted that his orders, which had been issued by the commander of the 749th Infantry Regiment, were to be carried out. Shortly before the executions commenced, Ljotić obtained approval for two Zbor officials to scrutinise the hostages. Over 3,000 individuals, those identified as being "genuine nationalists" and "real patriots", were excluded from the execution lists as a result of Ljotić's intervention. Those who were not extracted from

6174-527: The mass executions committed by the Wehrmacht in the occupied territory of Serbia during World War II, including the Kragujevac massacre. On 21 October 2021, Vice President of the Bundestag Claudia Roth became the first senior German government official to attend the annual commemoration at Šumarice. "My intention in attending was to underline that we will not let the crimes of the Nazis and

6272-468: The massacre is commemorated annually in Serbia as the Day of Remembrance of the Serbian Victims of World War II. Following the 1938 Anschluss between Nazi Germany and Austria , Yugoslavia came to share its northwestern border with Germany and fell under increasing pressure as its neighbours aligned themselves with the Axis powers . In April 1939, Italy opened a second frontier with Yugoslavia when it invaded and occupied neighbouring Albania . At

6370-473: The most famous Serbian-language poems. Recitations of it form the centerpiece of the annual commemoration ceremonies at Šumarice. In 1965, the Belgian poet Karel Jonckheere wrote the poem Kinderen met krekelstem ("Children with Cricket Voices"), also about the massacre. The Blue Butterfly , a book of poetry by Richard Berengarten , is based on the poet's experiences while visiting Kragujevac in 1985, when

6468-542: The most responsibility for these atrocities were primarily of Austrian origin and had served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I. Most were ardently anti-Serb , a prejudice that the historian Stevan K. Pavlowitch links to the Nazis' wider anti- Slavic racism. On 19 September, General der Gebirgstruppe ( lieutenant general ) Franz Böhme was appointed as Plenipotentiary Commanding General in Serbia, with direct responsibility for quelling

6566-425: The outbreak of World War II, the Yugoslav government declared its neutrality . Between September and November 1940, Hungary and Romania joined the Tripartite Pact , aligning themselves with the Axis, and Italy invaded Greece . Yugoslavia was by then almost completely surrounded by the Axis powers and their satellites, and its neutral stance toward the war became strained. In late February 1941, Bulgaria joined

6664-488: The pact. The following day, German troops entered Bulgaria from Romania, closing the ring around Yugoslavia. Intending to secure his southern flank for the impending attack on the Soviet Union , German dictator Adolf Hitler began placing heavy pressure on Yugoslavia to join the Axis. On 25 March 1941, after some delay, the Yugoslav government conditionally signed the pact. Two days later, a group of pro-Western, Serbian nationalist Royal Yugoslav Air Force officers deposed

6762-408: The population into the arms of insurgents. The ratio of 100 executions for one soldier killed and 50 executions for one soldier wounded was reduced by half in February 1943, and removed altogether later in the year. The massacre is commemorated by the October in Kragujevac Memorial Park and the co-located 21 October Museum, and has been the subject of several poems and feature films. The anniversary of

6860-415: The rank of general. The SDK was the only Serbian armed force that the Germans trusted during the war, and its units were often praised by German commanders for their bravery in combat. Mušicki attempted to flee Yugoslavia towards the end of the war, but was captured by the British. He was extradited to Yugoslavia and placed on trial. At his trial, he gave testimony about the involvement of Serbian volunteers in

6958-428: The recovery of the captured German troops. The III. Battalion started its advance on 5 October, fighting its way along the 40-kilometre (25 mi) road to Gornji Milanovac and sustaining casualties in the process. Upon entering Gornji Milanovac, it gathered between 120 and 170 male hostages, among them a Chetnik commander who had been scheduled to meet his superiors the following day. Hauptmann ( Captain ) Fiedler,

7056-526: The revolt, bringing with him the staff of XVIII Mountain Corps . He was allocated additional forces to assist him in doing so, reinforcing the three German occupation divisions already in the territory. These divisions were the 704th Infantry Division , 714th Infantry Division and 717th infantry divisions . Böhme boasted a profound hatred of Serbs and encouraged his predominantly Austrian-born troops to exact "vengeance" against them. His primary grievances were

7154-404: The same day. He further requested that the town and its inhabitants be spared from any possible reprisals. The commander of the 6th Company agreed and evacuated the garrison. Around 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) outside Gornji Milanovac, the 6th Company was surrounded by the guerrillas and forced to surrender. The 6th Company's disappearance caused unease in the German ranks. A reconnaissance flight

7252-768: The semi-vowels Й or Ў , nor the iotated letters Я (Russian/Bulgarian ya ), Є (Ukrainian ye ), Ї ( yi ), Ё (Russian yo ) or Ю ( yu ), which are instead written as two separate letters: Ја, Је, Ји, Јо, Ју . Ј can also be used as a semi-vowel, in place of й . The letter Щ is not used. When necessary, it is transliterated as either ШЧ , ШЋ or ШТ . Serbian italic and cursive forms of lowercase letters б , г , д , п , and т (Russian Cyrillic alphabet) differ from those used in other Cyrillic alphabets: б , г , д , п , and т (Serbian Cyrillic alphabet). The regular (upright) shapes are generally standardized among languages and there are no officially recognized variations. That presents

7350-721: The suppression of "Communist Armed Resistance Movements in the Occupied Areas", signed by Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel . This decree specified that all attacks against the Germans on the Eastern Front were to be "regarded as being of communist origin", and that 100 hostages were to be shot for every German soldier killed and 50 were to be shot for every German soldier wounded. It was intended to apply to all of Eastern Europe , though an identical policy had already been implemented in Serbia as early as 28 April 1941, aimed at deterring guerrilla attacks. Attacks against

7448-646: The time Böhme was relieved as Plenipotentiary Commanding General in December 1941, between 20,000 and 30,000 civilians had been killed in German reprisal shootings. The ratio of 100 executions for each soldier killed and 50 executions for each soldier wounded was reduced by half in February 1943, and removed altogether later in the year. Henceforth, each individual execution had to be approved by Special Envoy Hermann Neubacher . The massacres in Kragujevac and Kraljevo caused German military commanders in Serbia to question

7546-476: The town of Gornji Milanovac had effectively been cut off from the rest of German-occupied Serbia by the frequent disruption of road and rail transport leading to and from it. On 29 September, elements of the Takovo Chetnik and Čačak Partisan detachments attacked Gornji Milanovac, which was defended by the 6th Company of the 920th Landesschützen (local defence) Battalion. The 6th Company's garrison

7644-545: The two official scripts used to write Serbo-Croatian in Yugoslavia since its establishment in 1918, the other being Gaj's Latin alphabet ( latinica ). Following the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Serbian Cyrillic is no longer used in Croatia on national level, while in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro it remained an official script. Under the Constitution of Serbia of 2006, Cyrillic script

7742-472: The war, local collaborators pressured the Germans to implement stringent vetting procedures to ensure that "innocent civilians" were not executed, though only when the hostages were ethnic Serbs. The scale of the massacres in Kragujevac and Kraljevo resulted in no quarter being given to German POWs by the guerrillas. "The enemy changed his attitude toward German prisoners," one senior Wehrmacht officer reported. "They are now usually being maltreated and shot." By

7840-448: The war. In 1969, the historian Jozo Tomasevich wrote that, despite German official sources stating 2,300 hostages had been shot, both the Partisans and Chetniks had agreed that the number of victims was about 7,000. He further stated that careful investigation by the scholar Jovan Marjanović in 1967 had put the figure at about 5,000. In 1975, Tomasevich noted that some estimates of the number of those killed were as high as 7,000, but that

7938-635: 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

8036-630: Was based on the Slavic dialect of Thessaloniki . Part of the Serbian literary heritage of the Middle Ages are works such as Miroslav Gospel , Vukan Gospels , St. Sava's Nomocanon , Dušan's Code , Munich Serbian Psalter , and others. The first printed book in Serbian was the Cetinje Octoechos (1494). It's notable extensive use of diacritical signs by the Resava dialect and use of

8134-477: Was based out of a local school. The guerrillas did not expect to capture the garrison, but undertook the attack in order to generate new recruits from the surrounding area. The local Chetnik commander, Zvonimir Vučković , became aware of the Partisan plans and decided to join in the attack to avoid the significant loss of prestige that would result from allowing the Partisans to attack alone. The insurgents launched

8232-614: Was born on 7 April 1897 in Slavonski Brod , Austria-Hungary (now in Croatia ) to Milutin and Jelena Mušicki ( née Mihailović). An ethnic Serb , he began his military service in the Austro-Hungarian Army . He later married and had two children. During the interwar period , Mušicki served as an aide to King Alexander and Queen Maria . He joined the fascist Yugoslav National Movement ( Serbian : Југословенски народни покрет, Збор , Jugoslovenski narodni pokret , Zbor ) following

8330-466: Was dispatched to locate it, to no avail. The occupational authorities were unaware of the 6th Company's fate until a German officer escaped and informed them of what had transpired. He reported that the German prisoners were being humanely treated, but when Böhme became aware of the situation, he decided that retaliation was needed. He ordered the III. Battalion of the 749th Infantry Regiment to burn down Gornji Milanovac and take hostages in order to expedite

8428-472: Was found guilty on Count 1, as well as on another count. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1948, but was released due to ill health in December 1952. Despite this, he lived until June 1971. Keitel was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Trials , and subsequently hanged. Hoffmann, whom the local population dubbed the "butcher of Kraljevo and Kragujevac",

8526-399: Was furious, and on 15 October, he sent the III. Battalion back to Gornji Milanovac to carry out his original orders. The battalion returned to Gornji Milanovac the same day, but now only forty people could be found to be taken as hostages. The town was then razed. This time, no attempt to exchange the hostages was made. On 15–16 October, ten German soldiers were killed and 14 wounded during

8624-631: Was gradually superseded in later centuries by the Cyrillic script, developed around by Cyril's disciples, perhaps at the Preslav Literary School at the end of the 9th century. The earliest form of Cyrillic was the ustav , based on Greek uncial script, augmented by ligatures and letters from the Glagolitic alphabet for consonants not found in Greek. There was no distinction between capital and lowercase letters. The standard language

8722-448: Was headed by Kosta Mušicki , a former colonel in the Royal Yugoslav Army, whom Nedić appointed on 6 October 1941. In the early stages of the occupation, the SDK formed the bulk of Nedić's forces, which numbered around 20,000 men by late 1941. Nedić's inability to crush the Partisans and Chetniks prompted the military commander in Serbia to request German reinforcements from other parts of the continent. In mid-September, they transferred

8820-406: Was initially accepted by König, and on 19 October, the III. Battalion "mopped up" the villages of Mečkovac and Maršić and the I. Battalion conducted a similar operation in the villages of Grošnica and Milatovac. A total of 422 men were shot in these four villages, without any German losses. On the evening of 19 October, von Bischofhausen again met with König and was told that the original proposal

8918-413: Was involved in executing Serb civilians in the town of Čačak in December 1941. He and Milan Aćimović contacted Draža Mihailović on 5 December, possibly in an effort to warn him in advance of the assault the Germans had planned, codenamed Operation Mihailovic . This action prompted the Germans to question Mušicki's loyalty. He was removed from command at the end of 1941 and imprisoned by the Germans, but

9016-629: Was later freed at Nedić's intervention. In early 1943, the Serbian Volunteer Command was renamed the Serbian Volunteer Corps ( Serbian : Srpski dobrovoljački korpus , SDK), and placed under the direct command of General der Artillerie Paul Bader , the commanding general in Serbia. The SDK was not part of the SS, nor was it formally a part of the Wehrmacht . It was fed and clothed to German standards, with these expenses reimbursed to

9114-454: Was later tendered in evidence at the Subsequent Nuremberg trials . According to von Bischofhausen, in the late evening of 18 October, all male Jews in Kragujevac, along with some communists, were arrested according to lists, totalling 70 persons. As this constituted far too few hostages to meet the quota of 2,300, it was proposed to collect the balance by arrests on the streets, squares and houses of Kragujevac, in an operation to be conducted by

9212-664: Was officially adopted in the Principality of Serbia in 1868, and was in exclusive use in the country up to the interwar period . Both alphabets were official in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and later in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia . Due to the shared cultural area, Gaj's Latin alphabet saw a gradual adoption in the Socialist Republic of Serbia since, and both scripts are used to write modern standard Serbian. In Serbia , Cyrillic

9310-548: Was promoted to command the more capable 352nd Infantry Division in November 1941. He ended the war as the commander of a prisoner-of-war camp , having been demoted for refusing to shoot deserters in Ukraine. The 717th Infantry Division was reorganised as the 117th Jäger Division later in the war and its troops took part in the massacre of hundreds of Greek civilians at Kalavryta in December 1943. At least 31 mass graves were discovered in Kragujevac and its surroundings after

9408-582: Was published in 1868. He wrote several books; Mala prostonarodna slaveno-serbska pesnarica and Pismenica serbskoga jezika in 1814, and two more in 1815 and 1818, all with the alphabet still in progress. In his letters from 1815 to 1818 he used: Ю, Я, Ы and Ѳ. In his 1815 song book he dropped the Ѣ. The alphabet was officially adopted in 1868, four years after his death. From the Old Slavic script Vuk retained these 24 letters: He added one Latin letter: And 5 new ones: He removed: Orders issued on

9506-595: Was thus dedicated in 1990. List and Böhme were both captured at the end of the war. On 10 May 1947, they were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity as part of the Hostages Trial of the Subsequent Nuremberg trials. One of the crimes specifically listed in Count 1 of the indictment was the massacre of 2,300 hostages in Kragujevac. Böhme committed suicide before his arraignment . List

9604-401: Was to be implemented the following day in order to collect the 2,300 hostages. The following evening, the male Jews and communists, who had been held without food since their arrest, were shot by German troops at the barracks and courtyard where they were being held. Simultaneously, males between the ages of 16 and 60 were arrested within Kragujevac itself. They were detained in the barracks of

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