Article of the day for October 21, 2017
The Article of the day for October 21, 2017 is Kragujevac massacre.
The Kragujevac massacre (21 October 1941) was the mass murder of almost 2,800 men and boys in the city of Kragujevac in the German-occupied territory of Serbia by German soldiers during World War II. Coming in reprisal for insurgent attacks that killed 10 German soldiers in the Gornji Milanovac district, it followed a punitive German operation in which 492 males were shot and four villages were burned down. The victims included Serbs, Jews, Romani people, Muslims, Macedonians, and Slovenes. The massacre 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. Several senior German military officials were tried and convicted during and after the Nuremberg Trials for their involvement in the reprisal shootings. The massacre has been the subject of several poems and feature films. Commemorated annually in Serbia, it is memorialised at the October in Kragujevac Memorial Park and its 21st October Museum.
The Kragujevac massacre (21 October 1941) was the mass murder of almost 2,800 men and boys in the city of Kragujevac in the German-occupied territory of Serbia by German soldiers during World War II. Coming in reprisal for insurgent attacks that killed 10 German soldiers in the Gornji Milanovac district, it followed a punitive German operation in which 492 males were shot and four villages were burned down. The victims included Serbs, Jews, Romani people, Muslims, Macedonians, and Slovenes. The massacre 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. Several senior German military officials were tried and convicted during and after the Nuremberg Trials for their involvement in the reprisal shootings. The massacre has been the subject of several poems and feature films. Commemorated annually in Serbia, it is memorialised at the October in Kragujevac Memorial Park and its 21st October Museum.
