Kraljevo massacre

Kraljevo massacre
Part of World War II in Yugoslavia
A round-up in the city
Location	Kraljevo, German-occupied territory of Serbia
Date	15–20 October 1941
Target	Residents of Kraljevo, mostly Serbs
Attack type	Mass murder by shooting
Deaths	c. 2,000
Perpetrators	German Army
Motive	Reprisal

The Kraljevo massacre was the World War II mass murder of approximately 2,000 residents of the city of Kraljevo in the German-occupied territory of Serbia between 15 and 20 October 1941 by the German Army. The massacre came in reprisal for a joint Partisan–Chetnik attack on a German garrison during the Siege of Kraljevo in which 10 German soldiers were killed and 14 wounded. 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 German Army 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 German Army 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 German Army deployed through the surrounding villages, burning homes and killing indiscriminately. According to the 717th Infantry Division's own records, 1,736 men and 19 "communist" women from the city and its outskirts were executed, despite attempts by local collaborationists to mitigate the punishment. Twenty members of the 717th Infantry Division were later conferred Iron Crosses for their role in the killings.

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.