This Date in History – October 20, 1941 – The Tragic Kragujevac Massacre (Serbia)
Germans escorting people from Kragujevac and its surrounding area to be executed.
Saturday October 18th was International Necktie Day, celebrated in Croatia, the home of the necktie and several cities around the world. As a result, I wrote a little about Croatia. Today is the 73 rd anniversary of a horrific event that occurred in Serbia, which lies east of Croatia, and like Croatia was part of the old Yugoslavia. The event that is known as the Kragujevac massacre was according to Wikipedia….
….the murder of Serbs, Jewish and Roma men and boys in Kragujevac, Serbia, by German Wehrmacht soldiers on 20 and 21 October 1941. All males from the town between the ages of sixteen and sixty were assembled by German troops and members of the collaborationist Serbian Volunteer Command (SDK)[1] and Serbian State Guard (SDS),[2] including high school students, and the victims were selected from amongst them. On 29 October 1941, Felix Benzler, the plenipotentiary of the German foreign ministry in Serbia, reported that 2,300 people were executed.[3] Later investigations by the post-war Yugoslavian government came up with between 5,000 and 7,000 people executed, although these figures were never proven reliable.[4] Subsequently, Serbian and German scholars have agreed on the figure of 2,778.[1]