On April 6, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to secure its southern flank before launching Operation Barbarossa, the planned invasion of the Soviet Union. Within just 11 days, the Yugoslav army collapsed and the country was divided among the Axis powers and their allies.
In Serbia, one of the most important parts of the occupied kingdom, resistance against the German occupation began to grow, with hit-and-run attacks increasing throughout the summer of 1941. Determined to crush the uprising, Adolf Hitler ordered the occupation authorities to restore control at any cost.
German commanders responded with a campaign of mass reprisals, detaining civilians as hostages and executing them in retaliation for attacks carried out by resistance fighters. Entire towns and villages found themselves caught in a spiral of violence that claimed the lives of thousands of innocent people.
One of the men chosen to carry out this campaign was an Austrian general serving in the German army. His policies during just three months in command of occupied Serbia led to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. His name was Franz Böhme.
Franz Friedrich Böhme was born on April 15, 1885, in the town of Zeltweg, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After losing his father at 17 and his mother two years later, he chose a military career and joined the Austro-Hungarian army as an officer cadet in August 1904.
Over the following years, he rose steadily through the military ranks. When World War I broke out in July 1914, Böhme fought on the Eastern Front against the Russian Empire before being transferred to the Italian Front during the final years of the conflict. In recognition of his military achievements, he received several decorations, including the Military Cross of Karl and both classes of the German Iron Cross.
After World War I ended in November 1918 and the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, Böhme remained in military service and joined the newly created Austrian army. Rather than leading troops in the field, he spent most of the interwar period in general staff positions, building a solid reputation as a capable staff officer.
In 1935, he was promoted to major general, a rank equivalent to brigadier general in the U.S. Army, and was appointed head of Austrian army intelligence, placing him among the country's senior military leaders.
In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in an event known as the Anschluss. After the annexation, Böhme found himself temporarily without a command, but in November he was appointed commander of the garrison in the German city of Brandenburg an der Havel.
In the summer of 1939, Böhme was appointed to command the 32nd Infantry Division. On September 1, 1939, World War II began when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Böhme led his division through the Polish campaign and later in the Battle of France, where German forces won a decisive victory over the Western Allies.
For his leadership during these campaigns, he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, one of Germany's highest military honors. On August 1, 1940, he was promoted to general of infantry, a rank equivalent to lieutenant general in the U.S. Army.
In the autumn of 1940, he took command of the 18th Mountain Corps, which later took part in the German campaign in the Balkans.
On April 6, 1941, German aircraft bombed Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, in a massive air raid that killed many civilians and destroyed large parts of the city. Within days, German, Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian forces advanced from all directions.
The Yugoslav army, poorly equipped and ethnically divided, could not resist the broad and coordinated attack. After only 11 days of fighting, on April 17, 1941, the government signed an unconditional surrender. The state of Yugoslavia ceased to exist, and its territory was divided among the Axis powers and their local allies.
As resistance against the German occupation grew across the region, Berlin imposed increasingly brutal measures to suppress it. On September 16, 1941, Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, head of the High Command of the Nazi Armed Forces, issued Hitler's order on reprisals, which called for the execution of 100 hostages for every German soldier killed and 50 for every soldier wounded.
Three days later, on September 19, Hitler appointed Böhme as supreme commander in Serbia, granting him direct authority to crush attacks against German forces in the occupied territory. He arrived with a staff from the 18th Mountain Corps and took control of the German occupation forces already stationed there.
Among the main formations operating under his command were the 704th, 714th, and 717th Infantry Divisions, units tasked with carrying out security operations and brutal reprisals in German-occupied Serbia.
Böhme openly encouraged revenge against the Serbian population and reminded his soldiers of the defeats suffered by Austria and Hungary during World War I. Speaking to his troops, many of whom were Austrian-born, he declared: "Your objective must be achieved in a land where German blood was shed in 1914 through Serbian treachery, men and women alike." He told them: "You are the avengers of those dead."
Böhme wasted no time in implementing Hitler's orders. Following the reprisal policy set by Keitel, he instructed his forces to immediately arrest all communists, suspected communist sympathizers, all Jews, and a specified number of nationalist and democratic civilians to be held as hostages.
These prisoners were to be held ready for execution whenever German forces suffered casualties. Under Böhme's command, the German Armed Forces, the Wehrmacht, carried out these reprisals according to the specified ratio of 100 hostages for every soldier killed and 50 for every soldier wounded.
In late September 1941, Böhme also ordered a large-scale operation against rebels in the Mačva region. Villages suspected of supporting the resistance were burned, while men between the ages of 15 and 60 were detained as hostages. On September 25, he instructed his forces to carry out the operation with maximum severity in order to intimidate the rest of Serbia.
It was not long before the policy of mass punishment reached its peak in one of the largest mass executions of civilians carried out by the Wehrmacht during World War II. The consequences of Böhme's policy soon became visible in the town of Gornji Milanovac in central Serbia.
By late September 1941, the town had been effectively cut off from the rest of German-occupied Serbia, as resistance fighters repeatedly disrupted road and rail transport in the surrounding area. Two main resistance movements were active in the region.
One was the Chetniks, a Serbian nationalist guerrilla force loyal to the Yugoslav government-in-exile and the Serbian monarchy. The other was the Partisans, a communist-led resistance movement under the command of Josip Broz Tito.
On September 29, 1941, fighters from both resistance groups launched a joint attack on the German garrison in Gornji Milanovac, killing 10 German soldiers and wounding 26 others. Under the reprisal policy imposed by Böhme, these losses immediately triggered plans for large-scale retaliation.
German commanders calculated that thousands of civilian hostages would be needed to meet the required execution quota. German commanders ordered the required hostages to be seized in Kragujevac and the surrounding villages, sparking one of the darkest chapters of the occupation of Serbia.
The first arrests began on the evening of October 18, 1941. German authorities ordered the detention of all Jewish men in Kragujevac, along with individuals suspected of communist activity. In total, only 70 men were seized.
Because this number was far below the reprisal quota demanded by the German leadership, occupation forces turned to neighboring villages the following day. Soldiers entered the villages of Mečkovac, Maršić, Grošnica, and Milatovac, where men were rounded up and executed on the spot.
In these four villages alone, German forces executed 422 civilians, even though no German soldier had been killed there. Despite these executions, the Germans had still not reached the number of hostages they needed.
German commanders therefore ordered a wide-scale arrest campaign across Kragujevac. Soldiers moved through the city, arresting men and boys between the ages of 16 and 60. People were seized in fields, factories, markets, streets, and inside their homes.
Around 300 students and teachers were arrested from their classrooms. Roma children were also rounded up, most of whom worked as shoe shiners and had refused to polish the boots of German soldiers.
The detainees were transferred to military barracks on the outskirts of the city, where each hostage was registered and their property recorded. By evening, thousands of men and boys were under armed guard, waiting through the night for the decision that would determine their fate.
Members of the Serbian fascist Zbor movement were allowed to inspect the prisoners. More than 3,000 detainees who were identified as supporters of the movement and described as trusted patriots or true nationalists were released and removed from the execution lists.
Those who remained were labeled as communists, and for the German authorities, this accusation was enough to justify their execution.
On the morning of October 21, 1941, the prisoners were marched from the city toward open fields on the outskirts of Kragujevac. Groups of 50 to 120 men and boys were lined up in front of firing squads from the 717th Infantry Division.
Heavy machine guns were placed in front of them, and the executions continued for about seven hours. Estimates indicate that between 2,778 and 2,794 people were killed during this massacre.
Among them were 144 high school students, and 15 of the victims were only 12 years old. The victims included Serbs, Jews, Roma, Muslims, Macedonians, Slovenes, and individuals of other nationalities.
Böhme's appointment in Serbia ended in December 1941. Official German records reported that during his three-month command, 160 German soldiers were killed and 278 others wounded. In return, German authorities claimed that 3,562 partisans were killed in combat and that between 20,000 and 30,000 civilians were executed in reprisal operations.
After his service in Serbia, Böhme continued his military career. From May 1942 to December 1943, he commanded the 18th Mountain Corps in the far north before being transferred to the Austrian city of Salzburg as commander of the military district.
In March 1944, his title changed from general of infantry to general of mountain troops. A few months later, he briefly took command of the 2nd Panzer Army in Yugoslavia, but was seriously injured in a plane crash only weeks later.
From January 1945 until Germany's surrender in May of that year, Böhme served in Norway as commander of the 20th Mountain Army.
After the war, he was arrested by British forces and tried in the Hostages Trial, one of the subsequent Nuremberg trials for war crimes committed in Serbia. On May 29, 1947, with the likelihood of his extradition to Yugoslavia increasing, Franz Böhme committed suicide by throwing himself from the fourth floor of a prison building in Nuremberg. He was 62 years old.