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 German occupation began to grow. Hit-and-run attacks increased throughout the summer of 1941. Determined to crush the uprising, Adolf Hitler ordered occupation authorities to restore control at any cost.
German leaders responded with a campaign of collective punishment. Civilians were taken hostage and killed in retaliation for attacks carried out by resistance fighters. Entire towns and villages found themselves caught in a spiral of violence that claimed thousands of innocent lives.
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 of leadership in 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 age 17 and his mother two years later, he chose a military career and joined the Austro-Hungarian army as a cadet officer in August 1904.
Over the following years, he rose steadily through the 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 in the later years of the conflict. For his military achievements, he received several decorations, including the Karl Troop Cross and both classes of the German Iron Cross.
After the war ended in November 1918 and the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, Böhme remained in military service and joined the newly created Austrian army. Instead of leading troops in the field, he spent most of the interwar period in general staff positions, building a solid reputation as a competent staff officer.
In 1935, he was promoted to the rank of major general and appointed head of the intelligence service of the Austrian army. This placed him among the country's top military leaders.
In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the event known as the Anschluss. After the annexation, Böhme briefly found himself 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 assigned to lead 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 achieved a decisive victory over the Western Allies.
In recognition of his leadership, he received 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.
In the fall of 1940, he took command of the XVIII Mountain Corps, which later participated in the German campaign in the Balkans. On April 6, 1941, German aircraft bombed Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, 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 large-scale 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 German occupation grew throughout the region, Berlin imposed increasingly brutal measures to suppress it.
On September 16, 1941, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, head of the High Command of the German Armed Forces, issued Hitler's order on reprisals. It required 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 commander-in-chief in Serbia, granting him direct authority to suppress attacks against German forces in the occupied territory. He arrived with his staff from the XVIII Mountain Corps and took control of the German occupation forces already stationed there.
Among the main formations under his command were the 704th, 714th, and 717th Infantry Divisions. These units were tasked with carrying out security operations and brutal reprisal actions in German-occupied Serbia.
Böhme openly encouraged revenge against the Serbian population, reminding his soldiers of the defeats Austria-Hungary had suffered 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 flowed in 1914 because of Serbian treachery, men and women. You are the avengers of those dead."
Böhme wasted no time in carrying out Hitler's orders. Following the reprisal policy established by Keitel, he instructed his forces to immediately arrest all communists, suspected communist sympathizers, all Jews, and a set number of nationalist and democratic civilians to be held as hostages.
These prisoners were detained to be ready for execution whenever German forces suffered casualties. Under Böhme's command, the German armed forces 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 arrested as hostages. On September 25, he instructed his troops to carry out the operation with the utmost severity in order to intimidate the rest of Serbia.
It was not long before his policy of collective punishment reached its peak in one of the largest mass executions of civilians committed by the German armed forces 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 was effectively cut off from the rest of German-occupied Serbia, as resistance fighters regularly disrupted road and rail transport in the surrounding area.
Two main resistance movements were operating 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 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 led to plans for large-scale retaliation.
German commanders calculated that thousands of civilian hostages were needed to meet the required execution quota. They ordered that the necessary hostages be obtained in Kragujevac and the surrounding villages, sparking one of the darkest chapters in 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 arrested.
Because this number was far below the reprisal quota demanded by the German command, occupation forces turned to neighboring villages the next 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 still had not reached the number of hostages they needed.
German commanders then ordered a large-scale arrest campaign throughout Kragujevac. Soldiers moved through the city, arresting men and boys between the ages of 16 and 60. People were captured in fields, factories, markets, streets, and inside their own homes.
Approximately 300 students and teachers were arrested from inside their classrooms. Roma children, most of whom worked as shoe shiners and had refused to shine the boots of German soldiers, were also collected. The detainees were taken to military barracks on the outskirts of the city, where each hostage was registered and his possessions 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 identified as supporters of the movement and described as reliable patriots or true nationalists were released and struck from the execution lists. The rest were labeled as communists, and for the German authorities, this charge 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 between 50 and 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 approximately seven hours. Estimates suggest 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 assignment in Serbia ended in December 1941. Official German records stated that during his three months of command, 160 German soldiers were killed and 278 were wounded. In contrast, German authorities claimed that 3,562 partisans were killed in battle and 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 led the XVIII Mountain Corps in the Arctic 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 just a few 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 jumping from the fourth floor of a prison building in Nuremberg. He was 62 years old.