Number of Victims
In 1947, at the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, 7,000 civilians were reported to have been executed according to witness Živojin Jovanović. An investigation in the 1960s placed the number of casualties at 5,000. Staniša Brkić, curator of "The 21 October Museum", published a book in 2007 where he listed names and personal data of 2,794 victims.
Data concerning the number of people shot in Kragujevac are quite often the result of personal impressions which this crime left on contemporaries, and less the result of serious investigation. Data in German sources: announcements and numerous reports of German commanders and commands speak of 2300 people shot. In the war reports of royalist and Partisan sources there is mention of 5000 to 12,000 people shot, while in the documents of the government-in-exile in London the most frequently mentioned number is 6000 victims.
The security chief of the Danube province, Danilo Mihailović, spent a few days in Kragujevac after the shooting and being overwhelmed by the proportions of the tragedy, but lacking the possibility for a more precise insight, he informed Milan Nedić's government that between 7100 to 7300 people had been shot. However, the first serious research into establishing the crime of the occupiers which included the number of people shot in Kragujevac, was carried out after the liberation by the town committee of the regional commission of Serbia for establishing the crimes of the occupiers and their aides. The result of their work is contained in the report issued on 12 July 1945 and it records 2324 persons shot. This number, given by the official state organ, was used by Democratic Federal Yugoslavia in its indictment of a group of German generals before the Nuremberg Trials, and at the Belgrade trial of German generals and other high officers before the military court of the third Yugoslav army in 1947.
When, in 1953, the Kragujevac October Memorial Park was established, which included the "21 October Museum", the process of investigating the shooting and collecting material about the people shot was continued. This process continues to the present day. The results of this work indicate 2794 men shot (415 of them in villages and 2379 in the city of Kragujevac; it is not clear whether all 415 were executed in October or during the entire war) and 61 survivors, between 19–21 October 1941.
Serbian and German scholars have now agreed on the figure of 2,778 killed.
Read more about this topic: Kragujevac Massacre
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