It occurred in the German-occupied territory of Serbia during World War II, and came as a reprisal for insurgent attacks in the Gornji Milanovac district that resulted in the deaths of ten German soldiers and the wounding of 26 others.

Simultaneously, males between the ages of 16 and 60, including high school students, were assembled by German troops and local collaborators, and the victims were selected from amongst them.

[3] Intending to secure his southern flank for the impending attack on the Soviet Union, German dictator Adolf Hitler began placing heavy pressure on Yugoslavia to join the Axis.

Two days later, a group of pro-Western, Serbian nationalist Royal Yugoslav Air Force officers deposed the country's regent, Prince Paul, in a bloodless coup d'état.

They placed his teenage nephew, Peter, on the throne and brought to power a "government of national unity" led by the head of the Royal Yugoslav Air Force, General Dušan Simović.

Hitler had briefly considered erasing all existence of a Serbian state, but this was quickly abandoned and the Germans began searching for a Serb suitable to lead a puppet government in Belgrade.

[13] In September, the Nedić government was permitted to form the Serbian Volunteer Command (Serbo-Croatian: Srpska dobrovoljačka komanda; SDK), an auxiliary paramilitary formation to help quell anti-German resistance.

In effect, the SDK was the military arm of the fascist Yugoslav National Movement (Serbo-Croatian: Združena borbena organizacija rada, Zbor), led by Dimitrije Ljotić.

[17] Nedić's inability to crush the Partisans and Chetniks prompted the military commander in Serbia to request German reinforcements from other parts of the continent.

"[25] By late September 1941, the town of Gornji Milanovac had effectively been cut off from the rest of German-occupied Serbia by the frequent disruption of road and rail transport leading to and from it.

On 29 September, elements of the Takovo Chetnik and Čačak Partisan detachments attacked Gornji Milanovac, which was defended by the 6th Company of the 920th Landesschützen (local defence) Battalion.

[26] Thirty minutes later, a second Chetnik envoy appeared, guaranteeing the 6th Company unmolested passage to Čačak on the condition that it left Gornji Milanovac the same day.

Battalion of the 749th Infantry Regiment to burn down Gornji Milanovac and take hostages in order to expedite the recovery of the captured German troops.

Contrary to Fiedler's expectations, the battalion was ordered back to Kragujevac immediately after relieving the unit at Rudnik, and was thus unable to raze Gornji Milanovac.

[33] These reprisal killings continued over the following days, and by 17 or 20 October,[31][32] German troops had rounded up and shot 1,736 men and 19 "communist" women from the city and its outskirts,[34][35] despite attempts by local collaborationists to mitigate the punishment.

As this constituted far too few hostages to meet the quota of 2,300, it was proposed to collect the balance by arrests on the streets, squares and houses of Kragujevac, in an operation to be conducted by the III.

In response to this proposal, von Bischofhausen claimed that he suggested to the garrison commander, Major Paul König, that instead of using the population of Kragujevac, the required hostages be gathered from surrounding villages which were known to be "completely strewn with communists".

[42] On the evening of 19 October, von Bischofhausen again met with König and was told that the original proposal was to be implemented the following day in order to collect the 2,300 hostages.

In his version of events, von Bischofhausen claimed that he made objections to König, but the latter insisted that his orders, which had been issued by the commander of the 749th Infantry Regiment, were to be carried out.

According to the social scientist Jovan Byford, it was never intended or likely to reduce the overall number of hostages killed in reprisal, and served only to ensure the exclusion of those that were deemed by Zbor to be worth saving.

[54] Throughout the war, local collaborators pressured the Germans to implement stringent vetting procedures to ensure that "innocent civilians" were not executed, though only when the hostages were ethnic Serbs.

[58] The massacres in Kragujevac and Kraljevo caused German military commanders in Serbia to question the efficacy of such killings, as they pushed thousands of Serbs into the hands of anti-German guerrillas.

[18][61][62] The killings occurred only a few days before Captain Bill Hudson, a Special Operations Executive officer, met with Mihailović at his Ravna Gora headquarters.

[65] On 11 November 1941, the Partisans captured a Wehrmacht officer named Renner, the area commander in Leskovac, who was taking part in an anti-Partisan sweep around Lebane.

[74] In 1969, the historian Jozo Tomasevich wrote that, despite German official sources stating 2,300 hostages had been shot, both the Partisans and Chetniks had agreed that the number of victims was about 7,000.

[49] In 1975, Tomasevich noted that some estimates of the number of those killed were as high as 7,000, but that the foremost authority on German terror in Serbia, Venceslav Glišić, placed the figure at about 3,000.

[51] Šumarice is the site of a televised annual commemoration known as the Grand School Lecture (Serbian: Veliki školski čas) that attracts thousands of attendees every year.

[81] Germany's Federal Cabinet has never officially apologized for any of the mass executions committed by the Wehrmacht in the occupied territory of Serbia during World War II, including the Kragujevac massacre.

[79] On 21 October 2021, Vice President of the Bundestag Claudia Roth became the first senior German government official to attend the annual commemoration at Šumarice.

[87] The massacre has been the subject of two feature films: Prozvan je i V-3 (V-3 is Called Out; 1962)[88] and Krvava bajka (A Bloody Fairy Tale; 1969), named after the eponymous poem.