In Novi Sad, victims were forced to march across the frozen Danube, only to perish when the ice sheet was shattered by shelling from the shore.

The final court proceedings relating to the raid took place in 2011, when Sándor Képíró was tried and acquitted of murdering over 30 civilians in Novi Sad.

Germany, Italy and Hungary invaded Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941, in response to a coup d'état that deposed the country's regent, Paul, and hastened the ascent of his underage cousin, Peter to the throne.

[8] The Hungarians occupied Bačka, which had been a part of Hungary until the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, when it was incorporated into the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia).

[12][a] The Hungarian occupational authorities expelled between 25,000 and 60,000 Serbs from Bačka, both colonists from the interwar period, as well as pre-World War I inhabitants.

Hungarian and German were the only languages permitted in almost all secondary schools, and Serbo-Croatian books, newspapers and periodicals were virtually banned.

[14] Small-scale armed resistance broke out in Bačka in the second half of 1941 and the Hungarian military reacted with heavy repressive measures.

[22] Thousands of Serbs and Jews were detained in concentration camps that had been established in Ada, Bačka Topola, Begeč, Odžaci, Bečej, Subotica and Novi Sad, as well as at Pécs and Baja, in Hungary-proper.

[23] The Chetniks, Serbian nationalist irregulars seeking to reinstate the Yugoslav monarchy, offered sporadic resistance during the invasion, but were largely inactive for much of the occupation, maintaining some covert activity only.

[25] The Hungarian government had passed anti-Semitic laws in 1939, and following the outbreak of the war, these were applied in the occupied and annexed territories.

[12] After the violence of the initial occupation, no further massacres of Jews occurred in Bačka for the remainder of 1941,[12] though the Jewish community was subjected to a string of discriminatory measures, such as the confiscation of property, arbitrary detention and forced labour.

The Hungarian General Staff seized on the incident, using it as a pretext for launching attacks throughout the region that were intended to deter non-Hungarians from joining the resistance.

[26] On 5 January, Ferenc Szombathelyi, the Chief of the Hungarian General Staff, ordered punitive raids against the Partisans of Bačka.

Several days later, Generalfeldmarschall (Field marshal) Wilhelm Keitel, the chief of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, arrived in Budapest requesting that the entire Royal Hungarian Army be moved to the Eastern Front.

The Hungarian General Staff requested that the occupational authorities provide proof of an imminent, large-scale Partisan revolt in Bačka to show the Germans.

[28] According to the Holocaust scholar Mark Levene, the raid "may well have been intended as a dread signal from Budapest that Hungarian rule over non-Hungarians in the Balkans ... would be every bit as brutal as that of ... other occupying powers, or, for that matter, as it had previously been in Hungarian-occupied Serbia during the Great War.

Ferenc Feketehalmy-Czeydner summoned the local authorities and announced that the Royal Hungary Army would "take charge and clean things up" over the next three days.

[35] Thousands of men, women and children were imprisoned and interrogated at the Sokolski Dom, one of the city's main cultural centres.

According to another account, the victims were forced to tread the ice sheets, which were then shattered by shelling from the shore, causing them to fall into the freezing water and drown.

[36] The killings only ceased after four days, when the city's Lord Lieutenant, László Deák, bypassed the curfew and alerted the authorities in Budapest.

[34] "The randomness and senselessness of the operation were evident especially by the fact that it hit not one single functionary of the Yugoslav Communist Party," the historian Krisztián Ungváry writes.

[28] In a contemporary correspondence, Hungary's Minister of the Interior, Ferenc Keresztes-Fischer, wrote that 3,755 people lost their lives in the raid.

[39] The following table, composed by Golubović, lists the victims according to their gender, ethnicity and the place that they were killed:[31] In 1943, Regent of Hungary Miklós Horthy ordered an investigation into the massacres and charges were brought against some of those that had conducted them.

[31][43] Horthy was a witness at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II but, despite strong demands from Yugoslavia, the Americans and the Soviets favored dropping any charges.

[citation needed] In September 2006, Efraim Zuroff of the Wiesenthal Center made public copies of a 1944 court verdict finding Sándor Képíró and 14 other Hungarian military and police officers of taking part in 1942 raid in Novi Sad.

Képíró, however, stated that as a police officer, his participation was limited merely to arresting civilians, and he did not take part in the executions or any other illegal activity.

[47] War crimes charges were subsequently brought against Képíró in a federal court in Budapest, for murders of civilians committed under his command during the January 1942 raids.

Some days earlier members of the Serbian Parliament adopted a declaration, which condemned the massacres and application of the principle of collective guilt against Hungarians in Vojvodina at the end of the Second World War.

[61][62] The Yugoslav writer Aleksandar Tišma, who narrowly escaped being rounded up and killed in the massacre, explored the topic in his 1972 novel The Book About Blam (Serbo-Croatian: Knjiga o Blamu).

[63] In 1971, a commemorative statue by the sculptor Jovan Soldatović was erected in Novi Sad, on the spot where the bodies of victims were tossed into the Danube.