The Reprisal Quota at Kragujevac

A Wehrmacht officer serves in the 717th Infantry Division, deployed in occupied Serbia in the autumn of 1941. He answers to General Franz Böhme, plenipotentiary military commander in Serbia, who has locked the whole chain of command around a policy of quantified terror.

Since the summer, the Serbian uprising has struck isolated garrisons. The occupier, thin on the ground and obsessed with the threat of the franc-tireur (Freischärler, "irregular gunman"), answers with hostages. By an order of 10 October 1941, Böhme directs the arrest of communists, "suspects," Jewish men, and notables, on a fixed scale: 100 shot per German soldier killed, 50 per wounded.

In late September, near Gornji Milanovac, an insurgent ambush cost the troops ten dead and twenty-six wounded. Applied to those losses, the scale sets a quota of several thousand hostages that the staff demands be met without delay. Yet the town holds too few identified fighters or communists to reach it.

The officer must decide whom to round up and where to stop: seize only the men designated as communists or suspects, at the risk of a total far below the figure demanded; round up the male population indiscriminately, workers and schoolboys included, until the quota is met; or play for time and ask the command to scale back its demand in the name of pacifying the region.