In World War II, large-scale massacres against civilian populations were frequent. A series of tragic massacres broke out in Serbia, which was occupied by Nazi Germany. One of the most brutal stood out as the massacre in Terazije, the main square of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, from August 17, 1941. On that day, the Serbian occupation authorities in Nazi Germany publicly hanged five Serbs suspected of being part of the Serbian resistance by hanging them from lamp posts. The five people who died in that hanging were partisans, rebels against fascism. Two were peasants, one a 17-year-old student, one a tailor, and one a shoemaker, and all five were violently tortured for several days by the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany, before being hung from lamp posts in the center of Belgrade for several days. They were indiscriminately selected and hanged by the Serb civilians to counter their resistance activities.
Earlier, on July 4, 1941, the partisans of Biu, even Yugoslavia, made a decisive declaration of a full-scale armed uprising, hiding in the Terazije district of Belgrade. Many citizens of Belgrade launched an attack against the German army and local police. As a result, the Germans launched retaliatory arrests and reprisals against the local population of Belgrade. For captured resistance fighters, the Germans often carried out public executions of terror as a means to scare civilians enough from resisting the occupation. Belgrade was finally liberated from Nazi German occupation on October 20, 1944, when partisan fighters and Soviet troops attacked the city. More than 10,000 citizens of Belgrade were killed during the Second World War.
