Reprisal and Massacre

German reprisal policy was set out with unusual clarity in an OKW order issued on 16 September 1941. Wilhelm Keitel instructed commanders that attacks on German forces should be answered with severe retaliatory measures, proposing the execution of 50 to 100 people for every German soldier killed. In occupied Serbia, German commands applied an even more rigid scale: 100 hostages for each soldier killed and 50 for each soldier wounded. The mass shootings at Kragujevac in October 1941 became one of the most notorious applications of this policy.

The purpose was to deter resistance by making entire communities vulnerable to punishment. Those selected for execution did not need to have taken part in the attack that triggered the reprisal. Hostages were taken from prisons, political lists and the civilian population, while proclamations and posted notices warned that further attacks would bring further executions. Wehrmacht units participated alongside German police and SS formations in carrying out these measures.

The term reprisal, however, describes a policy and method rather than a single explanation for every massacre under Axis occupation. Lidice was destroyed after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in a deliberately ordered act of retaliation. Oradour-sur-Glane and Sant'Anna di Stazzema occurred within anti-partisan operations and systems of occupation terror, but under different immediate circumstances. The mass killings at Nanking followed the Japanese capture of the city and were not based on a German-style hostage ratio.

What links these events is not one formula, but the treatment of civilians as legitimate targets for punishment, intimidation or destruction. Their causes, orders and methods differed, and those distinctions matter.

Keitel’s directive of 16 September 1941 survives in the Nuremberg record. It described the execution of 50 to 100 people as an appropriate response to the death of a German soldier and was circulated through the German command structure. During the uprising in occupied Serbia, military authorities imposed a more specific scale: 100 hostages for every German soldier killed and 50 for every soldier wounded. The Serbian ratio therefore grew from a broader reprisal policy, rather than serving as a single rule applied throughout occupied Europe.

The destruction of Lidice followed a different chain of command. Reinhard Heydrich died on 4 June 1942 from wounds sustained in the assassination attempt in Prague. In the reprisals that followed, Karl Hermann Frank communicated the decision to destroy Lidice. No evidence had established that the village or its inhabitants were involved in the attack. Horst Böhme, commander of the Security Police and SD in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, oversaw the security-police operation.

Elsewhere, anti-partisan warfare gave German commanders wide latitude to destroy settlements, execute civilians and punish communities accused of supporting resistance. Such measures were used across the occupied Soviet territories, Greece, the Balkans and Italy, but the circumstances and command structures varied from place to place.

At Sant'Anna di Stazzema, the killings were not tied to a fixed hostage ratio or to retaliation for one identified partisan attack. Later Italian investigations and prosecutions treated the massacre as part of a deliberate operation against the civilian population, intended to terrorise communities in an area where partisan forces were active.

Reprisals often began with measures already established by the occupation authorities. Hostages were designated or detained in advance, names were drawn from prisons and administrative records, and public notices warned that attacks on German forces would bring collective punishment. These arrangements allowed arrests and executions to be organised quickly after an incident.

Once a reprisal was ordered, troops might seal off a town or village, assemble civilians, separate groups for detention or execution and determine how many people were to be killed. In places where fixed ratios were applied, administrative records became part of that process. Orders, lists, reports and execution records helped turn collective punishment from an exceptional response into a method that could be repeated.

There was no single sequence followed in every operation. Hostage shootings remained in use while anti-partisan forces also carried out large-scale sweeps in which settlements were searched, civilians were assembled or expelled, buildings were burned and suspected resistance areas were destroyed. Shooting, burning and demolition could all form part of the same operation.

The eight cards below therefore represent methods used to organise and carry out reprisals and occupation violence, rather than a progression of weapons or tactics.

At Lidice, 340 residents were killed as a result of the destruction of the village and the subsequent murder of deported children. The memorial at Oradour-sur-Glane now records 643 victims, replacing the figure of 642 found in many older accounts. Around 560 people were killed at Sant'Anna di Stazzema. At Kragujevac, the Museum "21 October" has identified 2,796 civilians killed during the mass shootings of October 1941.

Figures for destroyed villages describe a different scale of violence. More than 1,000 Greek villages were reported destroyed or severely damaged during the occupation, but that figure includes communities affected under different circumstances and cannot be treated as a count of reprisal actions alone. In Belarus, the Khatyn memorial represents a much broader campaign of village destruction, including more than 600 settlements where inhabitants were killed.

The surviving records also measure different things. Some count people executed, others settlements burned, populations expelled or villages destroyed. Definitions changed between occupation authorities, post-war investigations, national archives and later memorial institutions.

There is therefore no single total on this page for deaths caused by "reprisals." A hostage execution ordered according to a fixed ratio, the destruction of a village during an anti-partisan operation and mass killing following the capture of a city belong to different historical contexts. Presenting them separately preserves both the scale of the violence and the circumstances in which it occurred.

The written German policy is unusually well documented because Keitel's directives and the orders applying them survived into the Nuremberg record. The Kragujevac figure used here follows the named victims documented by the Museum '21 October' rather than the much larger figures repeated in early postwar memory.

For individual massacres this page follows the institutions responsible for the surviving local record: the Lidice Memorial, the Centre de la mémoire d'Oradour and the Sant'Anna di Stazzema memorial archive. Their current counts occasionally differ from older histories, which is why Oradour is given here as 643 rather than the long-standard 642.