CRIME THAT SHOOK BELGRADE: 74 years ago, the Nazis hanged five young men in the middle of Terazije to send a terrifying message!

Behind those words is darkness and not one, but two tragic episodes, from both world wars. The story that Belgraders sat and drank beer under the corpses of the murdered, which is still mentioned today as an indispensable segment of the entire concept of “hanging in Terazije,” most likely came to life from these writings of Krakov. During the occupation, he edited the quisling press and on several occasions repeated this painful detail in the newspapers, about indifferent people sitting in “Athens” (at that time a prestigious city bar, right in front of the crime scene) and drinking beer in the shadow of the gallows.

The corpses stood on Terazije for the entire day and were, most likely, taken down on the night of August 18 and taken to an unknown location. The same poles that served as the gallows remained in that place for a long time, all five of them, until the mid-fifties when they were moved to the New Cemetery and placed in the Alley of Murdered Patriots. As a first-class monument, they survived in that place for decades, until the reconstruction of that part of the cemetery in 2003, when they unexpectedly disappeared without a trace. To this day, it remains unknown how this happened, whether they were stolen during the night, as “secondary raw material,” intentionally resold, or even “removed” due to their heavy historical connotation.

Disgusted and appalled by what she saw, the opera diva Bugarinović remains to this day the only known witness to the beginning of the event that will be deeply etched in the collective memory of Belgraders – the hanging in Terazije on August 17, 1941.

When it was already dawn, and it was Sunday (the crime was calculated to be on a day when “the whole of Belgrade” went out for a traditional family walk and daily cafe fun), the first pedestrians and trams started crossing Terazije.

That morning, Belgraders were horrified to see bodies hanging from poles in the city center. Dark, clotted blood was flowing down the legs of the unfortunate people and still falling on the cobblestones that paved the city center. Although the city was bombed in early April, with many victims, and ruins were still everywhere, Belgrade began to slowly recover from that first great war trauma. Cafes, shops, and public transport began to work, and life began to get the appearance of “normality.” All the more, the shock of the sight of massacred people hanging from poles once again instilled horror in the agitated citizens.

“There are gallows on Terazije,” passers-by whispered to each other from Slavija and Nemanjina to Kalemegdan. The terrible news spread through the city like lightning, and by the morning, a large number of people had come to see the painful sight. The Nazis, with murderous cold blood, calculated how much rope length was needed for the hanged to hang so that the passing trams would not touch them (the poles on which the bodies stood carried the electric contact network for tram transport), and yet be close enough to passers-by to feel the breath of death.

“Indifferent drinking of beer under the corpses”

That summer, a great rebellion of communist units and armed groups of the royal army whose officers did not recognize the defeat in the April War broke out in Serbia, and the Nazis, besides being bitter at the “disobedient Serbs,” were also concerned that the massing of the uprising would vitally threaten their transport capacities, as well as the functioning of the exploitative occupation economy, which was digging metal ores enormously important for the war efforts of the Third Reich in several mines in Serbia.

Before they announced the criminal rule “a hundred for one,” that they would kill a hundred Serbs in retaliation for every German soldier who died at the hands of the insurgents, the Nazis decided to send a terrifying threat to the Serbs in this way, by publicly hanging the corpses of several people in the center of Belgrade, and show them what awaits them if they do not calm down and submit.

“Between the hanged, a large canvas was stretched that announced the horse races at Careva ćuprija for the following week. Radio speakers broadcast some music from Radio Belgrade, which was now a German military station, as if at a funfair. In front of Difranko’s ‘Athens,’ some men and women sat, just like any other Sunday, and sipped their drinks. Families, dressed for Sunday, stopped in front of this scene and mothers held the hands of their children who were licking ice cream cones in the heat and looking amazed at the hanged. In the middle of the Terazije square, a large board was displayed with the initials of the martyrs and their professions – one student, two workers and two peasants, one from Parcan, the other from Drlupa, both from the Kosmaj district, and the acts they were accused of,” wrote Stanislav Krakov later, a writer who was passing by with his uncle Milan Nedić.

First World War

However, although in the collective consciousness of Belgraders the term “hanging in Terazije” refers exclusively to the mentioned event from 1941, this is not the only public execution that was carried out in that place in the 20th century. According to photographic material that was discovered on the internet, Terazije served as the place of the first murder of innocent Belgraders by the occupying forces.