Massacres of civilians during World War II
The Velika Massacre: SS Divisions That Slaughtered 428 Civilians
13m
On 28 July 1944, the peaceful Montenegrin village of Velika became the scene of one of the worst massacres in the Balkans during the Second World War. Soldiers of the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division "Prinz Eugen" and the 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS "Skanderbeg", aided by local collaborators, murdered around 428 civilians—mostly women, children, and the elderly—and burned much of the village to the ground.
This documentary explores the German invasion of Yugoslavia, the anti-partisan campaign known as Operation Draufgänger, the horrifying eyewitness accounts from Velika, the role of the notorious SS divisions responsible for the massacre, the trial and execution of SS General August Schmidhuber, and the fate of the perpetrators after the collapse of Nazi Germany.
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