The Kingdom of serbia : report upon the atrocities committed by the Austro-Hungarian Army during the first invasion of Serbia

142 AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN ATROCITIES

I would draw attention to the fact that I was not placed in possession of the lists of killed, wounded, and missing in many villages, or even towns through which the Austrians passed during the course of their first invasion. The town of Shabatz, for instance, is not included in my statistics, and according to the information 1 was able to obtain, the Austrians carried off about 1,500 of the inhabitants there. On the other hand the Austrian army frequently got rid of its hostages by killing them. Tt is therefore safe to assume that many of the missing have been killed. Under these circumstances I venture to estimate, without of course being able to verify my figures in a perfectly accurate manner, that a total number of about 38,500 to 4,000 members of the civil population fell victims to the first Austro-Hungarian invasion.

It was an interesting matter to enquire into the different forms of death and mutilation inflicted upon the civil populace by the soldatesca of the enemy, and thus I have tabulated the following methods of procedure :—

Victims shot, bayoneted to death, killed with knives, arms lopped off, torn off, or broken, legs broken, nose cut off, ears cut off, eyes put out, genital organs cut off, victims stoned, women violated and killed, breasts cut off, persons hanged, victims burnt alive, one child thrown to the pigs, victims clubbed to death with butt-ends of rifles or sticks, victims impaled, victims whose skin was cut in strips.

Very many persons were burnt alive. In the parish of Prnjavor alone they number 122. Both in the case of the killed and the wounded, the

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