Prebilovci massacre

The Prebilovci massacre was one of many atrocities perpetrated by the Croatian Ustaše regime in the Independent State of Croatia during the World War II persecution of Serbs. On 6 August 1941, the Ustaša killed around 600 women and children from the village of Prebilovci, Herzegovina, by throwing them alive into the Golubinka pit, near Šurmanci.

During the summer of 1941, the Ustaša continued with mass murders of Serbs – of 1000 inhabitants of Prebilovci, 820 of them were killed, while in the neighbouring places of the lower basin of the Neretva river, including Šurmanci, around 4000 Serbs were murdered. The Golubinka pit was covered with concrete in 1961.

During the Second World War the Serb inhabitants of Prebilovci, a small village near Čapljina, fell victim to genocide. At the beginning of 1941, the village had a population of 1,000. Earlier, it had given volunteers to join the Bosnian-Herzegovinian uprising against the Turks in 1875-78, and contributed 20 volunteers to the Serbian Army in Salonica during World War I.

Many villagers died as prisoners in Austro-Hungarian Empire concentration camps. Croat nationalists reportedly harboured hatred at Prebilovci's contribution to the World War I Serbian army. Prebilovci was surrounded on the night of 4 August 1941 by some 3,000 Ustaša made up of the village's Croats.

In August 1941, some 650 women and children were taken away from their homes, moved to Šurmanci where they were later thrown into natural pits around that area — either dead or half-dead according to accounts – together with a thousand or so other Serbs from the Čapljina and Mostar municipalities. The men were in the mountains, hiding, in the deluded belief that the Croats would not harm their women and children.

The Serbs of Prebilovci were herded together with other Serbs from the western part of Herzegovina and eventually six carloads of them were sent off on a train that was supposedly to take them to Belgrade. They were ordered out of the six cars they occupied at a town called Šurmanci, on the west bank of the Neretva, and marched off into the hills never to return.

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Wikipedia