The destruction of Serbian Jews by the Nazi Germans was carried out in two distinct phases. The first, which lasted between July and November 1941, involved the murder of Jewish men, who were shot as part of retaliatory executions carried out by German forces in response to the rising anti-Nazi, partisan insurgency in Serbia. In October 1941. the German general, Franz Böhme, ordered the execution of 100 civilians for every German soldier killed and 50 for every wounded. Böhme's order stated that hostages are to be drawn from "all Communists, people suspected of being Communists, all Jews, and a given number of nationalist and democratically minded inhabitants". Altogether some 30,000 Serbian civilians were executed by the Nazi's during the first 2 months of this policy. among them 5,000 Jewish men, or nearly all the Jewish males above age 14 in Serbia and the Banat.By the end of Summer 1941, the Gestapo and local Volksdeutsche had already rounded up all the Jews in the Banat and transferred them to the Topovske Šupe and Sajmište concentration camps. The Germans carried out the first arrest of hostages in Belgrade in April 1941. From August to November 1941 Germans rounded up adult Jewish males from the rest of Serbia, and interred them at Topovske Šupe. These formed the main reservoir of Jewish hostages to be shot as part of the German reprisal policy of executing Serbian civilians. From there the Germans took and executed the Jews at killing grounds at Jajinci, Jabuka (near Pančevo), etc. 500 Banat Jews were executed at Deliblatska peščara in the south Banat, while some Jews were killed as part of mass German executions elsewhere, like the Kragujevac and Kraljevo massacres. Thus, by the November of 1941 “there were almost no living male Jews who could be used as hostages.”