itself. They were detained in the barracks of a former motorised battalion at Stanovija Field. Over 7,000 hostages were assembled. German troops and ethnic German units from the Banat were involved in the round-up, as was the 5th Regiment of the SDK, under the command of Marisav Petrović. According to von Bischofhausen, König permitted several classes of males to be excluded from the round-up, including those with a special pass issued by von Bischofhausen's district headquarters, members of a vital profession or trade, and those who were members of Ljotić's movement. When too few adult males could be located, high school students were also rounded up. Also seized were priests and monks from the city's churches. Each hostage was registered and his belongings noted meticulously. Executions The hostages were held overnight on a public plaza in the town. In his version of events, von Bischofhausen claimed that he made objections to König, but the latter insisted that his orders, which had been issued by the commander of the 749th Infantry Regiment, were to be carried out. Shortly before the executions commenced, Ljotić obtained approval for two Zbor officials to scrutinise the hostages. Over 3,000 individuals, those identified as being "genuine nationalists" and "real patriots", were excluded from the execution lists as a result of Ljotić's intervention. Those who were not extracted from the hostage pool were accused of being communists or spreading "communist propaganda". The Zbor officials told them they were not "worth saving" because they had "infected the younger generation with their leftist ideas." The Germans considered Zbor'''s involvement to be a "nuisance". According to the social scientist Jovan Byford, it was never intended or likely to reduce the overall number of hostages killed in reprisal, and served only to ensure the exclusion of those that were deemed by Zbor to be worth saving. On the morning of 21 October, the assembled men and boys were marched to a field outside the town. Over a period of seven hours, they were lined up in groups of 50 to 120 and shot with heavy machine guns. "Go ahead and shoot", said an elderly teacher, "I am conducting my class". He was shot together with his students. As they faced the firing squad, many hostages sang the patriotic song Hey, Slavs, which became Yugoslavia's national anthem after the war. One German soldier was shot for refusing to participate in the killings.