Even Milovan Đilas, a native Montenegrin and one of the most prominent Yugoslav intellectuals of the 20th century, described the Austro-Hungarian military administration in Montenegro during the First World War as relatively restrained. In his writings, he noted: “not a brutal one: Not a child was killed, not a woman violated.”

This characterization reflects the fact that, compared to other occupied territories in the Balkans during the war, the Austro-Hungarian authorities in Montenegro generally avoided widespread atrocities against civilians.

However, when a Montenegrin general shot an Austrian first lieutenant and fled in June 1916, many Montenegrins were summarily hanged and several thousand educated Montenegrins were deported to captivity in Drosendorf in Lower Austria.

After two Austrians were killed in August 1916 in the Montenegrin district of Zlokučan and Hungarian gendarmes were ambushed and killed, the AOK, at the request of the Military General Government, imposed penal provisions that included the withdrawal of food assistance, a fine of 40,000 crowns for the benefit of the survivors, the taking of two hostages from each town and the payment of the Fines up to the confiscation of the “movable and immovable assets of the murderers and their relatives who had also fled for the benefit of the state administration.

Source

Katrin BOECKH, Von den Balkankriegen zum Ersten Weltkrieg. Kleinstaatenpolitik und ethnische Selbstbestimmung auf dem Balkan (München 1996); SUNDHAUSSEN, Geschichte Serbiens, 214- 221; vgl. THE OTHER BALKAN WARS. A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquriy in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George F. Kennan (Washington DC 1993).