The crime was committed as revenge for a Slovene partisan ambush in Tesno gorge, when on February 2, 1945, important local Nazi officer Anton Dorfmeister was mortally wounded, dying the next day in Celje hospital. In retaliation, the Nazis gathered one hundred hostages from the prisons of Celje, Maribor, and Trbovlje and hanged them on trees along the road.[1]