Ponary massacre
| Ponary massacre | |
|---|---|
One of six Ponary murder pits in which victims were shot (July 1941). Note the ramp leading down and the group of men forced to wear hoods. | |
| Also known as | Polish: zbrodnia w Ponarach |
| Location | Paneriai (Ponary), Vilnius (Wilno), Reichskommissariat Ostland 54°37′35″N 25°09′40″E / 54.6264°N 25.1612°E |
| Date | July 1941 – August 1944 |
| Incident type | Shootings by automatic and semi-automatic weapons, genocide |
| Perpetrators | SS Einsatzgruppe Lithuanian collaborators |
| Ghetto | Vilnius Ghetto |
| Victims | ~100,000 in total (Jews: 70,000; Poles: From 1,000 to 2,000 Soviets/Russians: 8,000) |
| Documentation | Nuremberg Trials |
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The Ponary massacre (Polish: zbrodnia w Ponarach), or the Paneriai massacre (Lithuanian: Panerių žudynės), was the mass murder of up to 100,000 people, mostly Jews, Poles, and Russians, by German SD and SS and the Lithuanian Ypatingasis būrys killing squads, during World War II and the Holocaust in the Generalbezirk Litauen of Reichskommissariat Ostland. The murders took place between July 1941 and August 1944 near the railway station at Ponary (now Paneriai), a suburb of today's Vilnius, Lithuania. 70,000 Jews were murdered at Ponary, along with up to 2,000 Poles, 8,000 Soviet POWs, most of them from nearby Vilnius, and its newly formed Vilna Ghetto.
Lithuania became one of the first locations outside occupied Poland in World War II where the Nazis mass-murdered Jews as part of the Final Solution. According to Timothy Snyder, out of 70,000 Jews living in Vilna, only about 7,000 survived the war. The number of dwellers, estimated by Steven P. Sedlis, as of June 1941 was 80,000 Jews, or one-half of the city's population. More than two-thirds of them, or at least 50,000 Jews, had been killed before the end of 1941.