Ponary massacre

The Ponary massacre (zbrodnia w Ponarach), or the Paneriai massacre (Panerių žudynės), was the mass murder of up to 100,000 people, mostly Jews, Poles, and Russians, by German SD and SS and their Lithuanian collaborators, including 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 20,000 Poles, and 8,000 Soviet POWs, most of them from nearby Vilna (Vilnius), and its newly formed Vilna Ghetto. Lithuania became one of the first locations outside occupied Poland in World War II where the Nazis would mass murder Jews as part of the Final Solution. Out of 70,000 Jews living in Vilna according to Snyder, only about 7,000 survived the war. The number of dwellers, estimated by Sedlis, as of June 1941 was 80,000 Jews, or one-half of the city's population. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia and others, more than two-thirds of them or at least 50,000 Jews had been killed before the end of 1941. Following the Żeligowski's Mutiny and the creation of the short-lived Central Lithuania, in accordance with international agreements ratified in 1923 by the League of Nations, the town of Ponary became part of the Wilno Voivodship (Kresy region) of the Second Polish Republic. The predominant languages in the area were Polish and Yiddish. After the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, the region was annexed by the Soviets and after about a month, on October 10, transferred to Lithuania according to the Soviet–Lithuanian Treaty. Following the Soviet annexation of Lithuania and the Baltic states in June 1940, the construction of an oil storage facility began near Ponary in conjunction with the future Soviet military airfield. That project was never completed, and in June 1941 the area was overrun by the Wehrmacht in Operation Barbarossa.