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 asPolish: zbrodnia w Ponarach
LocationPaneriai (Ponary), Vilnius (Wilno), Reichskommissariat Ostland
54°37′35″N 25°09′40″E / 54.6264°N 25.1612°E / 54.6264; 25.1612
DateJuly 1941 – August 1944
Incident typeShootings by automatic and semi-automatic weapons, genocide
PerpetratorsSS Einsatzgruppe
Lithuanian collaborators
GhettoVilnius Ghetto
Victims~100,000 in total (Jews: 70,000;
Poles: From 1,000[1] to 2,000[2]
Soviets/Russians: 8,000)
DocumentationNuremberg 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,[3][4][5] 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,[a] along with up to 2,000 Poles,[10] 8,000 Soviet POWs, most of them from nearby Vilnius, and its newly formed Vilna Ghetto.[3][11]

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.[b] According to Timothy Snyder, out of 70,000 Jews living in Vilna, only about 7,000 survived the war.[13] 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.[14] More than two-thirds of them, or at least 50,000 Jews, had been killed before the end of 1941.[15][16]

  1. ^ Piotrowski 1998, p. 167.
  2. ^ Tomkiewicz 2008, p. 216.
  3. ^ a b Kazimierz Sakowicz, Yitzhak Arad, Ponary Diary, 1941–1943: A Bystander's Account of a Mass Murder, Yale University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-300-10853-2, Google Print.
  4. ^ KŚZpNP (2003). "Śledztwo w sprawie masowych zabójstw Polaków w latach 1941–1944 w Ponarach koło Wilna dokonanych przez funkcjonariuszy policji niemieckiej i kolaboracyjnej policji litewskiej" [Investigation of the mass murder of Poles in 1941–1944 at Ponary near Wilno by functionaries of German police and the Lithuanian collaborationist forces]. Documents of the Ongoing Investigation (in Polish). Institute of National Remembrance. Archived from the original on 2007-10-17 – via Internet Archive, 17 October 2007.
  5. ^ Bubnys, Arūnas (2004). German and Lithuanian Security Police, 1941–44 [Vokiečių ir lietuvių saugumo policija] (in Lithuanian). Vilnius: Lietuvos gyventojų genocido ir rezistencijos tyrimo centras. Retrieved 9 June 2006.
  6. ^ Mendelsohn, Ezra (1993). On Modern Jewish Politics. Oxford University Press. p. 8. ISBN 0-19-508319-9. Also in: Abley, Mark (2003). Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages. Houghton Mifflin Books. pp. 205, 277–279. ISBN 0-618-23649-X.
  7. ^ Balkelis (2013), p. 248, 'Red Cross'.
  8. ^ Balkelis, Tomas (2013). "Nationalizing the Borderlands". In Omer Bartov; Eric D. Weitz (eds.). Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands. Indiana University Press. pp. 246–252. ISBN 978-0253006318.
  9. ^ Niwiński, Piotr (2011). Ponary: the Place of "Human Slaughter" (in Polish, English, and Lithuanian). Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu; Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej, Departament Współpracy z Polonią. pp. 25–26.
  10. ^ Tomkiewicz, Monika (2008). Zbrodnia w Ponarach 1941-1944 (in Polish). Instytut Pamięci Narodowej--Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu. p. 216. ISBN 978-83-60464-91-5.
  11. ^ Piotrowski, Tadeusz (1998). Poland's Holocaust. McFarland & Company. p. 168. ISBN 0-7864-0371-3.
  12. ^ Miller-Korpi, Katy (1998). The Holocaust in the Baltics. University of Washington, Department papers online. Internet Archive, March 7, 2008. Archived from the original on 2008-03-07.
  13. ^ Snyder, Timothy (2003). The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999. Yale University Press. pp. 84–89. ISBN 0-300-10586-X – via Google Books, preview.
  14. ^ Sedlis, Steven P.; Grodin, Michael A. (2014). "Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust". The Establishment of a Public Health Service in the Vilna Ghetto. Berghahn Books. p. 148. ISBN 978-1782384182.
  15. ^ Baumel, Judith Tydor; Laqueur, Walter (2001). The Holocaust Encyclopedia. Yale University Press. p. 254. ISBN 0300138113. Also in: Shapiro, Robert Moses (1999). Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust Through Diaries and Other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts. KTAV Publishing House. p. 162. ISBN 0881256307.
  16. ^ Woolfson, Shivaun (2014). Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania: People, Places and Objects. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 3. ISBN 978-1472522955.


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