Ponary massacre
포나리 학살
The mass murder of 70,000–100,000 people, about 70,000 of them Jews and the rest mainly Poles and Soviet prisoners of war, by the German SD and SS and the Lithuanian Ypatingasis būrys at Ponary (Paneriai) outside Vilnius between July 1941 and August 1944.
In depth
The shootings began when Einsatzkommando 9 arrived in Vilnius on 2 July 1941, with most of the killing done by a Lithuanian volunteer squad some 80 strong. Six large pits dug by the Soviets for the fuel tanks of a military airfield became the graves. The “actions” continued after the Vilnius ghetto was set up in September; estimates of the Jews killed at Ponary by the end of 1941 range from 21,700 (Timothy Snyder) to 33,500 (Yitzhak Arad) and about 40,000 (US Holocaust Memorial Museum).
As Soviet troops approached in 1943, the Nazis formed prisoners into “corpse units” under Aktion 1005 to dig up and burn the bodies. On 19 April 1944 they escaped through a tunnel dug with spoons, and the testimony of the 11 of the 80 who survived helped reveal the massacre. For decades the Soviet authorities commemorated the victims only as “Soviet citizens”; a monument to the Holocaust victims was erected only in 1991.