Ponary massacre
The Ponary massacre or Paneriai massacre 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 Reichskommissariat Ostland. The murders took place between July 1941 and August 1944 near the railway station at Ponary, a suburb of today's Vilnius, Lithuania. Some 70,000 Jews were murdered at Ponary, along with up to 20,000 Poles, and 8,000 Russian POWs, most of them from nearby Vilna, and its newly-formed Vilna Ghetto.
Lithuania and the Baltic States 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 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.
Background
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 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. The Nazi killing squads decided to use the six large pits excavated for the oil storage tanks to abduct, murder, and to hide the bodies of condemned locals.
Massacres
The massacres began in July 1941, as soon as SS Einsatzkommando 9 arrived in Vilna on 2 July 1941. Most of the actual killings were carried out by the Special Platoons of Ypatingasis burys 80 men strong. On 9 August 1941, EK 9 was replaced by EK 3. In September, the Vilna Ghetto was established. In the same month 3,700 Jews were shot in one operation, and 6,000 in another, rounded up in the city and walked to Paneriai. Most victims were stripped before being shot. Further mass killings, aided by Ypatingasis burys, took place throughout the summer and fall.By the end of the year, about 50,000–60,000 Vilna Jews; men, women, and children, had been killed according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia. According to Snyder 21,700 of them were shot at Ponary, but there are serious discrepancies in the death toll for this period. Yitzhak Arad supplied information based on original Jewish documentation augmented by the Einsatzgruppen reports, ration cards and work permits.
According to his estimates, until the end of December, 33,500 Jews of Vilna were murdered in Ponary, 3,500 fled east, and 20,000 remained in the Ghetto. The reason for such a wide range of estimated deaths was the presence of war refugees arriving from German-occupied western Poland, whose residence rights were denied by the new Lithuanian administration. On the eve of the Soviet annexation of Lithuania in June 1940, Vilna was home to around 100,000 newcomers, including 85,000 Poles, and 10,000 Jews according to Lithuanian Red Cross.
The pace of killings slowed in 1942, as ghettoised Jewish slave-workers were appropriated by the Wehrmacht. As Soviet troops advanced in 1943, the Nazi units tried to cover up the crime under the Aktion 1005 directive. Eighty inmates from the Stutthof concentration camp were formed into Leichenkommando. The workers were forced to dig up bodies, pile them on wood and burn them. The ashes were then ground up, mixed with sand and buried. After months of this gruesome work, the brigade managed to escape through a tunnel dug with spoons on 19 April 1944. Eleven of the 80 who escaped survived the war; their testimony contributed to revealing the massacre.
Victims
The total number of victims by the end of 1944 was between 70,000 and 100,000. According to post-war exhumation by the forces of Soviet 2nd Belorussian Front the majority of the victims were Polish and Lithuanian Jews from nearby Polish and Lithuanian cities, while the rest were primarily Poles and Russians. According to Monika Tomkiewicz, author of a 2008 book on the Ponary massacre, 80,000 people were killed, including 72,000 Jews, 5,000 Soviet prisoners, between 1,500 and 2,000 Poles, 1,000 people described as Communists or Soviet activists, and 40 Romani people.The Polish victims were mostly members of Polish intelligentsia – academics, educators, priests, and members of the Armia Krajowa resistance movement. Among the first victims were approximately 7,500 Soviet POWs shot in 1941 soon after Operation Barbarossa begun. At later stages there were also smaller numbers of victims of other nationalities, including local Russians, Romani and Lithuanians, particularly Communist sympathizers and over 80 soldiers of General Povilas Plechavičius' Local Lithuanian Detachment who refused to follow German orders.
Commemoration
Information about the massacre began to spread as early as 1943, due to the activities and works of Helena Pasierbska, Józef Mackiewicz, Kazimierz Sakowicz and others. Nonetheless the Soviet regime, which supported the resettlement of Poles from the Kresy, found it convenient to deny that Poles or Jews were singled out for massacre in Paneriai; the official line was that Paneriai was a site of massacre of Soviet citizens only. This led some — including Polish Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek — to compare this to the Katyn massacre.On 22 October 2000, a decade after the fall of communism, in independent Lithuania, an effort by several Polish organizations resulted in raising a monument to fallen Polish citizens, during an official ceremony in which representatives of both Polish and Lithuanian governments, as well as several NGOs, took place.
The site of the massacre is commemorated by a monument to the victims of the Holocaust, a memorial to the Polish victims, monument to soldiers of Lithuanian Local Squad killed by Nazis in May, 1944, memorial stone to Soviet war prisoners, starved to death and shot here in 1941 and a small museum. The first monument in the former mass murder site was built by Vilnius Jews in 1948 but was soon replaced by Soviet regime with conventional obelisk dedicated to "Victims of Fascism".
The murders at Paneriai are currently being investigated by the Gdańsk branch of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance and by the Genocide and . The basic facts about memorial signs in the Paneriai memorial and the objects of the former mass murder site are now presented in the created by the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum.