Railway among the wood at Panerai Memorial, Lithuania
The Ponary or the Paneriai massacre (Polish: zbrodnia w Ponarach) was the mass murder of up to 100,000 people by German SD, SS, and the Lithuanian Nazi collaborators,[1][2][3][4] including killing squads of Ypatingasis būrys,[1][2][5] during World War II and the Holocaust in Reichskommissariat Ostland. The murders took place between July 1941 and August 1944 near the railway station of Ponary, now known as Paneriai, a suburb of what is today Vilnius, Lithuania. Some 70,000 Jews were murdered in Ponary,[a] along with up to 20,000 Poles,[2][9] and 8,000 Russian POWs, most of them from nearby Vilna (Vilnius), and its newly-formed Vilna Ghetto.[3][10] 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.[b] Out of 70,000 Jews living in Vilna according to Snyder, only 7,000 (or 10 percent) survived the war.[12] The number of dwellers, estimated by Sedlis, as of June 1941 was 80,000 Jews, or one-half of the city's population.[13] 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
Size: 6016px × 4016px
Location: Panerai (Ponary), Lithuania
Photo credit: © Roberto Cornacchia / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
Keywords: adolf, baltic, collaborators, final, german, hitler, holocaust, jew, jews, lithuania, lithuanian, mass, massacre, memorial, murder, nazi, panerai, polish, ponary, railway, schutzstaffel, sea, sicherheitsdienst, solution, ss, states, vilnius, ypatingasis, ūrys
