Paneriai (Polish: Ponary) is a suburb of Vilnius, some 10 kilometres away from the city centre. The town is located on low forested hills, on the Vilnius-Warsaw road.
After annexation of Lithuania the Soviet authorities started to build a huge oil warehouse for the nearby military airfield. The construction was never finished as in 1941 the area got under German occupation. Between July 1941 and August 1944 Paneriai became the mass murder site of approximately 100.000 victims. The executions were carried out by local Lithuanian police unit Ypatingasis Burys as well as German units of SD and SS. The victims were usually brought to the edges of huge pits and shot to death with machine gun fire.
Since late 1943 the German-led units tried to slur the crime. A unit of 80 workers was brought form a nearby Stutthof concentration camp in order to dig out the bodies, pile them with wood and burn them. The ashes were then mixed with sand and buried. After 6 months of such actions the brigade managed to escape on April 19, 1944. 11 of them managed to survive the chase in order to tell the tale.
According to post-war exhumation by the forces of 2nd Belarusian Front approximately 70 to 90% of the victims were Jews from nearby Polish and Lithuanian cities, while the rest were mostly members of Polish intelligentsia and Home Army. One of the first group of victims were 7.500 Polish POWs shot in 1941. At later stages there were also victims of other nationalities, for instance local Russians and Roma. The executions at Ponary are currently a matter of an investigation by the Gdańsk branch of the Polish IPN.
The site of the massacre is commemorated by the memorial to the victims of the Lithuanian holocaust and a small museum.
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