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Ponary massacre

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The Ponary massacre (or Paneriai massacre) was the mass-murder of 100,000 people, mostly Jews, by German SD and SS and Lithuanian[1][2][3][4] Sonderkommando collaborators (Special SD and German Security Police Squad "Ypatingasis būrys" units)[1][2][5] during World War II and the Holocaust in Reichskommissariat Ostland. The executions took place between July 1941 and August 1944 near the railway station of Paneriai (Template:lang-pl), now a suburb of Vilnius. The victims were brought to the edge of huge pits and shot to death by machine gun fire. Some 70,000 Jews were murdered in Ponary,[6] along with estimated 20,000 Poles and 8,000 Russians, many from nearby Vilnius.[1][3][7]

Background[edit]

Following the incorporation of the Republic of Central Lithuania into Poland, the town of Ponary became part of the Wilno Voivodship, (Kresy region). In September 1939, the region was taken over by the Soviets, and after about a month transferred to Lithuania. After the annexation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union, in June 1940, the Soviets began constructing an oil storage facility near Ponary in conjunction with a military airfield. That project was never completed, as in 1941 the area was occupied by Nazi Germany. The Nazis decided to take advantage of the large pits dug for the oil warehouses to dispose of bodies of unwanted locals. Their policy was to kill every Jewish individual in Lithuania, and the Baltic countries became the first place Nazis would mass execute Jews[8]. Out of 70,000 Jews living in Vilnius, only 7,000 would survive the war; the Jewish culture in Vilnius, one of the greatest in Europe, ceased to exist.[9]

Massacre[edit]

The massacres began in July, 1941, when Einsatzkommando 9 arrived in Vilnius, rounded up 5,000 Jewish men of Vilnius and took them to Paneriai where they were shot. Further mass killings, often aided by Lithuanian volunteers,[9] from Ypatingasis burys, took place throughout the summer and fall.[5] In September, Vilna Ghetto was created.[9] By the end of the year, about 21,700 Jews had been killed at Paneriai.[9] The pace of killings slowed in 1942, as slave workers were appropriated by Wehrmacht.[9]

One of the pits where people were shot

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 (50,000–70,000) of the victims were Polish and Lithuanian Jews from nearby Polish and Lithuanian cities, while the rest were primarily Poles (about 20,000) and Russians (about 8,000).[2][1] The Polish victims were mostly members of Polish intelligentsia (teachers, professors of the Stefan Batory University like Kazimierz Pelczar, priests like Romuald Świrkowski) and members of Armia Krajowa resistance movement.[2][7] Among the first victims were approximately 7,500 Soviet POWs shot in 1941 soon after Operation Barbarossa begun.[4] At later stages there were also smaller numbers of victims of other nationalities, including local Russians, Roma and Lithuanians, particularly communists sympathizers and members of general Povilas Plechavičius' Local Lithuanian Detachment who refused to follow German orders.[2]

As Soviet troops advanced in 1943, the German-led units tried to cover up the crime. A unit of eighty workers was formed from nearby Stutthof concentration camp prisoners and was forced to dig up the bodies, pile them on wood and burn them. The ashes were then mixed with sand and buried.[2] After six months of this gruesome work, aware that eventually they would be executed themselves, the brigade managed to escape on April 19, 1944. Eleven of them managed to survive the ordeal, and their testimony contributed to revealing the massacre.

Commemoration[edit]

Memorial for Soviet victims of Ponary massacre

The 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 massacred in Paneriai; the official line was that Paneriai was a site of massacre of Soviet citizens only.[10][4] This Soviet denial, as well as the fact that it was one of the biggest massacres on Poles in the East, led some - like Polish Prime Minister, Jerzy Buzek - to compare this to the Katyn Massacre.[2] On 22 October, 2000, a decade after the fall of communism, in independent Lithuania, an effort by a several Polish organizations resulted in raising a monument (a cross) to fallen Polish citizens, during an official ceremony in which representatives of both Polish and Lithuanian governments (Bronisław Komorowski, Polish Minister of Defence, and his Lithuanian counterpart), as well as several NGOs, took place.[4][11][2]

The site of the massacre is commemorated by a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, a memorial to the Polish victims and a small museum (currently closed). The executions at Paneriai, are currently a matter of an investigation by the Gdańsk branch of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance.[1]

References[edit]

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Template:pl icon Åšledztwo w sprawie masowych zabójstw Polaków w latach 1941 - 1944 w Ponarach koÅ‚o Wilna dokonanych przez funkcjonariuszy policji niemieckiej i kolaboracyjnej policji litewskiej (Investigation of mass murders of Poles in the years 1941–1944 in Ponary near Wilno by functionaries of German police and Lithuanian collaborating police). Institute of National Remembrance documents from 2003 on the ongoing investigation]. Last accessed on 10 February 2007.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 Template:pl icon CzesÅ‚aw Michalski, Ponary - Golgota WileÅ„szczyzny (Ponary — the Golgoth of Wilno Region). Konspekt nº 5, Winter 2000–2001, a publication of the Academy of Pedagogy in Kraków. Last accessed on 10 February 2007.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Kazimierz Sakowicz, Yitzhak Arad, Ponary Diary, 1941–1943: A Bystander's Account of a Mass Murder, Yale University Press, 2005, ISBN 0300108532, Google Print.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Ponary. Last accessed on 10 February 2007.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 (Lithuanian) ArÅ«nas Bubnys (2004). Vokiečių ir lietuvių saugumo policija (1941–1944) (German and Lithuanian security police: 1941–1944), Vilnius: Lietuvos gyventojų genocido ir rezistencijos tyrimo centras. URL accessed 2006-06-09.
  6. ↑ Jews of Vilna and Lithuania in general had their own complex identity, and labels of Polish Jews, Lithuanian Jews or Russian Jews are all applicable only in part. See also: Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics, Oxford University Press, 1993, ISBN 0195083199, Google Print, p.8 and Mark Abley, Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, Houghton Mifflin Books, 2003, ISBN 061823649X, Google Print, p.205
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Tadeusz Piotrowski, Poland's Holocaust, McFarland & Company, 1997, ISBN 0-7864-0371-3, p. 168.
  8. ↑ One of the areas to first experience the totality of Hitler’s "final solution" for the Jews was the Baltic countries. In a sense the Holocaust, that is the destruction of European Jews, started in the Baltics. It was there that Hitler’s executioners began their first actions of mass genocide. - Katy Miller-Korpi, The Holocaust in the Baltics, University of Washington, Department papers online, 1998.[1]
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999, Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-10586-XGoogle Books, p.84-89
  10. ↑ Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Lithuania at Ponary (with photo gallery). Last accessed on 15 March 2007.
  11. ↑ Template:pl icon StanisÅ‚aw Mikke, 'W Ponarach'. Relation from a Polish-Lithuanian memorial ceremony in Panerai, 2000. On the pages of Polish Bar Association

External links[edit]

Further reading[edit]

  • Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, eds., The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, Free Press, 1991, ISBN 0029174252
  • Algis Kasperavičius, ""Lithuanian-Jewish relations in 1935-1944
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