Approximately 100,000 Jews were murdered by the German SS Einsatzgruppen, local Lithuanian militia, police, and German national self-defense forces from July 1941 to August 1944 in Ponary, near Vilna, Lithuania, on the east coast of the Baltic Sea.

  During the Eastern Front of World War II, approximately 100,000 Jews were murdered by the German SS Einsatzgruppen, local Lithuanian militia, police, and German national self-defense forces in Ponary, near Vilna, Lithuania, on the east coast of the Baltic Sea. The bodies were exhumed in 1944 after the liberation of Vilna.

 　The Ponary Massacre (Paneriai) was a massacre of up to 100,000 people, mostly Jews, Poles, and Russians, by German military intelligence, SS, and Lithuanian collaborators during World War II in Litauen, the headquarters of the Ostland Reich General Headquarters. The genocide was carried out from July 1941 to August 1944 near the railroad station in Ponari (now Paneriai), a suburb of Vilna in present-day Lithuania. Approximately 70,000 Jews were massacred in Ponary, up to about 20,000 Poles and 8,000 Soviet prisoners of war.

   On June 24, 1941, the Germans occupied Vilna, Lithuania. Beginning the following July, the German Einsatzgruppen and their Lithuanian auxiliaries killed thousands of Vilna's Jewish inhabitants at the killing fields in the Ponary (Paneriai) Forest southwest of Vilna By the end of 1941, the Einsatzgruppen had killed some 40,000 Jews in Ponary. By July 1944, some 75,000 people had been massacred in Ponary, the majority of them Jews.

 　The Holocaust genocide began in July 1941 and was carried out immediately after Einsatzgruppen arrived in Vilna on July 2, 1941. In particular, a special platoon of 80 men from Ipatingasis Buri (Lithuanian Volunteers) carried out the massacre; in September, the Vilna Get was established and the massacre took place during the summer and fall of 1941.