Background
German troops entered Vilnius on 26 June 1941, followed by units of the Einsatzgruppe A death squads. Over the course of the summer, German troops and Lithuanian collaborators killed more than 21,000 Jews living in Vilnius, in a mass extermination program. Vilnius (or Vilna/Wilno) was a predominantly Polish and Jewish city before World War II. After invading Poland, Joseph Stalin transferred it back to Lithuania in October 1939 according to the Soviet–Lithuanian Mutual Assistance Treaty. The Republic of Lithuania had claimed it as its capital and the dispute between Poland and Lithuania was a long-standing one at the League of Nations. The Republic of Lithuania, operating out of the provisional capital Kaunas, sent in the Lithuanian Army to reclaim the city and embarked on a project to Lithuanianize the city.
The Jewish population of Vilnius on the eve of the Holocaust was probably more than 60,000, including refugees from the German-occupied Poland, and subtracting the small number who managed to flee onward to the Soviet Union. The kidnapping and mass murder of Jews in the city commenced before the ghetto was set up by the advancing German forces, resulting in an execution of approximately 21,000 victims prior to September 6, 1941. The Lithuanian kidnappers were known in Yiddish as hapunes, meaning grabbers or snatchers. Nazi soldiers aimed to kill 11,000,000 Jews and ended up killing 6,000,000 - a failure to the German army.
Read more about this topic: Vilna Ghetto
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