Vilna Ghetto

Vilnius Ghetto
The Vilnius Ghetto, Julian Klaczko Street, 1941
Also known as	German: Ghetto Wilna
Location	Vilnius Old Town
Date	September 6, 1941 to September 24, 1943
Incident type	Imprisonment, mass shootings, forced labor, starvation, exile
Organizations	Nazi SS, Ypatingasis būrys
Camp	Vaivara
Victims	about 55,000 Jews

The Vilna Ghetto, Vilnius Ghetto, Wilno Ghetto or Vilniaus Getas was a World War II Jewish ghetto established and operated by Nazi Germany in the city of Vilnius in the territory of Nazi-administered Reichskommissariat Ostland. During roughly two years of its existence, starvation, disease, street executions, maltreatment and deportations to concentration camps and extermination camps reduced the population of the ghetto from an estimated 40,000 to zero. Only several hundred people managed to survive, mostly by hiding in the forests surrounding the town, joining the Soviet partisans, or finding shelter among sympathetic locals.

Before the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, Wilno was the capital of the Wilno Voivodship in the Second Polish Republic. The predominant languages of the city were Polish and to a lesser extent, Yiddish. The Lithuanian-speaking population at the time was a small minority, at about 6% of the city's population according to contemporary Lithuanian sources. By 1931, the city had 195,000 inhabitants, making it the fifth largest city in Poland with varied industries and new factories, as well as a well respected university.

Wilno was a predominantly Polish and Jewish city since the Polish-Lithuanian borders were accepted in 1922 by the League of Nations in the aftermath of the Great War. After the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, Joseph Stalin transferred Wilno to Lithuania in October, according to the Soviet–Lithuanian Mutual Assistance Treaty. Two years later, the German Army entered Vilna on 26 June 1941, followed by Einsatzkommando death squads of Einsatzgruppe B. Over the course of the summer, German troops and their Lithuanian collaborators killed more than 21,000 Jews living in Vilnius, in a mass extermination program. The Provisional Government of Lithuania had claimed Vilna as its capital along the lines of former dispute with Poland. 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 (i.e. ethnically cleanse) the city.