Vinnytsia massacre

Vinnytsia massacre
Part of the Great Purge
Location	Vinnytsia, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
Coordinates	49°08′N 28°17′E / 49.14°N 28.29°E / 49.14; 28.29
Date	1937–1938
Target	Political prisoners, ethnic Poles
Attack type	Summary executions
Deaths	9,000[1]–11,000[2]
Perpetrators	NKVD

The Vinnytsia massacre was the mass execution of between 9,000 and 11,000 people in the Ukrainian town of Vinnytsia by the Soviet secret police NKVD during the Great Purge in 1937–1938, which Nazi Germany discovered during its occupation of Ukraine in 1943.^[3] The investigation of the site first conducted by the international Katyn Commission coincided with the discovery of a similar mass murder site of Polish prisoners of war in Katyn. Among the 679 dead identified by the Germans in 1943, there were also a certain number of Russians and 28 Poles (according to the latest data, the number of Poles killed by the NKVD in the city could amount to over 3,000). Nazi propaganda invoked mention of the massacre to illustrate communist terror by the Soviet Union.