Rainiai Massacre, Lithuania, 1941

The Rainiai massacre (Lithuanian: Rainių žudynės) was the mass murder of between 70 and 80 Lithuanian political prisoners by the NKVD, with help from the Red Army, in a forest near Telšiai, Lithuania, during the night of June 24–25, 1941. It was one of many similar massacres carried out by Soviet forces in Lithuania, and other parts of the Soviet Union, during June 1941. Several thousand people were killed in these massacres. The Rainiai massacre was far from the largest of these massacres, but it is one of the best-known, due to the brutality and alleged tortures inflicted on the victims by the perpetrators. Similar atrocities were committed in other places, like the Tartu massacre, in which almost two hundred people were murdered.