Museum of Genocide Victims

Today we headed to the Museum of Genocide Victims.  The museum is located in the former KGB headquarters.  We took some pictures outside of the building as you are not allowed to photograph the inside.  We toured the basement which was used as the prison and interrogation area where over 1,000 prisoners were executed.  I definitely recommend touring this building if any of you come to visit us.  The second and third levels have many displays of history, the people and their later resistance to the occupation.  For more information or pictures of the inside, I suggest googling it.

History of the building (borrowed from Wikipedia):

During the 19th century, Lithuania was part of the Russian Empire. The building, completed in 1890, originally housed the court of the Vilna Governorate. The German Empire used it during its World War I occupation of the country. After independence was declared, it served as a conscription center for the newly formed Lithuanian army and as the Vilnius commander's headquarters. During the Lithuanian Wars of Independence, the city was briefly taken by the Bolsheviks, and the building housed commissariats and a revolutionary tribunal. Following Żeligowski's Mutiny of 1920, Vilnius and its surroundings were incorporated into Poland, and the building housed the courts of justice for the Wilno Voivodship.

Lithuania was invaded by the Soviet Union in 1940, and following an ultimatum, became a Soviet Socialist Republic. Mass arrests and deportations followed, and the building's basement became a prison. In 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the country; the building then housed the Gestapo headquarters. Inscriptions on the cell walls from this era remain. The Soviets retook the country in 1944, and from then until independence was re-established in 1991, the building was used by the KGB, housing offices, a prison, and an interrogation center. Over 1,000 prisoners were executed in the basement between 1944 and the early 1960s, about one third for resisting the occupation.^[4] Most bodies were buried in the Tuskulėnai Manor, which underwent reconstruction and is selected to host the second Museum of Genocide Victims.^[5]

In addition to housing the museum, the building now serves as a courthouse and as the repository of the Lithuanian Special Archives.

The wall outside the building is engraved with the names of those killed inside.

Monument to Soviet Occupation Victims.  The stones in the monument are from all over Lithuania.