Posted on 06/29/16
| News Source: VIN
Vilnius - Israel’s antiquities authority says an international research team has located a tunnel in Lithuania dug by Jewish prisoners trying to escape their Nazi captors during World War II.
The authority said Wednesday the team from Israel, the U.S., Canada and Lithuania used mineral and oil exploration scanning technology to pinpoint the tunnel.
The 35-meter (115-foot) long tunnel is located in the Ponar forest, known today as Paneriai, where the Nazis killed some 100,000 people.
Toward the end of the war, prisoners were brought from the Stutthof concentration camp and forced to burn the bodies.
Secretly, they dug the underground tunnel out of a pit they were kept in. Forty prisoners escaped through the tunnel in 1944. Many were shot, but 11 reached partisan forces and survived.