The Glinciszki massacre (Polish: Zbrodnia w Glinciszkach; Lithuanian: Glitiškių žudynės) was a mass murder of Polish civilians by the German-subordinated 258th Lithuanian Police Battalion,[1] committed on 20 June 1944 in the village of Glinciszki (now Glitiškės in Lithuania) during World War II.

In the massacre 39 civilians were murdered including 11 women (one in an advanced stage of pregnancy), 11 children, and 6 elderly men.

Glitiškės village consisted of a large estate, the centre of which was the manor house of the Jeleński family, surrounded by farm buildings and a landscape park.

[8] However, this census cannot be considered reliable because it was taken during a period of heightened terror against the Polish population, just seven days after the May 20, 1942 murder of Poles in the Švenčionys district by Lithuanian police.

[13] On 20 June 1944, around 3:30 AM, a unit of Polish partisans, pretending to be Russian-speaking bandits, robbed the estate of several cattle.

The scouts ran into the Home Army 5th Wilno Brigade, under the command of Wiktor Wiącek [pl] "Rakoczy" and Antoni Rymsza "Maks": four were killed, two were injured, and two escaped.

Józef Bałendo, who was wounded in the hand and covered with other bodies, survived, slipping out of the execution site unnoticed.

[19] Jonas Žvinys, a Lithuanian parish priest from Dubingiai who happened to be passing by on his way to Vilnius, said a prayer for the dead.

[18] Lithuanian police officers brought about eight men from Baronėliai [lt] village and ordered them to dig a mass grave.

[19] Władysław Komar [pl], a member of the AK,[4] but also the administrator of a group of manors as a representative of the occupational German land management company Landbewirtschaftungsgesellschaft Ostland [de], was informed of events in Glitiškės via phone and arrived at the scene around 2 pm, a few hours after the massacre.

[23] In the spring of 1944, in the face of the approaching Soviet army, the Germans made attempts to win over local Poles, previously discriminated against.

[25] According to one account, the assassins of Władysław Komar were convinced that they had killed Aleksander Krzyżanowski, the commander of the Home Army in the Vilnius region.

[21] At the widow's request, Władysław Komar's body was exhumed and buried in a family grave in Vilnius on June 24, 1944.

[26] Following the massacre on 21 June, Lieutenant Petras Polekauskas and 11 Lithuanian soldiers were arrested by the Germans,[15] for the execution of Władysław Komar.

[5][28] The day after the crime, the commander of the 5th brigade of the Home Army Zygmunt Szendzielarz "Łupaszko" carried out a "retaliatory action".

[34] Łupaszko acted on his own, without agreement with the AK district commander, Lt. Col. Aleksander Krzyżanowski "Wilk", perhaps even ignoring orders to halt the action and not to take revenge.

[37] Both German and Polish reports produced immediately after the events mention 27 dead including Władysław Komar.

[4] A few days later, the dead were exhumed and reburied near the road to Paberžė (Polish: Podbrzezie) in a German war cemetery from 1915.

At the same time, a list of the victims was compiled by Irena Sławińska [pl] with 39 entries, but later researchers identified that one man was included twice under different surnames, leaving 38 dead.