On 25 June 1941 Nazi forces arrived in Kaunas, where they witnessed local Lithuanians drag about 50 male Jews into the center of the city while one Lithuanian man beat them to death with a crowbar (cheered on by spectators) in a public display of brutality that shocked many Germans. Once the Jews were all dead, the man who had beaten them to death, climbed atop their corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem on an accordion. These deaths were part of the Kaunas pogrom during which many thousands of Jews were killed by the Nazis with local acquiesance or assistance. Mere weeks after arrival, the Nazis instituted a systematic campaign to eliminate the Jews of Lithuania by identifying them, rounding them up, guarding them, and transporting them to extermination sites—during which they were aided by Lithuanian soldiers and police. The pace of murder increased and spread across Lithuania as the Germans consolidated their rule, sometimes by way of Lithuanian initiative, other times triggered at the arrival of Sipo-SD contingents. Within the last 6 months of 1941 following the June invasion by Germany, the majority of Lithuanian Jews were executed, the biggest crime being the Ponary massacre. The remnants trapped in ghettos were killed in occupied Lithuania and sent to Nazi death camps in Poland. By the end of June 1941, around 80 percent of Lithuania's Jews had been "wiped out." Scholars believe the overall Holocaust-related death rate in Lithuania was approximately 90 percent, making Nazi-occupied Lithuania the European territory with the lowest proportion of Jewish survivors from World War II. While estimates vary, the number of Lithuanian Jews murdered in the Holocaust is assessed to be between 195,000 and 196,000.