Founded in the 13th century in Eastern Galicia, the city of Lvov was under Austrian rule from 1772 to 1918; Poland, from independence in 1918, until annexation to Soviet Russia in late September, 1939; Germany, after the German offensive of June, 1941; and the Soviet Union again, following the defeat of Germany in 1945. Presently it is within the borders of the recently independent state of the Ukraine.
Prior to World War Two, Lvov had the third largest Jewish community in Poland. The city was known as both a cultural and industrial center, with its Jewish culture particularly lively. Following the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and the annexation of Lvov into Soviet territory three weeks later, approximately one hundred thousand Jews from Nazi-occupied Poland found refuge in Lvov. The following year the Soviet authorities exiled many of these Polish Jews to distant regions of the Soviet Union.
When the Germans took control of Lvov in the German-Soviet War, in June, 1941, extremely harsh anti-Jewish measures were immediately put into action. During the summer, a series of massacres of the Lvov Jews by both the Germans and Ukrainians, became known as the Petliura Days. Thousands of Jews were killed.
The Germans forced the city's Jews into the newly established ghetto by December, 1941. There the Nazis enacted their usual pattern of confiscation of Jewish property, personal humiliations and deprivations of every sort, forced labor, and deportation to concentration camps.
Source: The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Israel Gutman, Editor in Chief, Macmillan Publishing Company, New York: 1990