Due to the advance of Soviet troops in January 1945, the Stutthof concentration camp, an SSsubcamp near Stutthof, was disbanded and its inmates were sent on a forced march through Königsberg to Palmnicken, which only 3,000 of the original 13,000 inmates survived. Originally, the surviving detainees were to be walled up within a tunnel of an amber mine in Palmnicken, but this plan collapsed upon the objections of the mine's manager. The SS guards then brought the prisoners to the beach of Palmnicken during the night of January 31, and forced them to march into the Baltic Sea under gunfire, with only 33 of the known by name inmates surviving. A monument to the victims was unveiled in Yantarny on January, 30, 2011. The monument, by Frank Meisler, features hands lifted up to the sky as a symbol of the perishing people. On August, 24, 2011, the monument was vandalized with paint and antisemitic slogans.
Post-1945
Palmnicken was eventually captured by the Red Army on 7 April 1945, during the closing days of the war. The northern third of East Prussia, including Palmnicken, became part of the Soviet Union in 1945 under terms of border changes promulgated at the Potsdam Conference. The German population evacuated or was subsequently expelled to western Germany. Palmnicken was renamed Yantarny, derived from yantar, the Russian word for amber, and was repopulated by Soviet settlers, predominantly Russians, as well as Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Tatars.
was collected along the shores of the Sambian coast during the age of the Teutonic Knights. They succeeded in establishing a monopoly over the amber trade, which carried over to the Prussian stateof the House of Hohenzollern. In the 16th century amber collected along the coastline was brought to Palmnicken where it was sorted and then sent to Königsberg for further processing. After 1811 the amber production was leased. In 1858 the firm Stantien & Becker was founded. Stantien & Becker created the first open pit amber mine in the world, but mined amber mainly with the method of underground mining. Initially the mine produced 50 tons of amber annually, but by 1937 - now a state-owned company - it produced 650 tons annually and employed 700 workers. As part of the Soviet Union, Yantarny produced approximately 600 tons of amber annually through the company Russky Yantar. The refinement of amber was discontinued in 2002 by a directive of the Russian Regulatory Authority for Technology and Environmental Protection. Some years later, a new open pit mine was established in immediate vicinity of the old open pit mine. In 2008 about 500 tons amber was mined at this location.
