The Tykocin massacre (pogrom), of August 25, 1941, was the mass murder of Jewish residents of Tykocin in occupied Poland during World War II, soon after Nazi German attack on the Soviet Union.

The town of Tykocin was conquered by Nazi Germany during the Soviet and German invasion of Poland pursuant to their secret agreement known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. At the end of September 1939, the area was transferred by the Nazis to the Soviet Union in accordance with the German–Soviet Boundary Treaty.

In their attack, the Red Army overrun 52.1% of territory of interwar Poland with over 13,700,000 inhabitants. The Soviet occupation zone included also 336,000 new refugees who escaped from Polish lands invaded by Germany, most of them Polish Jews numbering at around 198,000. Spreading terror throughout the region, the Soviet secret police (NKVD) accompanying the Red Army massacred Polish prisoners of war, and in less than two years, deported up to 1.5 million ethnic Poles to Siberia. Twenty-one months after the Soviet invasion of Poland, during the German Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, the town was overrun again, this time by Wehrmacht followed closely behind by Einsatzgruppen. The Germans installed Jan Fibich, a local ethnic German, as mayor. Fibich, aided by Edmund Wiśniewski, prepared a list of Jews collaborating with the Soviet NKVD, which included almost all of Jewish youth.

Tykocin [tɨˈkɔt​͡ɕin] (German: Tykotzin; Yiddish: טיקטין) is an old, smaller size town in north-eastern Poland, with 1,800 inhabitants (1998), located on the Narew river. Tykocin has been situated in the Podlaskie Voivodeship since 1999. Previously, it belonged to Białystok Voivodeship (1975-1998). It is one of the oldest settlements in the region.

The name of Tykocin was first mentioned in the 11th century and through the 14th century it was a Duchy of Masovian castellany seat and castle on the Masovian border neighboring the growing medieval pagan Lithuania. Tykocin received city rights from prince Janusz I of Warsaw in 1425, but several months later it was given to Grand Duchy of Lithuania by the Polish king Wladyslaw II Jagiello.

Shortly later, or about 1433 AD, Duke Sigismund Kęstutaitis gave the town along with other towns to Jonas Gostautas, and it became the most important power seat of that Lithuanian magnate Gostautai family clan. During 1560s, upon the family's last member passing away, the town became one of the most favorite properties for Polish king and Lithuanian Grand Prince Sigismund II Augustus who had a Renaissance castle built there instead of the medieval one. It became property of the Crown and eventually it was awarded to hetman Stefan Czarniecki, later on through marriage of Czarniecki's daughters it passed to Branicki Gryf coat-of-arms family.