The Jäger Report

On 1 December 1941 in Kaunas, SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3 and commander of the Security Police and SD in Lithuania, signed a nine-page document classified Geheime Reichssache (Secret Reich Matter). It was entitled “Complete list of executions carried out in the EK 3 area up to 1 December 1941”. Day by day and place by place, Jäger listed in it those killed from the beginning of July to 25 November, broken down into men, women and children, and carried the tally through to a total of 137,346 people. Almost all of them were Jews. On the seventh page he wrote: “I can confirm today that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem for Lithuania, has been achieved by EK 3. In Lithuania there are no more Jews, apart from Jewish workers and their families.”

The report is often summed up as Jäger declaring Lithuania “free of Jews” with certain exceptions. That conveys its meaning but not its vocabulary: Jäger did not use the term judenfrei in the report, and the “exceptions” were, by his own figures, some 34,500 people whom he wanted to kill but for the time being could not. The Jäger Report is the most detailed surviving account by a single unit of the Einsatzgruppen and one of the key documents of the Holocaust.

Einsatzkommando 3 in Lithuania

Einsatzkommando 3 was one of the units of Einsatzgruppe A, the Security Police and SD task force that followed Army Group North through the Baltic states. It was commanded by SS-Brigadeführer Franz Walter Stahlecker, and above all the groups stood the head of the Reich Security Main Office, Reinhard Heydrich, who had briefed their commanders orally on their tasks before the attack on the USSR. Jäger’s unit itself was small: according to German studies it numbered fewer than two hundred men, including drivers, interpreters and auxiliary staff. It took over Security Police duties in Lithuania on 2 July 1941, a few days after the pogrom that Lithuanian militants, at German instigation, had carried out in Kaunas during the June Uprising. Wilno (Vilnius), which lay in the zone of Army Group Centre, was at first the territory of Einsatzkommando 9; from August it too came within EK 3’s area of operations. That is why the July executions at Ponary, with which that crime began, do not appear in Jäger’s tally, while the later ones do.

There were too few Germans to murder on their own a community that had numbered more than 200,000 people before the war. Jäger relied on Lithuanian auxiliary formations: on a battalion known by its Lithuanian abbreviation TDA, formed from participants in the June Uprising; on the local police and municipal authorities, which registered the Jews and confined them in makeshift ghettos; and on the Wilno unit Ypatingasis būrys. The most important instrument was the group he himself called a “mobile unit”: Rollkommando Hamann. According to the report it consisted, under the command of SS-Obersturmführer Joachim Hamann, of “8–10 reliable men” from EK 3, supported by several dozen Lithuanian riflemen. Driving in lorries from one small town to the next, it wiped out the entire Jewish communities of the provinces, each within a day or two.

What the report contains

The first six pages are a table. It opens with executions that, according to Jäger, Lithuanian “partisans” carried out in Kaunas “on my instructions and under my orders” in July, among them 416 men and 47 women at the Seventh Fort on 4 July and 2,514 Jews at the same fort on 6 July. Next come the actions of the mobile unit and of EK 3 itself: at first almost exclusively men, “communists” and “intelligentsia”; from mid-August increasingly women and children; and from the end of August entire communities. Under 15 and 16 August the report records 3,207 killed at Rokiškis, and under 1 September more than 5,000 at Marijampolė, including 1,404 children and 109 mentally ill people. In all, the document lists more than seventy places, mainly in Lithuania but also around Daugavpils in Latvia and in Minsk, where a detachment of EK 3 operated in September and October. On more than a dozen occasions the daily number of those killed exceeded 2,000.

The Wilno entries correspond to actions known from the ghetto: the September executions after the creation of the ghetto, the Yom Kippur actions, the yellow permits action and the combing-out of the ghetto in early November. The Kaunas entries record, under 4 October, 1,845 people murdered during the liquidation of the so-called small ghetto, where the infectious diseases hospital was also burned down together with its patients, and under 29 October 2,007 men, 2,920 women and 4,273 children, 9,200 people in all, with the note “cleansing the ghetto of superfluous Jews”. This second entry was the Great Action in the Kaunas Ghetto: on 28 October the Germans ordered all the inhabitants of the ghetto, more than 25,000 people, to assemble on Democracy Square in Vilijampolė. All day long the Gestapo man Helmut Rauca directed them with a wave of his hand to the left or to the right. Those sent to the “wrong” side were locked up overnight in an emptied part of the ghetto, and on the morning of 29 October they were driven uphill to the Ninth Fort, where pits had been dug and were waiting. The ghetto’s Council of Elders, headed by the physician Elchanan Elkes (PL), tried to the very end to beg the Germans for at least some of the people.

The last entries in the table go beyond Lithuania. Under 25 November the report records 2,934 people at the Ninth Fort, “resettlers from Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt am Main”, and under 29 November 2,000 people from Vienna and Breslau. In all, 4,934 Jews from the Reich had been brought in five trains, officially to the Riga ghetto, and were shot immediately on arrival. They were the first German and Austrian Jews to be murdered straight after deportation. Because transport lists and witness accounts exist, this entry is among the best corroborated in the whole document.

The total of 137,346 also includes some 4,000 Jews killed in pogroms and executions before EK 3 took over, several hundred “communists”, several hundred mentally ill people and several dozen Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and Roma. In a handwritten report to Stahlecker of 9 February 1942 Jäger gave an updated figure of 138,272 killed, including 136,421 Jews (46,403 men, 55,556 women and 34,464 children), 1,064 communists, 653 mentally ill and 134 others.

“A question of organisation”

The last three pages are Jäger’s commentary, and it is this that incriminates its author most heavily. Jäger wrote that the objective could be achieved only after the mobile unit had been formed, and he praised the cooperation of the Lithuanian “partisans” and the local authorities. Carrying out such actions was, in his view, “first and foremost a question of organisation”: the Jews had to be rounded up in one place, a site found and pits dug, and the people then brought to the place of execution. As an example he cited Rokiškis, where more than 3,200 people had to be marched four and a half kilometres, and most of the eighty Lithuanian helpers available were needed for guarding and shooting. He wrote about the executions in the language of an accountant and a works manager, stressing that his men had performed “nerve-racking work”.

He also explained where those not yet killed had come from. In Šiauliai some 4,500 Jews remained, and in Kaunas and in Wilno some 15,000 each, including their families. Jäger wrote plainly that he had intended to “finish off” these as well, but that the civil administration of the Reichskommissariat and the Wehrmacht had forbidden it “most strongly”, because they needed workers. Since, as he foresaw, the labour would be urgently needed after the winter as well, he proposed the immediate sterilisation of the men, and of women who nevertheless became pregnant he wrote that they should be “liquidated”. The dispute over the “working Jews” thus concerned not whether they would die but when. The civil administration of Reich Commissioner Hinrich Lohse and the Commissioner General for Lithuania, Adrian von Renteln, wanted to keep them for the duration of the war; the Security Police preferred to kill them at once.

A further part of the report describes measures of which Jäger was proud: a review of the overcrowded Lithuanian prisons, in which some prisoners were released and others shot. He presented the releases as a gesture intended to win the population over to the Germans.

What the report does not say

The Jäger Report is precise, but it does not cover all the victims in Lithuania. It does not include the executions by Einsatzkommando 2 in north-western Lithuania, which historians estimate claimed several tens of thousands of lives, nor the killings committed in the border strip by the Security Police and SD commando from Tilsit in the very first days of the war. It lacks the July executions by EK 9 in Wilno, and for several large Wilno actions its figures differ from the accounts from the ghetto, usually being lower. It also contains arithmetical errors: the entries for 12 September in Wilno add up to 3,434, but 3,334 was written in. Historians therefore accept that far more people died in Lithuania by the end of 1941 than Jäger reported – according to most estimates, about four-fifths of the more than 200,000 Jews who had come under German occupation. The scale of the killing is set out in detail in histories of the Holocaust in Lithuania.

The figures in the report do, however, show how the escalation proceeded. In July and early August it was mainly adult men who were killed, described in the reports as communists, intelligentsia or hostages. From the second half of August the number of women and children rises, and in the provinces whole communities become victims. The German historian Peter Longerich concluded from these entries that between 5 and 16 August the mobile unit was ordered to kill men and women without distinction, while the killing of children was left to its discretion. In those weeks all the Einsatzgruppen went through a similar transformation from actions against “hostile elements” to the destruction of entire communities, from Lithuania to Kiev.

Discovery and value as evidence

The report was produced in five copies. One has survived, the fourth, with Jäger’s handwritten signature. In 1944, after the recapture of Lithuania, it fell into the hands of the Red Army and lay in Soviet archives for almost twenty years. Neither historians nor the judges at the Nuremberg trials knew of it. Only in 1963, during an East German show trial in absentia of Hans Globke, head of the West German Federal Chancellery, did the Soviet Foreign Ministry hand a copy to the German Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg. Jäger was by then dead: arrested in April 1959, he hanged himself in his cell before his trial. In 1965 the document was published in a Lithuanian collection of sources on the mass murders in Lithuania, and in the early 1970s in West Germany as a facsimile.

From then on the report served as evidence in many trials in Germany, Canada and the United States, including denaturalisation and extradition cases against former participants in the executions. In 1983 Canada extradited to the Federal Republic Helmut Rauca, accused of directing the selection of 28 October in Kaunas; he died in custody before his trial. In 2000, before a court in London, in the libel action brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt, Irving pointed to minor formal irregularities but accepted the document as authentic, with reservations. It would have been hard to do otherwise, since most of its entries are corroborated by independent sources: transport lists, railway timetables, ghetto diaries and witness testimony.

Place in the war

The Jäger Report was written in the weeks when the destruction of the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories was entering a new phase. A few days earlier, on 30 November, the commandos of Friedrich Jeckeln had begun the Rumbula massacre near Riga, in which the first transport from Berlin perished together with thousands of Latvian Jews. The shooting of Jews from the Reich in Kaunas and Riga was so far-reaching a step that on 30 November Heinrich Himmler ordered by telephone that the Berlin transport was “not to be liquidated”, and later threatened punishment for “unauthorised action”. For a time the shooting of deportees was halted; this changed only in the spring of 1942. At the same time Heydrich was convening a meeting of state secretaries, which took place on 20 January 1942 as the Wannsee Conference. In its minutes the number of Jews in Lithuania is given as 34,000, almost exactly as many as Jäger had left alive.

Those left alive did not survive. The Wilno ghetto was liquidated in September 1943; the Kaunas ghetto was turned into a concentration camp and liquidated in July 1944, just before the Red Army arrived. The Ninth Fort also became a place of execution for Jews from France and for prisoners of war, and from the autumn of 1943 prisoners of Aktion 1005 were forced to dig up and burn the bodies there in order to destroy the evidence. Only a few per cent of Lithuania’s Jews survived the war. The report in which Jäger sought to demonstrate his efficiency became the most precise record of how, within five months, a community that had existed in Lithuania since the Middle Ages was destroyed.