Jäger Report
The Jäger Report, also Jaeger Report was written on 1 December 1941 by Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3, a death squad of Einsatzgruppe A attached to Army Group North in the Operation Barbarossa. It is the most detailed and precise surviving chronicle of the activities of one individual Einsatzkommando, and a key record documenting the Holocaust in Lithuania as well as in Latvia and Belarus.
Description
The Jäger Report is a tally sheet of actions by Einsatzkommando 3, including the Rollkommando Hamann killing squad. The report keeps an almost daily running total of the murders of 137,346 people, the vast majority Jews, from 2 July 1941 to 25 November 1941. The report documents date and place of the massacres, number of victims and their breakdown into categories. In total, there were 112 executions in 71 different locations in Lithuania, Latvia, and Belarus. On 17 occasions, daily casualties exceeded 2,000 people. On 9 February 1942, in a handwritten note for Franz Walter Stahlecker, Jäger updated the totals to 138,272 people: 136,421 Jews, 1,064 communists, 653 mentally disabled, and 134 others. The report concluded that Lithuania was now free of Jews except for about 34,500 Jews concentrated in Vilnius, Kaunas and Šiauliai Ghettos. However, Jäger Report did not tally all Jewish deaths in Lithuania as it did not include executions by Einsatzkommando 2 in Šiauliai area, in some border areas, or even in Vilnius.Jäger concluded his report with the following:
| German original | English translation |
Ich kann heute feststellen, dass das Ziel, das Judenproblem für Litauen zu lösen, vom EK. 3 erreicht worden ist. In Litauen gibt es keine Juden mehr, ausser den Arbeitsjuden incl. ihrer Familien. Das sind in Schaulen ca. 4 500 in Kauen " 15 000 in Wilna " 15 000. Diese Arbeitsjuden incl. ihrer Familien wollte ich ebenfalls umlegen, was mir jedoch scharfe Kampfansage der Zivilverwaltung und der Wehrmacht eintrug und das Verbot auslöste: Diese Juden und ihre Familien dürfen nicht erschossen werden! Das Ziel, Litauen judenfrei zu machen, konnte nur erreicht werden durch die Aufstellung eines Rollkommandos mit ausgesuchten Männern unter der Führung des SS-Obersturmführers Hamann, der sich meine Ziele voll und ganz aneignete und es verstand, die Zusammenarbeit mit den litauischen Partisanen und den zuständigen zivilen Stellen zu gewährleisten. ... | I can confirm today that the goal of solving the Jewish problem for Lithuania has been achieved by EK. 3. In Lithuania, there are no more Jews, except for the Arbeitsjuden incl. their families. These are in Schaulen ca. 4 500 in Kauen " 15 000 in Wilna " 15 000. I also wanted to put down these Arbeitsjuden incl. their families, but this provoked a sharp conflict with the civil administration and the Wehrmacht, and resulted in the prohibition: these Jews and their families must not be shot! The goal to make Lithuania judenfrei could only be achieved through the establishment of a Rollkommando with selected men under the leadership of SS-Obersturmführer Hamann, who fully embraced my objectives and understood how to ensure cooperation with the Lithuanian partisans and the relevant civil authorities. ... |
The nine-page report was prepared in five copies, but only one survives, kept by the Special Archive of the in Moscow. The copy was discovered in 1944 when the Red Army reoccupied Lithuania, but it was not made known to scholars or the judiciary evaluating Nazi war crimes. Only in 1963, during the in absentia trial of Hans Globke in East Germany and four years after Jäger's suicide, did the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs disclose the document to the German Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes. The document was first published in a Lithuanian collection of documents Masinės žudynės Lietuvoje in 1965 and in the Western press by in 1972 as a facsimile.