Jäger Report

The so-called Jäger Report was presumably authored in early December 1941 by Karl Jäger, then commander of Einsatzkommando 3a of Einsatzgruppe A. This unit operated mainly in Lithuania.

This document was allegedly discovered by the Soviets in Lithuania after the reconquest of Lithuania by the Red Army in 1944. For inscrutable reasons, they hushed up the existence of this document until 1963, when it was made available to the West-German Zentrale Stelle, the country’s central organization investigating National-Socialist crimes.

The document lists 95 executions of a total of 137,348 persons until late 1941, most of them Jews from Lithuania. However, most of the individual execution events mentioned cannot be found in Einsatzgruppe A’s Event Reports (Ereignismeldungen, EM) of that time. In fact, the EMs confirm only eleven of these alleged executions with a total of some 2,900 victims, hence just over two percent. However, EM 8 of 30 June 1941 mentions thousands executed in Kaunas on 28 June, and EM 48 of 10 Aug. 1941 lists a total for Kaunas and Riga of 28,000 victims, without giving any specifics.

The following table contains the total number of victims listed in the Jäger Report for each location, in comparison to the number of victims found in the Event Reports of Einsatzgruppe A.

In addition to this December Jäger Report, an earlier version of it also exists, which is dated 10 September 1941. It lists a total of 76,355 victims of executions, over 13,000 more than are listed in the December Jäger Report as of that date. An update requested on 6 February 1942 by the commander of the Security Police and Security Service in Kaunas lists a total of 138,272 victims, 136,421 of them Jews. If we follow Jäger, these massacres were committed by a squad of just 10-11 SS men from Einsatzkommando 3 with the assistance of 50 to 100 Lithuanian collaborators.

The December Jäger Report has several odd features which make it suspicious:

• Although Jäger was to submit regular reports to his superior Stahlecker, the document in question has as its (rubber-stamped) letter head Stahlecker’s official position. However, there is neither an addressee or address on this report, nor a sender.
• If connecting on a map the claimed execution locations in chronological order, then a completely erratic pattern of chaos and disorganization emerges of a team going around in circles and crisscrossing Lithuania back and forth. Some listings even exclude one another chronologically.
• Some entries claim death tolls for single-day executions that are difficult to believe for a team of just some ten men plus auxiliaries:
  • 9,200 victims on 29 October 1941
  • 7,523 victims on 23 August
  • 5,090 victims on 1 September
  • 3,782 victims on 29 August.
• EM 88 of 19 September 1941 reports that Einsatzkommando 3, together with their Lithuanian auxiliaries, had executed a total of 46,692 Jews. However, the Jäger Report reports 78,305 persons shot as of this date, which is 68% more.
• Although Jäger had reported Lithuania free of Jews in his report, except for some 35,000 labor Jews and their families, later data show that there were more Jews alive in these areas than the Jäger Reports would have us believe.
• The Jäger Report mentions the wholesale slaughter of some 5,000 Jews deported from Germany to Kaunas (at Fort IX) in five deportation trains in November 1941. However, numerous other German wartime documents, among them also EMs, clearly demonstrate that these Jews were accommodated in camps and ghettos, and deployed at forced labor wherever possible.

On the corroborative side, a letter written by the medical examiner of Trakai County to the district commissar Vilnius dated 8 July 1942 lists mass graves in that area, including their size. With a few exceptions, their location and size by and large agree with the number of executions mentioned in the Jäger Report for these locations — provided that these mass graves indeed contain executed Jews, which the letter does not mention.

Hence, if this Jäger Report is a genuine document — and this is highly dubious — its claims are questionable, to say the least. Ultimate certainty about the veracity of claims made in this document could be gained only with thorough forensic examinations of mass grave located at the claimed locations. However, considering the present zeitgeist of accepting any atrocity claim against German wartime units at face value, such investigations seem highly unlikely.

(For more general information, see the entries on the Einsatzgruppen and on Aktion 1005; for more details, see Mattogno 2022c, pp. 198-242, 641-646.)