English source-aligned edition
Karl Jäger
Karl Jäger served as commander of Einsatzkommando 3 and author of the Jäger Report. The profile reconstructs the person’s function in Occupied Lithuania through documented office, decisions, supervision or operational conduct. It does not assign every crime committed by an institution or region to one individual.
Confirmed findings
- Jäger commanded Einsatzkommando 3 from 1941 and directed systematic mass shootings throughout occupied Lithuania.
- The unit included the mobile Hamann commando, which travelled between towns and murdered entire Jewish communities.
- Jäger signed detailed reports listing killings by date, place, sex and age, including a cumulative report of more than 137,000 victims.
Place in the chain of responsibility
The Jäger Report is direct perpetrator documentation of command, knowledge and the organised character of the killings. Its figures record crimes by the entire unit and auxiliaries under his authority, not acts carried out by Jäger alone.
Key events and mechanisms
- mass shootings at the Seventh and Ninth Forts in Kaunas and across Lithuanian towns in 1941
- the compilation of the Jäger Report and its February 1942 supplement
The circle records authority, function and agency. Several profiles may describe different parts of the same persecution chain, so profile-level totals must not be added together.
Postwar accountability
Jäger lived under his own name until the report was identified in 1959. Arrested on 10 April, he hanged himself at Hohenasperg prison on 22 June 1959 before trial.
Limits of the evidence
The report gives 137,346 victims for the earlier reporting period and 138,272 in a later supplement; the difference reflects coverage, not two competing counts of the same period. The numbers remain those reported by the perpetrators themselves.
Sources
The source set combines institutional, archival, trial or scholarly material from at least two independent publishers.