Karl Jäger

Nazi party and regime Fascists and Nazis 1888–1959 ✕ Suicide while awaiting trial

Commander of Einsatzkommando 3 who directed the murder of Lithuania’s Jews and tallied it in the Jäger Report

Born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, he moved to Germany with his father at the age of three. He won the Iron Cross First Class in the First World War, managed an orchestrion factory in Waldkirch and joined the Nazi Party in 1923, becoming known as “Waldkirch’s Hitler”; he joined the SS in 1932. From July 1941 to September 1943 he commanded Einsatzkommando 3 of Einsatzgruppe A in Kaunas, which with Lithuanian help shot Jewish men, women and children indiscriminately and carried out the Ninth Fort massacres of November 1941. On 1 December 1941 he wrote a report keeping an almost daily tally of 137,346 executions. Sent back to Germany in late 1943 after a nervous breakdown, he lived after the war as a farm hand until his report came to light in 1959; arrested, he hanged himself while awaiting trial.