The killing of the Jewish women and children of Lithuania began on 15 August in the rural regions of northeast and north Lithuania and was then pursued in and around Kaunas. Of the over 90,000 Jews killed up to the middle of October 1941, over 40,000 had lived in the northern Siauliai regional commissariat and over 30,000 in the region of Kaunas. On the basis of the witness statements it is clear that provisions problems in Lithuania and in the region of Army Group North in general constituted an important, and possibly a decisive, factor in the decision to kill, instead of feeding, "useless" Jewish women and children.

It is probable that the note by Goebbels on a meeting with Hitler on 19 August also related to the killing campaign against the Lithuanian Jews which had now been embarked upon on a large scale: "We also spoke about the Jewish problem. The Fuhrer is of the conviction that his earlier prophecy in the Reichstag--that if the Jews succeeded in provoking a world war once again, it would end with the extermination of the Jews--was coming true. In these weeks and months it has proven accurate with an almost uncanny certainty. In the East the Jews have to pay the price; in Germany they had in part already paid and they would in the future have to pay still more."

National Socialist Extermination Policies

Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies

edited by ULRICH HERBERT

(Chapter 9)

by Christoph Dieckmann

The War and the Killing of the Lithuanian Jews

Einsatzkommando 3[edit]

SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger (June 1941–1 August 1943)
SS-Oberführer und Oberst der Polizei Dr. Wilhelm Fuchs (15 September 1943–27 May 1944)
SS-Sturmbannführer Hans-Joachim Böhme (11 May–July 1944)
Jäger Report[edit]

Main article: Jäger Report

The Jager report

The Jäger Report is the most precise surviving chronicle of the activities of one Einsatzkommando. It is a tally sheet of the actions of Einsatzkommando 3 — a running total of their killings of 136,421 Jews (46,403 men 55,556 women, 34,464 children), 1,064 Communists, 653 mentally disabled, and 134 others, from 2 July-1 December 1941. A second, major sweep occurred in 1942, before death camp killing replaced Einsatzkommando open-pit executions. Einsatzkommando 3 operated in the Kovno (Kaunas) district, west of Vilna (Vilnius) in contemporary Lithuania.(See also Rollkommando Hamann)