How participation in Lithuania’s first killings produced units capable of murdering entire communities

I was born in Riga. Most of what I know about how the Jews of the Baltic states were murdered, I learned from paperwork produced by the men who murdered them.

One document does more work than any argument I could construct around it. Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3, compiled what he titled a “Complete List of Executions Carried Out in the EK 3 Area up to 1 December 1941”. It was neither complete nor wholly accurate. Michael MacQueen identified omitted regions, omitted actions and inaccurate totals. The defects do not rescue the record. They establish that the sequence Jäger preserved is a minimum.

The list opens with two entries at the Seventh Fort in Kaunas. On 4 July 1941, 416 Jewish men and 47 Jewish women. On 6 July, 2,514 Jewish men. Jäger introduced the entries by identifying the shooters: Lithuanian partisans acting on his instructions and orders. He named no German firing unit for either action.

A new organization then appears. SS-Obersturmführer Joachim Hamann commanded a mobile killing apparatus built around a small German directing element and Lithuanian auxiliaries. For the next six weeks, the entries follow a pattern. Jewish men dominate the totals. Women appear in smaller numbers. Children do not yet appear on a mass scale.

On 15 and 16 August at Rokiškis, Jäger recorded 3,200 Jewish men, women and children. A separate entry covering 9–16 August at Raseiniai lists four Jewish children. Because that range ends on 16 August, it establishes no priority in either direction. Rokiškis marks the point that cannot be disputed: family extermination had arrived on a mass scale.

The proportions then invert. On 23 August at Panevėžys, Jäger listed 1,312 men, 4,602 women and 1,609 children. At Kaišiadorys on 26 August and Prienai on 27 August, the clerk stopped separating the categories and recorded that all Jewish men, women and children had been killed. By early September, entire districts disappeared in single lines.

The ledger does not prove that identical personnel served at every site. It records continuity of the German-directed operational system. The organization remained available, Lithuanian formations supplied most of its manpower, and the victim category widened until selective murder became community destruction.

What the first killings produced

Michael MacQueen, then with the Office of Special Investigations at the United States Department of Justice, divided the destruction into three overlapping phases: terrorization from late June to mid-August, concentration from mid-July to late August, and mass extermination from late August through December. His evidence for the first phase included the Kaunas forts. Between 4 July and 9 August, 3,770 people were shot there. All but six were Jews. Most were men; 136 were women.

MacQueen stated what the first phase was for. It sought to intimidate the Jews who remained and “to rehearse the fledgling Lithuanian auxiliaries in the tactics and practice of mass murder.” He found the same pattern in Vilnius, where the early July shooting lists contained very few women. The rehearsal conclusion belongs to MacQueen. The ledger records what followed.

The strongest domestic command chain runs through Bronius Norkus. In How Did It Happen?, Christoph Dieckmann and Rūta Vanagaitė record that the Third and Fourth Companies of the National Labour Protection Battalion were placed at the disposal of the German Security Police. The Third Company, commanded by Norkus and Juozas Barzda, was assigned to guard prisoners at........

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