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Guidelines on the Treatment of the Jewish Question 29 January 1942
Contemporary Source

1942-01-29 / Guidelines for the Occupied Eastern Territories: “Elimination of Jewry […] Fairly Rapid Solution of the Jewish Question”

On 29 January 1942, the office of the Reichsführer-SS forwarded to the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories a proposed version of guidelines for the “Jewish question.” The guideline states that “the Jewish question must be solved generally for all of Europe” and that “measures in the occupied eastern territories which serve the final solution of the Jewish question and thereby the elimination of Jewry are in no way to be hindered”. The guidelines added that, especially in the occupied eastern territories “a fairly rapid solution of the Jewish question is to be sought”. They also remarked that “any “actions by the local civilian population against the Jews” were not “to be prevented”.

Report dated September 4, 1941 Jews liquidated Lithuania
Contemporary Source

1941-09-04 / “All Jews Were liquidated” – A Lithuanian Police Report During Nazi Occupation

Report dated September 4, 1941, from the Kaišiadorys police precinct (Trakai district, Lithuania) to the head of the Trakai district. The document records that “on August 27 … all citizens of Jewish nationality were liquidated – shot by members of the auxiliary police who had arrived from Kaunas and by German soldiers.” The author then turns to administrative matters and requested “instructions on how to proceed with the remaining movable and immovable property of the Jews.”

Telex dated 9 February 1942 Jäger report
Contemporary Source

1942-02-09 / “138,272, of Which Women 55,556, Children 34,464” – Executions Reported By EK 3 Commander Karl Jäger

On February 6, 1942, the BdS Ostland in Riga (head of Einsatzgruppe A) telexed its Einsatzkommandos in Reval, Minsk and Kaunas to receive a break-down of “the number of executions carried out” and specifically asked “how many were women and children?” Three days later, the commander of Einsatzkommando 3 in Kaunas, Karl Jäger, telexed to Riga the “Executions up to 1 February 1942 by EK 3”: “Jews 136,421, Communists 1,064, Partisans 56, Mentally ill 653, Poles 44, Russian prisoners of war 28, Gypsies 5, Armenians 1”. Jäger summarized the total figures: “138,272, of which women 55,556, children 34,464”

Letter dated April 25, 1942 liquidation sites Jews
Contemporary Source

1942-04-25 / District Commissioner of Vilnius Region: “Liquidation Sites of the Jews Must Be Covered With Chlorinated Lime”

This directive on “Burial sites of the Jews”, issued on 25 April 1942 by the District Commissioner of Wilna-Land (Vilnius Region), instructed local authorities that “the liquidation sites of the Jews must immediately be covered with sufficient quantities of chlorinated lime and the sites must be filled in with new earth”.

Contemporary Source

1943-11-22 / Jewish Escape Report from the Security Police in Ponevezh: “Levinas was given special treatment … His death was to be expected in any case”

A report dated 22 November 1943 from the Security Police and SD field office in Ponevezh (Panevėžys) to the Security Police and SD in Kaunas adressed the escape of a “Jewish labor detachment at the District Commissioner in Ponevezh”. It states that “27 Jews, including one policeman, were apprehended” and “that they had fled because the District Commissioner had told them that all would be shot if even one person escaped.”

The report further notes that the recaptured Jewish prisoner Kurisa Levinas “was given special treatment on the orders of Hauptsturmführer Schmitz, as he had been shot while fleeing and was seriously wounded. His death was to be expected in any case.”

The report requests a decision as to whether the remaining Jewish prisoners should also undergo “special treatment”. In the case of the “Jewish policeman Bakas”, the Ponevezh office recommends that “special treatment be considered” because “he failed to report the events, although he was aware of them”.

Letter dated August 31, 1941 Trakai Jews
Contemporary Source

1941-08-31 / “Not a Single Jewish Person Remaining” – A Lithuanian District Report During Nazi Occupation

This document, dated 31 August 1941 and issued by the Trakai district administration in Lithuania, reports that “in Kaišiadorys, Žasliai, and Žiežmariai there is not a single person of Jewish nationality remaining,” and proceeds to request instructions on how “to deal with the movable and immovable property that belonged to the Jews.”

Contemporary Source

1944-01-21 / Secrets at Kaunas Fort IX: “Told Me About Your Kommando 1005 B, Even Giving Me Concrete Figures”

A series of wartime letters from early 1944 shows how knowledge of Sonderkommando 1005 circulated within German military and SS circles. In this correspondence, Oberleutnant Willy Schell threatens SS-Obersturmführer Radif – who was at the time in custody in connection with the escape of Jewish prisoners from the Sonderkommando 1005 site at Fort IX in Kaunas- “to report to your superiors the careless manner in which you told me about your Kommando 1005 B, even giving me concrete figures.” Schell sought to pressure Radif into retracting his testimony that Schell had disclosed an unspecified incident involving homosexual conduct. In his reply, the Commander of the Security Police in Kaunas stated that “I will in any case hold SS-Obersturmführer Radif accountable in this matter, although I would note that the confidential matter you refer to has long been generally known and has even been described in detail in illegal Lithuanian propaganda leaflets”. The defensive tone of the response – the Security Police refrained from reporting Schell to the legal authorities as this “could have unforeseeable consequences” – underscores the sensitivity of the information. So what makes these documents particularly interesting is the tension they reveal: on the one hand, Sonderkommando 1005 was an operation surrounded by extreme secrecy; on the other, fragments of its purpose – exhumation and destruction of bodies – were clearly leaking beyond strictly controlled channels.

Report dated November 7, 1943 Sonderkommando 1005 Kaunas
Contemporary Source

1943-11-07 / Kaunas Security Police Report: “Jewish bones are being burned” at Fort IX

A report dated November 7, 1943, written by a employee attached to the Commander of the Security Police in Kaunas states that the local criminal police had determined that “nighttime fires at Fort IX”were caused by the burning of “Jewish bones”. This activity correspomds with the operations of Sonderkommando 1005 at Kaunas, a program led by Paul Blobel, which was tasked with exhuming mass graves and destroying evidence of Nazi atrocities across Eastern Europe.

Interrogation protocol dated April 16, 1946
Post-War Testimony

1946-04-16 / Joint Interrogation of Otto Moll and Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höß

Joint interrogation of Otto Moll and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß on April 16, 1946. Höss stated that it “was the responsibility of the subordinates, like Moll, to see that the people actually got into the gas chambers under the doctors and then to see that their bodies were burned” and that”those that were too weak to be moved to the gas chamber, or who could not be moved for some other reason, were shot thru the neck by him”. Moll testified that “we put between 30,000 and 40,000 people in those mass graves” of the Bunker extermination sites in 1942, whereas Höss gave a higher figure, “the people buried in the two big mass graves of the so-called dugouts: one and two, amounted to 106,000 or 107,000 people”.

Post-War Testimony

1945-11-03 / Otto Moll’s 1945 Dachau Statement

Sworn statement of Otto Moll, taken at Dachau by U.S. investigators on November 3, 1945. At the center of his account is his role in the Kaufering subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp system during the final months of the war (end phase atrocities). On his earlier service at Auschwitz, Moll made a notably brief and misleading claim that “From 1941 until January 1945, I likewise managed a gardening unit of the Economic and Administrative Main Office in the Auschwitz concentration camp, in which concentration camp prisoners were also employed.”

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