The Jager report is used to help substantiate the claim that over a million Jews were murdered in the East by the Einsatzgruppen. I have previously written about the implausibility of this many Jews being murdered by the limited resources of the Einsatzgruppen and I suggest you read that if you haven’t already.
What makes this report interesting is the oddities surrounding it. From Wolfram Wette’s book on Karl Jager, Karl Jager being the person who was said to be the author of the report in question, we learn this:
So the Soviet Union had this important document but did not submit it to the Nuremberg trials and did not disclose it to another government until decades after the war? Very strange.
After the war Jager did not flee abroad but rather settled in the Allied occupied territory of Germany. He was arrested on 10 April 1959. After his arrest, he was interrogated for approximately 23 hours in total and then signed typewritten statements consisting of 29 sheets. During the night of 21-22 June 1959, he was found hanged in his cell. It is noteworthy that the Soviets kept quiet about Jager’s report until after the author of it was dead.
In his book, The Einsatzgruppen in the Occupied Eastern Territories—Genesis, Missions and Actions, Carlo Mattogno offers critical examination of the report. Here he makes some generalized observations such as the report being a copy and not formatted to the standard protocol.
While it cannot be known for certain if the report is authentic or not, what can be done is a critical analysis of what the reports claims. Mattogno did just that and stumbled upon many absurdities like this one where an Einsatzgruppen squad traveled 683 miles just to kill 857 people. Not very efficient.
Mattogno can also account for 16,500 living Jews that were claimed to be dead in the report.
Then we come to the matter of the more than 137,000 bodies that would have been left behind and if there is any documental or physical evidence that they are buried in the locations in this report. Mattogno’s book covers this in detail (AKTION 1005 is said to be an operation of the Nazis to hide traces of their widespread crime). In the interest of not being tl;dr I will give you one instance of the claims of the Jager report not aligning with reality.
According to the orthodox Holocaust historian’s story there should be a mass grave of some 5,000 Jews in Marijampole.
Regarding an excavation performed in 1996 in Mariampole the following article was written. According to Lithuanian Morning the archaeological investigations had failed to find any human remains at the site described by the witnesses. The most reliable documents referred to are very report we are discussing, the Jager report.
In an entry about Einsatzgruppen mass graves, Holocaust Denial on Trial (HDoT) criticizes Holocaust deniers for citing information from this Lithuanian Morning article instead of criticizing the newspaper for it’s inaccurate report. Although HDoT does not name names I can assume they are talking about Germar Rudolf as they had mentioned him earlier in that same entry (see this article for more on that). What HDoT doesn’t tell you is that Rudolf has corrected his claim after receiving new information. You can see this correction in, Dissecting the Holocaust—The Growing Critique of ‘Truth’ and ‘Memory’, pages 15-60.
Blogger Roberto Muehlenkamp was motivated to confront the issue of the mass graves because of the the article written by Germar Rudolf mentioned in the previous paragraph. Muehlenkamp contacted Algimantas Merkevicius, whom had performed the archaeological excavations in 1996 The following is their correspondence:
From Merkevicius’ response we can glean that the dig was inconclusive. Despite this Holocaust Denial on Trial uses this inconclusive dig to refute revisionists. Father Patrick Desbois was also mentioned by HDoT, but he has also been exposed for a sham, upi can read about that here.
In the end we have a document of dubious origin that does not stand up to scrutiny. Regardless of this fact the orthodox Holocaust historians still use it as evidence and bank on the fact the average person isn’t going to look into it.