What group achieved the goal of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 was a decisive moment in the evolution of the Holocaust. The German army was followed by SS killing squads known as Einsatzgruppen which immediately carried out mass shootings of Jewish men. From late summer onwards, the Einsatzgruppen began murdering entire Jewish communities – the map comes from an official summary of the murders carried out in the Baltic States and Belarus up to October 1941. The following extract is taken from a report of 1 December 1941 from Karl Jäger, commander of one unit, Einsatzkommando 3, which was based in Lithuania.

I can today confirm that the aim of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania has been achieved by EK 3. In Lithuania there are no more Jews, apart from work Jews and their families. That is:

In Šiauliai                     ca.   4,500

In Kaunas                       ”   15,000

In Vilna                           ”   15,000

I wanted to bump off these work Jews and their families as well, but this provoked strong protests from the civilian administration and the army...

I consider that the Jewish actions are essentially concluded as far as EK 3 is concerned. The remaining work Jews and Jewesses are needed urgently and I can envisage that after the winter this workforce will be even more urgently needed. I am of the opinion that the sterilisation of the male work Jews should begin immediately to prevent reproduction. If a Jewess nevertheless becomes pregnant, she will be liquidated...

One can not imagine the joy, gratitude and enthusiasm which our measures triggered in the liberated and the population. We often had to use strong words to cool the enthusiasm of the women, children and men who tried, with tears in their eyes, to kiss our hands and feet.

Between July and November 1941, EK 3 had shot 137,346 people, all but 2,000 of whom were Jewish. Despite Jäger’s call for sterilisation, most of the remaining Jews in Lithuania were in fact shot in 1942 and 1943, either by German police units or by the Lithuanian nationalists whose reactions Jäger mentioned at the end of his report. By this time, Nazi policy had advanced from the murder of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union to the whole of Europe.

Explanation:

from thales, who is often considered the first western philosopher, to the stoics and skeptics, ancient greek philosophy opened the doors to a particular way of thinking that provided the roots for the western intellectual tradition. here, there is often an explicit preference for the life of reason and rational thought. we find proto-scientific explanations of the natural world in the milesian thinkers, and we hear democritus posit atoms—indivisible and invisible units—as the basic stuff of all matter. with socrates comes a sustained inquiry into ethical matters—an orientation towards human living and the best life for human beings. with plato comes one of the most creative and flexible ways of doing philosophy, which some have since attempted to imitate by writing philosophical dialogues covering topics still of interest today in ethics, political thought, metaphysics, and epistemology. plato’s student, aristotle, was one of the most prolific of ancient authors. he wrote treatises on each of these topics, as well as on the investigation of the natural world, including the composition of animals. the hellenists—epicurus, the cynics, the stoics, and the skeptics—developed schools or movements devoted to distinct philosophical lifestyles, each with reason at its foundation.

with this preference for reason came a critique of traditional ways of living, believing, and thinking, which sometimes caused political trouble for the philosophers themselves. xenophanes directly challenged the traditional anthropomorphic depiction of the gods, and socrates was put to death for allegedly inventing new gods and not believing in the gods mandated by the city of athens. after the fall of alexander the great, and because of aristotle’s ties with alexander and his court, aristotle escaped the same fate as socrates by fleeing athens. epicurus, like xenophanes, claimed that the mass of people is impious, since the people conceive of the gods as little more than superhumans, even though human characteristics cannot appropriately be ascribed to the gods. in short, not only did ancient greek philosophy pave the way for the western intellectual tradition, including modern science, but it also shook cultural foundations in its own time.