I’ve begun The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders. According to the introduction,

The title “The Good Old Days” (“Schone Zeiten” in German) comes from the cover of a private photo album kept by concentration camp commandant Kurt Franz of Treblinka. This gruesomely sentimental and unmistakably authentic title introduces a disturbing collection of photographs, diaries, letters home, and confidential reports created by the executioners and sympathetic observers of the Holocaust.

It includes the Jäger Report in full. What is this report?

The “Jäger Report” is a statistical summary of the killing carried out by the Einsatzkommando 3, a unit of Einsatzgruppe A, between 4 July and 25 November 1941 in the towns and villages of Lithuania and Latvia. It was written by the unit’s commander, SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger (1888-1959), a member of the NSDAP since 1930 who was 53 years old at the time. As historian Ronald Headland points out, the “Jäger Report” is exceptional among these horrific documents for its “cold-blooded horror” and the “mind-boggling depravity” of its meticulous, morbid cataloguing. “In no other report,” Headland observes, “do we get as detailed a picture of the steady accumulation of victims.” At the conclusion of his report, on page 7, Jäger stated that “the aim of solving the Jewish problem for Lithuania has been achieved by Einsatzkommando 3. There are no more Jews in Lithuania apart from work-Jews and their families,” approximately 35,000 in number, still living in the towns Siauliai, Kaunas, and Vilnius. Note the change that took place at the end of July and the beginning of August: Jäger’s Einsatzkommando begins shooting Jewish children, in addition to adult men and women, and the overall rate of killing increases by a factor of ten: from a total of 4,400 in July to 47,906 in August. Karl Jäger committed suicide in June 1959 while awaiting trial (Source).

It’s page after page of tabulated columns indicating the date, the location, and the number of victims as Einsatzkommando 3 moved through Lithuania, killing Jews. Two back to back entries stand out:

All the Jews of a given town, wiped out in a single day. And this was long before gassing: these murders were personal, close.

The Einsatzkommandos had to take aim individually at individual people — at men, at women, at children. They were splattered with blood and brain matter at the end of the day.

The world said, “Never again!” when this happened. In a unified voice, we declared, “We will not let this happen again.” And yet it’s happening again, now, in Ukraine. Not to this extent. Not yet.

Why are we letting it happen again? Simple: the man behind all this has a whole arsenal of nuclear weapons behind him. We risk World War 3 if we simply intervene. He’s holding the world hostage as we sit and watch his troops slaughter, rape, and terrorize the civilians of Ukraine.

It’s fairly clear that, in a conventional war without the fear of nuclear weapons, the NATO allies could completely humiliate the Russian army right now. Putin knows that; his troops probably realize it; the world sees it. That’s why he keeps rattling the saber of nuclear annihilation.

And when you realize what, according to some, is the actual motivation behind all this, it’s even more sickening:

'This is about just a grubby little man who has stolen a ton of money and wants to make sure he can get away with it.'

Anti-corruption campaigner and author Bill Browder on the Ukraine war.@IainDale | @Billbrowder pic.twitter.com/WJWImdX9KA

— LBC (@LBC) April 28, 2022