30988) and founded the local party chapter, as a result of which he became known as "Waldkirch's Hitler" among the Alte Kämpfer (Old Fighters), as those who had joined before the Reichstag election of September 1930 called themselves.

According to his own account, he spurned unemployment benefits from the government of the Weimar Republic, which he despised, so by 1934 he had used up all his savings and his wife Emma separated from him, though their divorce was not formalized until 1940.

[1] In July 1933, deputy NSDAP Führer Rudolf Hess had officially decreed that well paid employment was to be found for Alte Kämpfer on a preferential basis.

Reassigned back to Germany near the end of 1943 after a nervous breakdown occasioned by the mass murders he had participated in, Jäger was appointed commander of the SD in Reichenberg in the Sudetenland, and precluded from further promotions due to what the SS saw as a "lack of strength of nerve.

Arrested and charged with his crimes, Jäger committed suicide by hanging himself in Hohenasperg prison using "the wire of the cell's radio carphones," while he was awaiting trial on 22 May 1959.