The killer in one of the most shocking photos in history has been identified after 84 years: “He was never investigated”

German historian Jürgen Matthäus has elucidated one of the mysteries surrounding the highly emotional photograph known as “The Last Jew in Vinita”, which depicts an SS officer about to kill a man. The identity of the victim remains unknown, reports El Pais, which has now spoken to the historian who made the discovery.

The image captures the full horror of the Holocaust: a Nazi points a gun at a man's head, who looks at the camera with an almost defiant expression. Other German soldiers and even a civilian witness the scene without showing any visible emotion.

This photograph, taken in Ukraine in 1941, embodies the so-called “Holocaust by bullets” and is one of the most famous images of the genocide suffered by the Jews under Nazism. Until now, the executioner's name was unknown.

But thanks to artificial intelligence and the collaboration of two family members, Matthäus identified the perpetrator: Jakobus Onnen, who was 34 years old at the time and who died in 1943 in an attack by Soviet partisans. The victim, however, remains unidentified. Matthäus published his conclusion in an article late last year in the Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft (Journal of Historical Studies).

Research by Matthäus, a Holocaust historian who recently retired from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, made it possible for the first time to correctly identify where the photograph universally known as The Last Jew of Vinita was taken. In a new interview, he detailed how he came to analyze the photo and discover the killer's identity with the help of AI tools.

The story of a shocking photo

The photograph was first published in 1961 by the United Press Agency (UPI), now defunct, during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the main organizers of the Holocaust. Eichmann had been captured by Israeli agents in Argentina, tried and hanged – a trial based on which Hannah Arendt wrote her famous book “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, in which she formulated the concept of the “banality of evil”.

The image had been discovered by Al Moss, a Holocaust survivor, who turned it over to UPI to show the world the crimes committed by the Nazis. At the time, there was very little information, and the low-resolution photo was believed to have been taken in the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia. It depicted the Einsatzgruppen – the “death squads” that carried out mass shootings of Jews in open fields in Poland and the former Soviet Union during World War II.

It became one of the most gruesome documents of the “Holocaust by bullets”, in which millions of people – mainly Jews, but also Roma, prisoners of war and members of the resistance – were shot near ravines or in mass graves, almost always dug by the victims themselves, in forests or in open fields near cities.

By the end of the conflict, 1.5 million Jews had been exterminated in Ukraine, according to data collected by Raul Hilberg in his monumental work The Destruction of European Jews. It was only after these mass executions, in late 1941 and early 1942, that the Nazis began operating extermination camps with gas chambers, where nearly three million people, mostly Jews, were killed.

The chance discovery of a historian

A chance discovery allowed 66-year-old Jürgen Matthäus to answer many questions about the photograph – conclusions he published in 2023 in the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies. “Very little was known about this photograph,” he explained in comments written for El Pais.

“That changed a few years ago when the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where I worked as a historian until retirement, received as a donation the war diaries of a Wehrmacht captain. One of the diary volumes related to the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. It contained not only a good quality copy of the photograph, but also an entry from the captain's diary, which confirmed the crime scene.”

On the back of the photo was written: “End of July 1941. Execution of Jews by the SS [Schutzstaffel, Escadroanele de Protecție ale Germaniei] at the citadel of Berdichev. July 28, 1941”.

Wehrmacht officer Walter Materna described in his diary that a massacre of Jews had taken place in that city, proving that members of the German regular army were fully aware of the mass murders committed by the SS and death squads, even if they did not directly participate in them.

How the criminal was identified

The next step came later, when a couple contacted the historian after reading his article, convinced that a relative of theirs was the Nazi in the photograph. It was about the woman's uncle, her mother's brother, who they suspected had been part of the Einsatzgruppen.

“The key factor in identifying the killer in the photograph was the availability of comparable images,” says Matthäus: “In this case, I was fortunate to be contacted by a reader of my previous publication on the subject, who, together with his wife, suspected that the killer was a relative of hers. He provided photographs of Jakobus Onnen taken near the war period and of sufficient quality to allow facial recognition. Experts involved used both traditional facial recognition techniques and artificial intelligence, the latter of which produced similarity rates between 98.5% and 99.9%, which are extremely high for historical photos.”

Starting from here, the German historian was able to reconstruct a biographical profile of the perpetrator: Jakobus Onnen, born into a middle-class family in 1906 in the village of Tichelwarf, close to the Dutch border. He was a teacher, spoke French and English, and was an early Nazi: he became a member of the Sturmabteilung (Assault Division, SA) in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, then joined the SS, and during the war he was part of the death squads.

“The photo clearly shows that the killer was a member of the German Security Police and the SD, that is, that part of the police apparatus led by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who was part of the infamous Einsatzgruppen,” explains Matthäus.

“These units followed the Wehrmacht in its advance through the Soviet Union and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, especially Jews. After the war, Allied and German prosecutors investigated these criminal units. Onnen's name was among those identified as members of one of them, but because he died in action in the Ukraine in August 1943, he was never investigated,” says the German historian.