A historian has used artificial intelligence to identify the Nazi soldier in one of the most chilling images of the Holocaust, solving a mystery that has persisted for decades.
Jürgen Matthäus painstakingly assembled evidence and worked with AI experts to identify the killer as Jakobus Onnen, a teacher turned SS member, reports The Guardian.
The photograph shows a bespectacled Nazi soldier pointing a pistol at a kneeling man before a pit full of corpses. The image was long misidentified as “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa” and its location remained unknown for decades.
Matthäus published findings in the academic journal Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft showing the SS carried out the massacre on 28 July 1941 in Berdychiv, Ukraine. The city was a thriving centre of Jewish life located 150 kilometres south-west of Kyiv.
The breakthrough came when a reader contacted Matthäus after media coverage, believing the gunman could be his wife’s uncle based on family correspondence. Relatives had destroyed Onnen’s letters from the Eastern Front in the 1990s but retained the photographs.
Bellingcat volunteers used these images for AI facial recognition analysis. Matthäus said: “The match, from everything I hear from the technical experts, is unusually high in terms of the percentage the algorithm throws out there.”
However, he cautioned about AI limitations: “This is clearly not the silver bullet – this is one tool among many. The human factor remains key.”
Onnen, born in 1906 in German village Tichelwarf, was a French, English and gymnasium teacher who joined the Nazi party before Hitler took power in 1933. He was killed in battle in August 1943.
The Einsatzgruppe C commando had been clearing the region of Jews and partisans before a planned Hitler visit. Of an estimated 20,000 Jews in Berdychiv when Germans arrived in 1941, only 15 remained by early 1944.
Matthäus emphasised the image’s historical significance: “I think this image should be just as important as the image of the gate in Auschwitz, because it shows us the hands-on nature, the direct confrontation between killer and person to be killed.”
