Historian uses AI to help identify Nazi in notorious Holocaust murder image

"It is one of the most chilling images of the Holocaust: a bespectacled Nazi soldier trains a pistol at the head of a resigned man kneeling in a suit before a pit full of corpses. German troops encircle the scene. The picture taken in today's Ukraine was long known, mistakenly, as The Last Jew in Vinnitsa, and was for decades shrouded in mystery."

"According to findings, he has now published in the respected academic periodical Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft (Journal of Historical Studies), the SS carried out the massacre on 28 July 1941, most likely in the early afternoon, in the citadel of Berdychiv. The city was for centuries a thriving centre of Jewish life. It is located 150km south-west of Kyiv and about 90km north of what is now known in English as Vinnytsia, which had long been considered falsely to be the site of the killings."

"Matthaus described an incremental process of traditional digging in dusty archives, lucky breaks, input from peers and the trailblazing involvement of volunteers from open-source journalism group Bellingcat. The match, from everything I hear from the technical experts, is unusually high in terms of the percentage the algorithm throws out there, Matthaus said. Preliminary research published last year allowed Matthaus to reveal the date, location and unit involved in the mass shooting, generating media coverage in Germany."

A bespectacled Nazi soldier is shown aiming a pistol at a kneeling man before a pit of corpses in a photograph long misattributed to Vinnytsia. Archival research combined with artificial intelligence and open-source investigation identified the killing as taking place in Berdychiv on 28 July 1941, carried out by Einsatzgruppe C. The identified shooter is Jakobus Onnen, a teacher born in 1906. Berdychiv was a historic Jewish centre 150km south-west of Kyiv. The identification relied on dusty archives, lucky breaks, peer input and volunteers from Bellingcat, and was published in an academic journal.

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