By Jordan Fleguel
Published: October 03, 2025
A German soldier is about to shoot a Jewish man in 1941. This image was titled "The last Jew in Vinnitsa." The text is written on the back of the photograph, which was found in a photo album belonging to a German soldier. (Photo by Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images)
A U.S.-based German historian believes he’s uncovered the identity of the Nazi killer in one of the most infamous Holocaust images ever taken – and he did so with the help of artificial intelligence.
Jürgen Matthäus, who until this spring was head of research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., had for years been attempting to discover the identities of the men in the image, which was taken in 1941 in the city of Berdychiv in modern Ukraine.
The image shows a Nazi SS officer pointing a pistol at the head of a man kneeling on the edge of a pit of corpses as around 20 other Nazi soldiers watch in a line a short distance away. The identities of the perpetrators and victims in the photo remained unknown for years.
The photo was known as “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa” for decades, until Matthäus found the diary of an Austrian Wehrmacht captain in the Holocaust Museum, which contained a negative of the same photo with the description: “Shooting of Jews by the SS in the Berdichev Citadel.”
Using artificial intelligence software, Matthäus and other researchers were able to confirm the location of the image based on the buildings and city layout in the background.
After Matthäus published those findings in 2023, he received a letter from a man who said he’d always suspected that the killer in the photo could be his wife’s uncle, who was a German SS officer on the eastern front during the Second World War.
The man provided Matthäus with details about the man’s life and military career, as well as comparison photographs, which were then matched to the original image with 99 per cent certainty using an open-source artificial intelligence tool.
The killer was identified as Jakobus Onnen, according to Matthäus, who published his most recent findings in the historical research journal Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft.
According to Onnen’s relatives, he was born in 1906 in the German town of Tichelwarf, near the Dutch border. After graduating high school, he taught English, French and physical education before joining the SA, the Nazi party’s original paramilitary wing, at the age of 25.
He was killed in battle in 1943.
Matthäus said in his research submission to the journal that using AI is becoming more common in the humanities, and it’s another useful tool historians can use to identify previously unknown individuals.
He said this particular image is as important as those showing the gates of Auschwitz, as it demonstrates the “hands-on” nature of the Nazi atrocities; “the direct confrontation between killer and person to be killed.”
Jordan Fleguel
Journalist, BNNBloomberg.ca
A U.S.-based German historian believes he’s uncovered the identity of the Nazi killer in one of the most infamous Holocaust images ever taken – and he did so with the help of artificial intelligence.
Jürgen Matthäus, who until this spring was head of research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., had for years been attempting to discover the identities of the men in the image, which was taken in 1941 in the city of Berdychiv in modern Ukraine.
The image shows a Nazi SS officer pointing a pistol at the head of a man kneeling on the edge of a pit of corpses as around 20 other Nazi soldiers watch in a line a short distance away. The identities of the perpetrators and victims in the photo remained unknown for years.
The photo was known as “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa” for decades, until Matthäus found the diary of an Austrian Wehrmacht captain in the Holocaust Museum, which contained a negative of the same photo with the description: “Shooting of Jews by the SS in the Berdichev Citadel.”
Using artificial intelligence software, Matthäus and other researchers were able to confirm the location of the image based on the buildings and city layout in the background.
After Matthäus published those findings in 2023, he received a letter from a man who said he’d always suspected that the killer in the photo could be his wife’s uncle, who was a German SS officer on the eastern front during the Second World War.
The man provided Matthäus with details about the man’s life and military career, as well as comparison photographs, which were then matched to the original image with 99 per cent certainty using an open-source artificial intelligence tool.
The killer was identified as Jakobus Onnen, according to Matthäus, who published his most recent findings in the historical research journal Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft.
According to Onnen’s relatives, he was born in 1906 in the German town of Tichelwarf, near the Dutch border. After graduating high school, he taught English, French and physical education before joining the SA, the Nazi party’s original paramilitary wing, at the age of 25.
He was killed in battle in 1943.
Matthäus said in his research submission to the journal that using AI is becoming more common in the humanities, and it’s another useful tool historians can use to identify previously unknown individuals.
He said this particular image is as important as those showing the gates of Auschwitz, as it demonstrates the “hands-on” nature of the Nazi atrocities; “the direct confrontation between killer and person to be killed.”
Jordan Fleguel
Journalist, BNNBloomberg.ca
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