AI Helps Solve Decades-Old Mystery Of Holocaust Massacre Image

Historian Jürgen Matthäus has used AI to identify Nazi soldier Jakobus Onnen in a notorious 1941 Holocaust photo from Berdychiv.

A historian employed artificial intelligence technology to resolve a long-standing enigma about one of the most well-known Holocaust photographs from history.

The image shows a bespectacled Nazi soldier aiming a pistol at the head of a kneeling man beside a pit of corpses, while German troops look on. For years, the photo was wrongly known as ‘The Last Jew in Vinnitsa’.

The Guardian, who first reported the story, says that Jürgen Matthäus who works as a German historian in the United States has dedicated multiple years to study the image.

Now, with the help of AI and volunteers from the open-source group Bellingcat, he believes he has identified the killer as Jakobus Onnen, a teacher from northern Germany, as reported by The Guardian.

According to Matthäus’s findings, published in Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, the massacre took place on 28 July 1941 in the citadel of Berdychiv, Ukraine, carried out by SS unit Einsatzgruppe C. The city had long been a thriving Jewish center. Of the estimated 20,000 Jews there at the time, only 15 survived by early 1944.

AI analysis compared Onnen’s photos to the image which resulted in a match that Matthäus described as “unusually high”. He cautioned that the technology is not definitive but provides strong evidence when combined with archival research.

“The match, from everything I hear from the technical experts, is unusually high in terms of the percentage the algorithm throws out there,” he said, as reported by The Guardian.

Matthäus stressed that AI is only one part of the process. “This is clearly not the silver bullet – this is one tool among many. The human element continues to be the most important aspect.’’

Onnen became a member of the Nazi party when he joined in 1933 but lost his life during combat in 1943. Matthäus said the image should be seen as a crucial reminder of the Holocaust’s brutality, as reported by The Guardian..

“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.’’