United States Library of Congress
The Nazi soldier was identified as Jakobus Onnen, a former teacher and member of one of the SS’s mobile extermination units.
After years of research, with the help of AI-assisted photographic analysis and archival footage, German historian Jürgen Matthäus was finally able to name the Nazi soldier who appears in the photograph of the massacre of Jews in the Ukrainian oblast of Vinítsia.
In the famous photograph of an infamous massacre during World War II known as “The Last Jew of Vinítsia”, a figure has always remained unidentified: that of the Nazi soldier who appears with a pistol pointed at a prisoner’s head, next to a mass grave.
After years of investigation, with the help of AI-assisted photographic analysis and archival footage, a German historian has finally managed to give the soldier a name: he is Jakobus Happinessformer teacher and member of one of the SS’s mobile extermination units.
When in 1963 he reported the trial of Adolf Eichmann in his landmark work “Eichmann in Jerusalem“, the American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the expression “banality of evil”.
Arendt defined the concept as “the fact that such a departure from reality and lack of reflection can cause more damage than all evil instincts together, which are perhaps inherent to the human being.”
Few photographs of the horrors of the Holocaust embody this idea as much as “The Last Jew of Vinítsia.”
The photograph belonged for some time to Al Mosssurvivor of the Munich-Allach concentration camp, who provided it to United Press in 1961, at the time of the Eichmann trial. Moss insisted that the image be seen “to find out What happened during Eichmann’s time?”.
The photograph, which shows a Nazi officer pointing a gun to his head of a man kneeling over a mass grave while other officers look on provokes undeniable visceral horror and encapsulates the banality of evil at its core, says .
United States Library of Congress
“The Last Jew of Vinítsia”
But what was specifically happening thereat the time the image was captured, it was a mystery for decades. No one in the photograph had been identified; they were faces without names. From their uniforms, it was clear that they were membranes the operational groups — SS mobile extermination units.
At one point, the photograph was given the name “The Last Jew of Vinítsia”, allegedly because another copy had this title inscribed on the back.
It is however possible that the attribution to attribution was simply inferred, since the Einsatzgruppen C e D cometeram numerosos massacres in Soviet Ukraine, including Vinítsia oblast.
The identity of the shooter depicted in the image might have forever remained a mystery were it not for the dogged efforts of the German historian Jürgen Matthäus.
The historian spent years trying to determine the name of the man holding the gun — the cold, bespectacled killer in the infamous image. Finally, thanks in part to AI-assisted photo analysis, the shooter was identified as being Jakobus Happinessa teacher from Tichelwarf in northern Germany.
Onnen joined the party before Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. In 1933, the year of Reichstag firebecame a member of Assault Departmentthe paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party, and a year later joined Einsatzgruppe C. This data had been known for some time.
What was not known until now is that Jakobus Onnen was protagonist of one of the most horrific images of the Second World War.
O Matthäus’s first advance in investigating the photograph was not to identify any of the figures present, but rather, explains the , to determine the date, location and unit involved no massacre.
By carefully analyzing the background of the photograph and comparing it with 19th-century maps, contemporary photographs, and modern aerial images from Google Earth, Matthäus was able to determine that the location of the photograph was not Vinnitsa, but rather the city of Berdychiv150 kilometers southwest of kyiv.
Matthäus was later able to establish that the unit represented was or Einsatzgruppe C, sob commando de Otto Rasch. Until now it was thought that it was Einsatzgruppe D.
After months of research in “dusty files”, Matthäus was also able to determine the date of massacre depicted: July 28, 1941.
Last year, Matthäus publicized these findings in German media. “A reader contacted me and told me that he believed, based on contemporary correspondence in his family’s possession, that the shooter could be your wife, Jakobu Onnen”, he told The Guardian.
Matthäus followed this lead. Onnen’s family had destroyed letters that the Nazi soldier had sent from the Eastern Front in the 1990s, but photographs of him still existed. The distant relative then provided these images to Matthäus.
There were visual similarities to the naked eye, but to consolidate his conclusions, Matthäus enlisted the help of media group Bellingcat to submit the provided photographs, along with “The Last Jew of Vinnitsa”, to a AI comparative analysis.
“The result was a clear match“, says Matthäus. “From everything I heard from the technical experts, the algorithm came up with an extremely high probability that the man in the photograph is Jakobus Onnen.”
AI analysis alone wouldn’t be enough to prove conclusively identify. “This is clearly not a silver bullet — it’s just one tool among many,” Matthäus stressed. “The human factor continues to be decisive.”
But the combination of computer-assisted confirmation and the enormous amount of circumstantial data collected over the years gave him the necessary trust to publish their findings. That Onnen is the man photographed holding the gun is no longer in question for Matthäus.
But the question remains as to whether Why did you pose for the photo?. “Motivation is one of the hardest questions to answer. The reason I think he poses like that, the way he presents himself, I think is to impress“, says the historian.
When posing for this photograph, Onnen was not just “following orders“, nor was this cold-blooded execution a way to advance one’s career. “Participating in a homicide like this was a given, and did not bring any type of merit points in these extermination units”, highlights Matthäus.
Those the Nazi soldier sought to impress were probably just ordinary people — the same ordinary peoplewho, after the war, made a huge effort to erase any evidence of your knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust.
People who, in the 1990s, burned all of Onnen’s letters to erase this dark past. But the photograph never disappearedand now, slowly but surely, his story begins to emerge.
