AI facial recognition helped identify a Nazi shooter in a Holocaust photo titled “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa.”

The mystery associated with the photograph “The Last Jew in Vinnytsia,” in which a German soldier is aiming at a Jew at the moment of execution, remained for many years one of those Holocaust stories where everything is known except the people in the picture. The frame began to break into history after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. At that time, eyewitness Al Moss presented it to the court to show not statistics, but the real moment of murder. The photograph became a symbol, but the names on it disappeared in the flow of time.

Now the situation is changing. Research by Jürgen Matthäus, former head of the scientific department of the Holocaust Memorial in the USA, adds specifics. He identified the shooter. It turned out to be Jacobus Onnen — a teacher from northern Germany, who was 34 years old at the time of the event. Not an officer, not a career military man. A person who joined the SS and found himself in the mechanism of mass shootings.

Matthäus presented the first data last year, but the evidence was incomplete. Later, one of Onnen’s relatives provided family photographs. They were compared with the original frame — the result gave almost 99% confidence. This is one of those cases where facial recognition technology changes the course of historical investigation, not just everyday conveniences.

In September 2025, the German “Journal of Historical Research” published an expanded version of the work. It also specifies the place: the mass shooting in Berdychiv, Ukraine, on July 28, 1941. The operation was carried out by an Einsatzgruppe unit, which followed the Wehrmacht and destroyed the Jewish population according to pre-compiled lists. The photograph captures one moment out of hundreds of similar episodes.

Onnen regularly participated in these actions. In SS documents, he is listed as an employee of units involved in punitive operations. His death occurred in 1943. Punishment for the crime never came — he died before he could be brought to justice.

But the victim in the photograph remains unnamed. This is the part of the story that has not yet been restored. Matthäus writes that the archives of Berdychiv are divided among several structures, and some documents were destroyed. Therefore, identification continues, and this fragment of the tragedy remains unfinished.

We are observing how modern methods change the understanding of the Holocaust, how they return names to where there was only an image for decades. These investigations shape collective memory differently than before, and it is important to document this for those working with the history of Israel, Ukraine, and Europe — we discuss this in more detail on the platform NAnews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency.