“The photograph “The Last Jew in Vinnytsia” became a symbol of the Holocaust. It shows a man sitting on the edge of a pit of corpses, while a German soldier aims a gun at him as his Nazi comrades look on. The photo was first published in the 1960s during the trial of a former SS-Obersturmbannführer responsible for the “final solution of the Jewish question.” Adolf Eichmann, but they did not know for a long time”, — write on: ua.news
The photograph “The Last Jew in Vinnytsia” became a symbol of the Holocaust. It shows a man sitting on the edge of a pit of corpses, while a German soldier aims a gun at him as his Nazi comrades look on. The photo was first published in the 1960s during the trial of a former SS-Obersturmbannführer responsible for the “final solution of the Jewish question.” Adolf Eichmann, but for a long time neither the date nor the location of the shooting was known. Thanks to modern technology, historian Juergen Matthaus of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum established the exact location of the event and the name of the killer.
This is reported by the magazine Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft.
“The last Jew in Vinnytsia” is written on the back of the photos. But whether the photo card was really taken in Vinnytsia and who took it was unknown for a long time. After its publication, the picture became very famous, it was repeatedly used as the most vivid illustration of German war crimes and a symbol of the Holocaust.
New information about the photo was found in 2023. Then the historian Jürgen Matthaus discovered one of the copies of the picture in the papers of the Wehrmacht officer, the Austrian Walter Materna. These materials — several boxes and folders with documents — were found in a garbage container in Vienna by an unknown person, and in 2021 her friend, who also wished to remain anonymous, handed over the find to the Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In Materna’s diary, the photo was signed as “Death of Jews in the Berdychev Citadel” and dated July 28, 1941. The officer received a photo from one of the soldiers. As Matthaus points out, it was popular among the military who passed through Berdychiv – this can be judged from the large number of copies of the picture, the original negative of which has not yet been found.
In addition to Materna’s papers, the diary of Wehrmacht sergeant Heinz Bayer, dated July 1941, became the source of information about the picture. It has a photo of the same scene, but taken from a different angle. It is signed as follows: “Punishment of Jews in Berdychev by SS forces. Was it necessary? Madness”.
After the material was published in Der Welt, an anonymous reader wrote to the historian Jürgen Matthaus, saying that the soldier in the photo resembled his uncle, and added biographical information. Thanks to this, Matthaus and the analysis of documents about Einsatzgruppe C identified the probable executioner – SS Unterscharführer Jakobus Onnen. The reader later confirmed that his wife’s uncle was him.
Jacobus Onnen, born in 1906 in East Frisia, became a teacher of French and English, joined the SA in 1931, and the SS in 1932. In August 1939, he transferred to the “Dead Head” SS battalion in Dachau.
In early June 1941, he was sent to Einsatzgruppe C under the command of Otto Rasch. So Jacobus Onnen ended up on the Eastern Front. There Onnen was appointed chief of the German security police in occupied Zhytomyr, and in August 1943 he was killed by partisans. Much of the information about the subject in the picture has been lost because the family destroyed the wartime letters.
Artificial intelligence helped to confirm the killer’s identity – although the similarity between individuals is obvious, the neural network can also measure it numerically.
We will remind you that the KGB published a cynical instruction on how to lie when asked by relatives of repressed and shot citizens.
