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Perhaps the most haunting images depicting the Holocaust shows a bespectacled German officer pointing a handgun at the temple of a subdued man kneeling in a suit before a trench overflowing with corpses. Nazi forces surround the site.

This image captured in today’s Ukrainian territory was previously identified, incorrectly, as the final Jew of Vinnitsa, and was unidentified for many years.

One German historian based in the United States has spent years painstakingly assembling the evidence and, through artificial intelligence, is confident he has discovered the killer.

Research Discoveries

Per evidence newly issued in a prestigious research publication, the SS carried out the mass killing on 28 July 1941, probably in the afternoon hours, in the stronghold of Berdychiv.

This location was for generations a prosperous hub of Jewish life. It is located 93 miles southwest of the Ukrainian capital and about 56 miles to the north of what is currently called in international circles as Vinnitsa, which had once believed mistakenly to be the location of the killings.

Mobile Killing Unit

The mobile death squad, part of various operational groups deployed in the freshly invaded USSR, had been engaged in clearing the region of Jewish residents and resistance fighters shortly prior to a tour by Hitler himself.

Among them was a man named Jakobus Onnen, a French, English and gym teacher who was born in the year 1906 in the small town of Tichelwarf, near the Holland frontier.

Investigation Process

Matthäus explained an step-by-step investigation of archival research in historical documents, fortuitous discoveries, input from peers and the trailblazing involvement of contributors from an investigative collective.

“The correlation, from what experts tell me from the technology professionals, is exceptionally close in terms of the likelihood the algorithm produces,” he said.

Early findings shared last year enabled him to reveal the date, precise site and military group participating in the atrocity, generating media coverage in the German press.

Breakthrough

A reader came forward and stated that, from letters from the era in his family records, the perpetrator could be his relative by marriage, the teacher.

Family members had destroyed correspondence from the eastern front from him in the 1990s. But they possessed photographs of him, which the researchers were able to use for an computer-assisted comparison.

“The AI experts inform me that because it's a historical photo makes it more difficult to arrive at a near-perfect match” as commonly achieved in contemporary forensic work, the historian remarked.

But its strong likeness, combined with a mountain of contextual proof, lent him credibility to publish his conclusions.

Technology in Academia

“Technological resources in the humanities have significantly grown in application, but it’s typically for the analysis of large datasets, less frequently for qualitative analysis,” he said about the possibilities for the use of artificial intelligence in his area of expertise.

“This is certainly not the silver bullet – this is one tool among many. Human judgment continues to be crucial.”

The Suspect

The identified man, who had enlisted in the NSDAP before 1933, came from an well-to-do background and in his youth was fond of “traveling, language acquisition”, Matthäus noted.

“Then follows his posting in the occupied territories and clearly this is his location,” he said. “Personal drive is among the hardest aspects to determine. The reason I believe why he is posing there, the his posture – I think is intended to show off.”

Onnen was not advanced past a relatively lowly rank and was fell during fighting in August 1943.

“Taking part in a murder like that was considered normal and wouldn't earn you any kind of bonus points in these murder units,” Matthäus said.

Missing Documents

Matthäus expressed disappointment that the written accounts the suspect mailed back from the front which might have offered insight on to his beliefs were lost. But he mentioned that the descendant who had contacted him about his possible identification had seen them long ago and reported them as “ordinary”.

Continuing Investigation

Matthäus previously served as leader of the academic unit of the Holocaust museum in Washington in the US capital, where he had served since 1994.

His latest publication, Gerahmte Gewalt (Framed Violence), examines the personal albums compiled by Nazi personnel on the Eastern Front during the World War II.

He stated it was “fairly certain” the picture of the Berdychiv execution, of which there are multiple copies, was captured by a fellow soldier and noted that such snapshots were seen as “souvenirs” from massacres of civilians.

Naming the Victim

Of the estimated 20,000 Jewish people in the city on the Nazi invasion in the war years, merely fifteen were left in the beginning of 1944, according to media accounts.

“These mass executions in this fashion went on throughout of the occupation period in the east,” Matthäus commented.

“In my opinion this image should be as crucial as the picture of the entrance in Auschwitz, because it {sh