While artificial intelligence, or AI, is commonly used to produce trivial or deepfake content, it was used by a German historian to identify a Nazi executioner in a World War II photograph taken more than 80 years ago.
“The match, from everything I hear from the technical experts, is unusually high in terms of the percentage the algorithm throws out there,” Jürgen Matthäus, who is based in the United States, told The Guardian.
Widely known as “The Last Jew of Vinnitsa,” the photo shows an SS soldier aiming a pistol at the head of a Jewish man who is kneeling on the edge of a mass grave in Ukraine. The gunman, who is wearing glasses, is being observed by a line of expressionless SS soldiers and officers behind him.
The name of the executioner has long been a mystery thought lost to the march of time until Matthäus used AI, historical records and personal accounts to solve it.
A study published in the Journal of Historical Studies indicates that the massacre took place on July 28, 1941, in the citadel of Berdychiv, and not Vinnitsa, as had previously been thought. The mobile commando unit Einsatzgruppe C had been tasked with the eradication of “Jews and partisans” in the region ahead of a visit by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
Matthäus believes the Nazi executioner in the photo is Jakobus Onnen, an English, French and gym teacher who was born in Tichelwarf, Germany, and joined the Nazi party in 1931, when he was 25 years old.
After German media circulated reports of the study revealing the massacre’s true details last year, a reader came forward with a piece of important information.
Based on correspondence from the era in his family’s possession, the reader said the SS officer in the photo could be his wife’s uncle, Onnen.
While relatives had destroyed Onnen’s letters from the eastern front in the 1990s, they still had pictures of him, which were used in AI image analysis performed by volunteers from the open-source journalism group Bellingcat.
That analysis, coupled with strong circumstantial evidence, gave Matthäus the confidence to identify Onnen as the shooter.
“Digital tools in the humanities have massively increased in use, but it’s usually for the processing of mass data, not so much for qualitative analysis,” he said about the use of AI in his field.
“This is clearly not the silver bullet – this is one tool among many,” Matthäus added. “The human factor remains key.”
According to The Independent, Onnen was a dedicated Nazi, having enlisted in the SS Death’s Head Unit at Dachau concentration camp in August 1939, just before the war broke out. By 1940, he was working for the Nazi “Order Police” in occupied Poland.
From there, he joined the Einsatzgruppe C in 1941, not long after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The unit reportedly eliminated all but 15 of the 20,000 Jews present in Berdychiv upon the Germans’ arrival.
“These mass executions in this format continued until the very last day of the German occupation in the east,” Matthäus said. “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.”
Onnen was reportedly killed in battle in the Zhytomyr region of Ukraine in 1943, having never been promoted beyond a relatively low rank.
The kneeling victim in the photo has not yet been identified, but Matthäus said he hopes to restore his name using Soviet-era records and potentially AI as part of his next project.
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