IThe T is one of the coldest images of the Holocaust. Glasses-wearing Nazi soldier trains a pistol on the head of a resigned man kneeling in a suit in front of a hole filled with corpses. German troops surround the scene.
Photos taken in today's Ukraine have been mistakenly known for long as Vinica's last Jew, and have been shrouded in mystery for decades.
The US-based German historian Jürgen Matthäus has been painstakingly assembled puzzle pieces for years. With the help of artificial intelligence, I am sure he has identified the murderer.
According to the findings, he is now featured in the revered, academic regular Zeitschrift fürgeschichtswissenschaft (Journal of Historical Studies), where SS carried out a massacre on July 28, 1941, perhaps early in the afternoon, at the fortress of Berdychiv.
For centuries, the city has been a prosperous centre for Jewish life. It is located 150 km southwest of Kiev and about 90 km north of what is now known as Vinnizzia in English.
One of several mobile units deployed in the newly occupied Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppe C Commando was engaged in clearing the “Jews and Partisans” areas a few days before Adolf Hitler's visit.
Among them was Jacobs Onnen, a French, English and gym teacher who was born in the village of Tichelwarf in Germany near the Dutch border in 1906.
Matthäus described the “incremental process” of the traditional excavation of dusty archives, lucky breaks, peer opinions, and the pioneering involvement of volunteers from the open source journalism group BellingCat.
“This match is very high in terms of the rate at which the algorithm throws it out from everything I've heard from technical experts,” Matthäus said.
A preliminary investigation released last year revealed Matthias, which revealed the dates, locations and units involved in the mass shooting, generating media coverage in Germany.
Readers came forward and said they believed that based on communications from his family's ownership era, the gunman could become Jacobs Onnen, his wife's uncle.
Relatives destroyed letters from Onnen from the Eastern Front in the 1990s. However, they still had his photos, which could be used by BellingCat volunteers for AI image analysis.
“AI experts say it's more difficult to reach 98 or 99.9% because this is a historic photograph. [match]”As often handed over in modern forensic work, Mash said.
But his strong portrait combined with a pile of circumstantial evidence lends him the credibility to make it public.
“The use of digital tools in the humanities has increased dramatically, but is usually for the processing of mass data, not for qualitative analysis,” he said of the possibility of AI use in his field.
“This is clearly not a silver bullet. It's one tool among many people. Human factors are still important.”
Onnen, who joined the Nazi Party before Hitler came to power in 1933, came from an educated family and enjoyed “the language of travel and studying” when she was younger, Matty said.
“Then his development unfolds eastward, and obviously he's standing here,” he said. “Motivation is one of the hardest questions to answer. I think it's meant to be touching because why he's posing there, how he draws himself – that's what I think is meant to be touching.”
Onnen never got promoted beyond a relatively low rank and was killed in battle in August 1943.
“It's obvious to be involved in such murders and I didn't give you any bonus points for these murder units,” Mattius said.
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He regrets that a letter sent home had been destroyed from the front where Onnen might have provided a window for his ideology. However, he said that relatives who came forward about his suspicious identity had read them decades ago and described them as “mediocre.”
Until this spring, Massausau was the director of research at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and had been working since 1994.
His latest book, Gerahmte Gewalt (Framed Violence), examines photo albums edited by Germans on the Eastern Front during World War II.
He said it was “pretty surely” taken by fellow soldiers with images of the Berdychiv genocide, where there are several prints, and pointed out that such a snapshot is considered a “trophy” of civilian blood.
Of the estimated 20,000 Jews in Berdichyv at the time of the German arrival in 1941, only 15 remained in early 1944, according to news outlet del Spiegel, who reported on the new study.
“These massive executions in this format continued until the last day of the German occupation in the East,” Matty said.
“I think this image should be as important as the image of Auschwitz's Gate because it shows us a practical nature, a direct conflict between the killer and the murderer.”
He said extensive visual and written evidence sent home by German soldiers exposed the myth that the population in their homes was unaware of the genocide taking place in their names.
Matthäus's project also includes hunting the identity of the victim with a photograph of Berdychiv. He works with his Ukrainian colleague Andrii Mahaletskyi using Soviet-era records from the local community.
AI might also prove useful in this detective job, he said, if equivalent images of men in suits can be found.
He acknowledged the difficulty of the task, noting that while the Nazis recorded the names of deported people from Western Europe in detail of the deaths in the concentration camp, the majority of the victims killed in the east remained unknown for 80 years.
“The occupied Soviet Union had more than a million casualties,” he said. “Most of them are unknown, as the murderers intended.”
