At Last, a Name for the Murderous Face in a Holocaust Photo

BCF : One man kneels at the edge of a pit filled with bodies. He knows that, within moments, he will be dead. His drawn face burns with defiance.

Behind him stands a uniformed, bespectacled Nazi soldier. In his extended right arm, the soldier holds a pistol, just inches from his victim’s skull. A crowd of other Germans stands watching, curious but undisturbed.

This harrowing scene, captured in a 1941 photograph known as “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa,” became an iconic image of the Holocaust for the way it captured the banal savagery of mass slaughter. But for decades, nobody could answer the most basic question the photograph posed: Who were these two men? 

That mystery was partly solved last month by Jürgen Matthäus, who recently retired from his post as the head of research at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. According to an article he wrote for the September issue of The Journal of Historical Studies, a German-language publication, the killer was Jakobus Onnen, 34, a former teacher from the town of Tichelwarf, near the German border with the Netherlands.  

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After one of Mr. Onnen’s living relatives provided Dr. Matthäus with family photos, an artificial intelligence tool made the match with 99.9 percent confidence. The photo emerged in 1961, during the Jerusalem trial of high-ranking Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann. It had been in the possession of Al Moss, a Holocaust survivor who said he had acquired it in 1945 but knew nothing of its context. 

Mr. Moss said he had made the photo public so the world would “know what went on in Eichmann’s time.” With unimpeachable clarity that remains intact decades later, the photo places the viewer in a gruesome setting that refuses rationalization.

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