It is one of the most famous photos from the Second World War: a man sits on his knees in front of an open mass grave. His gaze is focused on a point in the distance. Diagonally next to him stands a bespectacled soldier in uniform, pointing a gun at the back of his head. A little further on, a group of German soldiers watch impassively. This image has gone down in history as The last Jew in Vinnitsa. German historian Jürgen Matthäus has now established the identity of the shooter with 99 percent certainty: it was the then 33-year-old SS man Jakobus Onnen. Matthäus published his findings in September in it Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft.
The historian, who until March this year was head of research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, managed to identify the perpetrator with the help of a diary, his relatives and AI. Matthew’s discovery had a long run-up. He published in 2013 ‘”The last Jew in Vinnitsa”: Reframing an Iconic Holocaust Photograph’ in the magazine Holocaust in Genocide Studies. In this article he was the first to determine the precise location and date of the mass execution of this group of Jews.
Find in a diary
The photo of the execution first became known in 1961, during the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Then the statue was circulated by an American news agency, saying that a Holocaust survivor had acquired it in 1945 shortly after his liberation. At some point, for some unknown reason, the photo was given the name ‘The Last Jew of Vinnytsia’. Vinnytsia is a city two hundred kilometers southwest of Kiev, which was captured by the Germans in the summer of 1941.
This association is incorrect, Matthäus discovered. A discovery in a diary of one Walter Materna made it clear that the scene had taken place somewhere else. This Austrian soldier wrote on July 28, 1941 about the “execution of 70 Jews and 1 Aryan.” Between the pages lay a print of the photograph known as “The Last Jew of Vinnytsia.” However, on the back Materna had written: “End of July 1941. Erschießung von Juden durch die SS in der Zitadelle Berditschew”. Berdychiv is located between Kiev and Vinnytsia.
There was a lot of publicity in the German media surrounding this discovery in 2023, after which a retired teacher reported to Matthäus. This man said the shooter in the photo looked like his wife’s uncle. Photos of this SS man from the war were preserved showing him in uniform.
SS uncle
The teacher did not give Matthäus the name of his wife’s uncle, but did give him a number of biographical details about his life, such as year and place of birth, the year he joined the SS (1932) and the year he died in 1943, when he died in combat with partisans. With this information, a search in the Matthäus archive yielded the name Jakobus Onnen. He submitted Einsatzgruppe Ca German unit that murdered tens of thousands of Jews behind the front in the Ukraine by shooting them in mass executions. This murder wave, in which more than a million Jews died, has been called the ‘Holocaust with bullets’ because it took place before the Nazis started using gas chambers.
After this, his family sent the historian three photos of the SS uncle. An AI program from the research collective Bellingcat that compared these images with the photo from Materna’s diary – which was sharper than the version that circulated in 1961 – gave a match with 99 percent certainty.
Onnen was a teacher of French, English and gymnastics at the Deutschen Kolonialschule in Witzenhausen until the summer of 1939. Only from this moment on did he really become active in the SS: he first served as a guard in the Dachau concentration camp and left for the Eastern Front in 1941 as a member of Einsatzgruppe C. Two years later he died here.
The name Jakobus Onnen appears on a memorial plaque with war victims in the city of Weener in East Friesland, near his birthplace. In response to Matthäus’ discovery says the Heimatmuseum that maintains the monument that it is considering removing Onnen’s name or placing an information sign next to it.
The name of Onnen’s victim is still unknown.
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