According to The Guardian, German historian Jürgen Matthäus, who spent years investigating Nazi crimes during World War II, used AI to shed new light on one of the Holocaust’s most infamous images — a Nazi soldier aiming a pistol at a kneeling man before a pit of corpses.
On July 28, 1941, Nazi forces massacred Jews in Berdychiv, a city with a large Jewish community at the time. When the Red Army retook the area in 1944, only 15 of an estimated 20,000 pre-occupation Jews had survived.
By applying AI facial comparison tools to historical photographs, Matthäus identified the gunman as Jakobus Onnen, a schoolteacher and Nazi party member who served with Einsatzgruppe C, the mobile unit responsible for mass killings in Soviet-occupied Ukraine, as reported by The Guardian.
Matthäus’s research combines archival records, family testimonies and AI image analysis conducted with volunteers from Bellingcat, a prominent investigative group. Relatives provided old photographs of Onnen, allowing experts to determine that the match is very strong, though not definitive.
As the historian noted, over a million Holocaust victims in the occupied Soviet territories remain unidentified to this day.
