A new study by German historian Jürgen Matthäus identifies Jakobus Oehnen, a German schoolteacher turned SS officer, as the executioner in the infamous 1941 photo known as 'The Last Jew in Vinnitsa,' taken during mass killings in Berdychiv, Ukraine
The research, conducted by German historian Jürgen Matthäus, names the killer as Jakobus Oehnen, a German schoolteacher who turned into an SS officer who participated in mass executions of Jews in Berdychiv, Ukraine, in 1941.The black-and-white photo, first introduced as evidence during the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, is now documented for the first time with confirmed details of the time, location, and perpetrator. The victim remains unidentified.According to Matthäus, the photograph was taken on July 28, 1941, at a fortress near Berdychiv, some tens of miles from Vinnitsa, just three weeks after the city was occupied by the Nazis and days before its Jews were forced into a ghetto. The image captures the moment an SS officer stands on the edge of a killing pit behind a kneeling Jewish man, holding a pistol aimed at his neck, moments before the execution. In the background, at least 20 SS soldiers and officers look on, expressionless. The city of Berdychiv in Ukraine, a major center of Hasidic Judaism, had suffered violent pogroms by Russian forces after World War I. After the Nazi occupation in July 1941, thousands of Jews were murdered by the Germans. The image’s stark power lies in the visibility of the killers - their faces are clear, their presence is documented. At least 20 SS soldiers and officers looked indifferently and peacefully, as if they were used to the sight. A small sand mound appears in the foreground, made from the earth dug out by Jews forced to excavate their own mass grave. Dozens of bodies already lie at the bottom. The doomed man, kneeling at the edge of the pit, stares into the distance, beyond the camera. Behind him, the SS officer wears a beret and glasses. His left hand rests behind his back inside his belt holster. His legs are set in a perfectly balanced stance. His boots are polished to the knee. He looks like someone who is dressed for a party. His right arm extends forward with a pistol. In just a moment he will shoot the Jew in the back of the neck and kill him. This photo has been published hundreds, if not thousands, of times in books and magazines. Yet until now, none of its critical details, i.e., the identity of the shooter, the victim, the witnesses, the location, or the exact date, had been verified.
Matthäus’ research appears in a recent edition of a historical science journal. Until March of this year, he served as head of the research department of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. His work brings long-sought context to one of the Holocaust’s most horrible images. According to Matthäus, the photograph was taken in early afternoon of July 28, 1941, at a fortress near Berdychiv, just three weeks after the city was occupied by the Nazis and days before its Jews were concentrated into a ghetto. The shooter-killer is identified as Jakobus Oehnen, born in 1906 in a small village near the Dutch border, had been a teacher of English, French, and physical education before joining the SS.Oehnen first joined the SA, the Nazi paramilitary organization, two years before the Nazi Party came to power. A year later, he enlisted in the SS. Immediately upon Nazi occupation, Oehnen was deployed in Poland, and according to the research, he had already participated in the murder of Jews a month before the photo was taken. Oehnen's unit, numbering about 700 soldiers, was part of the SS mobile killing squads tasked with “cleansing the Reich’s rear areas of dangerous elements” while the German army advanced into the Soviet Union.
By the fall of 1942, his unit had murdered more than 100,000 civilians, men, women and children, most of them Jews. Adolf Hitler himself visited the region in early August 1941 to commend the troops for their efficiency. When the Red Army liberated Berdychiv in January 1944, only 15 Jews remained out of the 20,000 who had lived there before the Nazi occupation. Oehnen was killed in combat in 1943.The photo gained global attention during the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. It was introduced by Ed Moss, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust and later immigrated to Chicago. He had received the photo from an American soldier in Munich in 1945. Over time, it came to be known by titles such as 'The Last Jew in Vinnitsa' and 'Seventy Jews and One Aryan'. Matthäus’s study does not identify the photographer but suggests it was likely a Wehrmacht soldier. The historian launched his investigation after discovering a photo negative in the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. It had been tucked inside the wartime diary of Walter Materna, an Austrian Wehrmacht officer born in 1898. Materna, a former bank clerk and World War I veteran, provided a detailed account of the July 28, 1941, massacre. He described executions at the site, including a soldier firing into the mass grave with a machine gun to ensure the dead remained so. He also documented the role of Ukrainian collaborators who informed on Jews, brought shovels from their homes to speed up the digging of mass graves, and even abandoned their dinners upon hearing that another grave was being prepared.According to Materna’s writings, 180 Jews were killed that day at the fortress, compared with 300 executed the day before. He recorded these figures in stark, impersonal language, as if noting routine logistics. Though much of his diary appears to echo stories told by fellow officers, the level of detail suggests he may have witnessed the executions himself. On the back of the photo negative, he wrote: “July 28, 1941. Execution of Jews by the SS. Fortress Berdychiv.”Portions of Matthäus’ research first appeared in the German newspaper Die Welt in 2023. A reader who suspected the man in the photo was his wife’s uncle contacted Matthäus with new evidence and family photos. A private investigator and research firm used artificial intelligence to compare the images and determined with 99 percent certainty that the man in the photo was Jakobus Oehnen.The identity of the Jewish man he murdered remains unknown.
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