AI helps identify Nazi murderer in 1941 photo from Ukraine

Historian Jürgen Matthäus has for years been investigating a notorious photo of a Nazi massacre — now he is confident he has solved the mystery and named the perpetrator

The bodies of 14,000 civilians in a mass grave uncovered in Babyn Yar by the advancing Red Army in 1944. Jürgen Matthäus used his own detective skills as well as AI, open-source journalism, and media coverage to research another atrocity in Ukraine carried out by the Nazis. File picture: AP

It is one of the most chilling images of the Holocaust: a bespectacled Nazi soldier trains a pistol at the head of a resigned man kneeling in a suit before a pit full of corpses. German troops encircle the scene.

The picture taken in what is now Ukraine was long known, mistakenly, as The Last Jew in Vinnitsa, and was for decades shrouded in mystery.