Historian uses AI to help identify Nazi in notorious Holocaust murder image
www.theguardian.com
Jürgen Matthäus has for years been investigating the killer – and is confident he has finally solved the mystery

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 today’s Ukraine was long known, mistakenly, as The Last Jew in Vinnitsa, and was for decades shrouded in mystery.

The US-based German historian Jürgen Matthäus has for years painstakingly assembled the puzzle pieces and, with the help of artificial intelligence, is confident he has identified the killer.

According to findings, he has now published in the respected academic periodical Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft (Journal of Historical Studies), the SS carried out the massacre on 28 July 1941, most likely in the early afternoon, in the citadel of Berdychiv.

  • calliope@retrolemmy.comEnglish
    2·
    20 days ago

    To use a different atrocity as an example, the Japanese saw the Chinese as “pigs” during the Nanjing Massacre.

    It’s easy to see how dehumanizing your enemy has an effect. Here is an excerpt from The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang.

    there were those in the imperial army who saw the Chinese as subhuman beings whose murder would carry no greater moral weight than squashing a bug or butchering a hog. In fact, both before and during the war members of the Japanese military at all levels frequently compared the Chinese to pigs. For example, a Japanese general told a correspondent: “To be frank, your view of Chinese is totally different from mine. You regard the Chinese as human beings while I regard the Chinese as pigs.”