The photograph, taken in 1941, shows a man kneeling at the edge of a mass grave, moments before being executed. He is the “last Jew of Vinnitsa”, a Ukrainian city. Behind him, a German soldier of Einsatzgruppe D points a rifle, ready to fire. The image is raw and direct, capturing the horror of a mass killing in real time, with other victims already visible in the pit and more soldiers in the background.
The Massacre of the Jews of Vinnitsa
The photograph was found in the pocket of a German soldier during the Second World War, with the following words scrawled on the back: “Last Jew in Vinnytsia”. On that day, 28,000 Jews were executed. One of the most iconic photographs of the Second World War and of the twentieth century was most likely taken on 22 September 1941, the day of the second massacre in the city of Vinnitsa (Vinnytsia), in Ukraine.
Those responsible for the executions were German soldiers of the Einsatzgruppen, paramilitary units formed by Heinrich Himmler and run by the Schutzstaffel (SS), which between 1941 and 1945 killed more than 1.3 million people in summary open-air executions, most of them Jewish and communist civilians.
Many people question the authenticity of the photograph or suspect it may have been manipulated, yet the image remains one of the most iconic of the twentieth century. The “original” print is held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In any case, there were at least two mass executions, on 16 and 22 September 1941, carried out against the Jews of the city of Vinnitsa, in Ukraine, and they did in fact result in the deaths of around 28,000 Jews.
The Brutal Historical Context of the Extermination of Jews
This photograph is visual testimony to the crimes committed by the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi death squads that operated in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe. Unlike the extermination camps, much of the Holocaust in the East was carried out through mass shootings such as the one shown here. Vinnitsa, once home to a thriving Jewish community, became a site of systematic extermination, with most of its Jewish inhabitants murdered in mass graves.
The Power and the Memory of the Photograph
“The Last Jew of Vinnitsa” became one of the most iconic and disturbing images of the Holocaust. Although its authenticity and the exact identity of the photographer have been debated over the years, the picture captures the inhuman brutality of the genocide. Despite the claim by some that the photograph may have been altered in some way, there is no room whatsoever for any kind of Holocaust denial or revisionism. This record, among many others, stands as a graphic and painful reminder of the atrocities committed and of the importance of remembering and teaching about the Holocaust so that such horrors do not happen again.
Identifying the Gunman, 84 Years Later
The photograph first surfaced in 1961 during the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, when United Press circulated it from a copy provided by Al Moss, a Holocaust survivor who had obtained it in 1945 shortly after his liberation from the Allach concentration camp. For decades, the identity of the soldier holding the rifle remained unknown. In 2025, historian Jürgen Matthäus, former head of research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, used AI facial recognition to compare the gunman’s face with family photographs supplied by living relatives of suspects. The result, with 99.9 percent confidence, identified Jakobus Onnen, a 34-year-old teacher and member of Einsatzgruppe C, who died in battle in August 1943 without ever facing justice for his crimes. The same research also revised the location of the killing: the execution most likely took place on 28 July 1941 in the town of Berdychiv, not Vinnitsa as had long been assumed, although the photograph retains its historical title.
