For more than eighty years the photograph has haunted Jewish memory. A man kneels on the edge of a pit, surrounded by smirking Nazis. An SS officer raises his pistol. The shutter clicks. The victim’s name was never known, and until now, neither was the killer’s. The picture traveled the world as “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa.” It was shown at the Eichmann trial. It became an icon of Nazi barbarity. And still the gunman’s face stared out without a name.
That face now has a name. A new study by Holocaust historian Jürgen Matthäus has identified the shooter as Jakobus Oehnen, a German schoolteacher who turned murderer. He was not a monster in appearance. He was a man who once taught English and French. He stood in classrooms before the war, then joined the SS and put bullets into Jewish skulls. On July 28, 1941, at the fortress in Berdychiv, Ukraine, he held the pistol that ended one man’s life as dozens of others watched. That moment was frozen in the frame that still burns into our collective memory.
The details came from the diary of Austrian Wehrmacht officer Walter Materna. Inside it was the negative of the infamous photo and notes that matched the day’s massacre. Materna wrote down what he saw: Jews marched to the citadel, Ukrainians ordered to dig, the SS carrying out the executions. He even jotted down the date. The archive sat for decades until Matthäus pieced it together, matched the face, and exposed the identity of the killer.
Oehnen was born in 1906 near the Dutch border. He lived the quiet life of a provincial teacher until he embraced Hitler’s movement, joining the SA and then the SS. By 1941 he was part of a killing squad that followed the German army into Ukraine. They were tasked with “cleansing” the rear lines. By the time Oehnen died in combat in 1943, his unit had murdered more than one hundred thousand civilians, most of them Jews.
The victim in the photograph remains unknown. His name, his family, his story—all erased in that instant. The photographer too is still a mystery, most likely a Wehrmacht soldier who watched and recorded while Jews were slaughtered in cold blood.
The mislabel “Vinnitsa” has been stripped away. The myth is now placed in Berdychiv, July 28, 1941, in a fortress courtyard where hundreds of Jews were lined up and shot. But the horror remains the same. The photo is no longer just a symbol of faceless evil. It is proof of a schoolteacher turned executioner, a reminder that the Holocaust was carried out not only by generals and ideologues but also by ordinary men who chose to kill.
Leave a Reply