📰⁉️— about 6 days ago US-based German historian Jürgen Matthäus has identified SS officer Jakobus Onnen as the executioner in the infamous The Last Jew in Vinnitsa, using AI facial recognition to match the 1941 image.

🇩🇪 Jakobus Onnen was a German teacher, Whom was a SA men, then in the German invasion in September 1939, Onnen was transferred to the Ordnungspolizei in Płock in occupied Poland in the autumn of the same year. Later he was deployed to the Eastern Front, where he was part of Einsatzgruppe C. his unit was validated to be assigned to Lithuania and other areas to protect from partisans and cleanse Jews from the region.

❌ Onnen was killed on 12 August 1943 during a combat operation in the Zhytomyr region of present-day Ukraine. His grave is in the Kyiv War Cemetery, a Rheiderland Local History Museum, also contains his name.

🏴 Neues Europa archive 🏴

— Artwork is by Otto Engelhardt-Kyffhäuser, a prolific NS propagandist. Text on the back of the postcard reads:

The Unknown Soldier of the World War. Artistic lithograph by Engelhardt-Kyffhäuser, Görlitz, executed in three colours. The artist does not wish here merely to depict the unknown soldier with his burden and effort; rather, the image is meant to symbolically express that this unknown soldier today also bears the heavy burden of responsibility at the forefront of the people on the path toward ultimate freedom.

🏴 Neues Europa archive 🏴

🚩 — Hank Welzel was born in Ohio in 1926. In 1928, his family moved to Germany, and in the 1930s, Hank joined the Hitler Youth. In 1943, he was drafted into the army and sent to the Italian front. During the fighting on the Gothic Line, he was captured by the Americans, and remained in the United States. When the Korean War began, Welzel expressed a desire to reenlist, this time in the American army. He served 11 months as a medic with the 179th Infantry Regiment, and was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart for his combat service. After the war, he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, which he never fully recovered from, even in his old age.

🏴 Neues Europa archive 🏴