History

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Historian uses AI to help identify Nazi in notorious Holocaust murder image [GRAPHIC PHOTO] (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 days ago by FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world to c/history@lemmy.world

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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.

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[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Onnen [the presumed killer], who had joined the Nazi party before Hitler took power in 1933, came from an educated family and in his youth enjoyed “travelling, studying languages”, Matthäus said.

One interpretation is that evil is banal. Personally I'm not sure this even took evil. All you need do is convince someone of the truth of a narrative. Humans are storytelling creatures.

[–] calliope@retrolemmy.com 2 points 21 hours 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.”