The photograph was circulated in 1961 by
United Press (UPI) during the
trial of Adolf Eichmann. UPI had received it from Al Moss (b. 1910), a Polish Jew who acquired it in May 1945 shortly after he was liberated from
Allach concentration camp by the
American 3rd Army. Moss, living in Chicago in 1961, wanted people "to know what went on in Eichmann's time".
Early accounts Multiple wartime prints of the image exist. Several people have contacted , each purporting to identify the shooter as a relative. If it was taken in Vinnytsia, the photograph would date from some time between mid-1941, when
the Germans occupied the
oblast (region) of Vinnytsia, and 1943. During this period, there were numerous massacres of Jews in the oblast, including in the town itself on 16 and 22 September 1941 and April 1942, after which those spared were sent to labour camps and
Yerusalimka, Vinnitsa's Jewish quarter, was largely razed.
2020s developments In 2023,
Jürgen Matthäus of the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum discussed the image in an article in the journal
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, based on an alternative print from the same negative found in the diary of Walter Materna, an Austrian captain in a
Wehrmacht pioneer unit attached to
Army Group South, then deployed to the Ukrainian city of
Berdychiv, This print has the handwritten caption "Late July 1941. Execution of Jews by SS in the Berditschew citadel" on its reverse. Materna's diary for 28 July 1941 in Berdychiv tells of hearing from other Germans at the
citadel that about 70 Jews were shot that day (and one "
Aryan", a trainee
political commissar) after 180 and 300 killed on the previous two days. Volunteers from the investigative journalism group
Bellingcat helped Matthäus to
geolocate the image. They were the first to identify the location depicted in the photograph. The photographer and victim remain unidentified. ==Significance==