Vinnitsa, Ukraine in 1941

The last Jew of Vinnitsa is kneeling before a filled mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukraine in 1941, where all 28,000 Jews were massacred. This is from soldier Einsatzgruppen's personal photo album.

The Last Jew in Vinnitsa is a photograph taken during the Holocaust in Ukraine showing a Jewish man near the town of Vinnitsa ( Vinnytsia ) about to be shot dead by a member of Einsatzgruppe D , a mobile death squad of the Nazi SS . The victim is kneeling beside a mass grave already containing bodies; behind, a group of SS and Reich Labor Service men watch.

The photograph dates 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 labor camps and the Yerusalimka quarter was largely razed. 

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".  The UPI copy was published over a full page of The Forward .

Some later sources say that the original physical image was in an Einsatzgruppe member's photograph album,  or removed from the pocket of a dead soldier;  and that written on its reverse side was "Last Jew in Vinnitsa",  now sometimes used as the image's name.

Significance 

The photograph has become iconic. Some features are unusual among well-known Holocaust pictures: it was taken during the Holocaust rather than after its end, and presumably by someone complicit in the killing; it depicts Einsatzgruppen rather than concentration or extermination camps ; the focus is on a solitary victim rather than a multitude. 

The photograph has been reproduced, with different degrees of cropping ,  in many books and museum exhibits about the Holocaust.  Books include ones by Guido Knopp  and Michael Berenbaum . Exhibits include in Berlin at "Questions on German History" in the Reichstag building from 1971 to 1994,  and then at Topography of Terror  and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe ; the Institute of National Remembrance in Poland; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ;  and Yad Vashem .