'I think this image should be just as important as the image of the gate in Auschwitz,' says the US-based German historian Jürgen Matthäus. 'I think this image should be just as important as the image of the gate in Auschwitz,' says the US-based German historian Jürgen Matthäus. Thu 2 Oct 2025 03.23 EDTLast modified on Thu 2 Oct 2025 08.22 EDT 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. 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.

The vast collection of Holocaust survivor testimonies presents invaluable historical insights but poses challenges for manual analysis. This paper leverages advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to explore the USC Shoah Foundation Holocaust testimony corpus. By treating testimonies as structured question-and-answer sections, we apply topic modeling to identify key themes. We experiment with BERTopic, which leverages recent advances in language modeling technology. We align testimony sections into fixed parts, revealing the evolution of topics across the corpus of testimonies. This highlights both a common narrative schema and divergences between subgroups based on age and gender. We introduce a novel method to identify testimonies within groups that exhibit atypical topic distributions resembling those of other groups. This study offers unique insights into the complex narratives of Holocaust survivors, demonstrating the power of NLP to illuminate historical discourse and identify potential deviations in survivor experiences.

Most survivors of World War II's Nazi concentration camps are now in their 80s and 90s, and soon there will be no one left who experienced the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand -- no one to answer questions or bear witness to future generations. But as we first reported two years ago, a new and dramatic effort is underway to change that by harnessing the technologies of the present and the future. To keep alive the ability to talk to -- and get answers from -- the past. Our interview with Holocaust survivor Aaron Elster, who spent two years of his childhood hidden in a neighbor's attic, was unlike any interview we have ever done. "Aaron, tell us what your parents did before the war," Stahl asked Elster. "They owned and operated a butcher shop," Elster said. It wasn't the content of the interview that was so unusual. "Where did you live?" Stahl asked. "I was born in a small town in Poland called Sokolów Podlaski," Elster said. It's the fact that this interview was with a man who was no longer alive. Aaron Elster died four years ago.

On 20 November, 1945 the Nuremberg trials began - the military tribunals called to prosecute Nazi war criminals closely involved in the Holocaust. Now, 71 years later, that work continues through the Bavarian State criminal office (LKA) in Munich, that has created a virtual reality version of the Auschwitz concentration camp to assist with the continued prosecutions. Digital imaging expert Ralf Breker is behind the project: "We spent five days in Auschwitz taking laser scans of the buildings and the whole project to complete took about six months." About 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were killed at Auschwitz, most deceived into entering gas chambers where cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon B was released, killing those inside. Their bodies were then burned in the camp's many crematoria.