(Dagbladet): The year is 1946. A group Jewish men and women want revenge for atrocities Germans inflicted them during WW2. They will avenge the six million Jews who perished.
The plan is to poison 12,000 German SS soldiers sitting in an American prison camp in Nuremberg. Everything goes according to plan.
Except that no Germans die.
– Killing Germans
Now, 70 years after, AP obtained a recently declassified US military report. But nor does it give any good answer to why “avengers” not succeeded.
The desire for vengeance was strong for many Jews in the years after the war, but most of them refused to do anything.
But some 50 Jews, mostly young men and women who had contributed in mostandskampen during the war, decided that they had to do something. They had to have revenge, at least in a small scale.
They called themselves Nakama, the Hebrew word for revenge. The goal was simple.
– Killing Germans. As many as possible, says Joseph Harmatz.
Harmatz, now 91 years old, is one of the few surviving from the small grouping. The first plan their was to poison water supplies to Nuremberg, but they concluded that it would take many innocent lives.
Infiltrated bakery
Married they had got hold of. One of the group founders, partisanlederen and poet Abba Kovner, had arranged it, and should have received it via Ephraim Katzir, later Israel’s fourth president, and his brother Aharon.
A new plan was carved out. Members of the group took a job at a bakery that supplied the camp at Langwasser near Nuremberg.
13 April 1946 they set to work. Three members of the group rubbed into 12,000 pieces of bread that were to the prison camp, with arsenic. The goal was to kill all the SS soldiers in the camp.
The plan did not succeed. But than 2,200 Germans were sick, but no one died.
Two theories
According to documents the AP has received from the National Archives in the United States, should arsenic amount used have been enough to kill large numbers of people.
in a note of 1947 writes investigators that the bakery found “three empty water bottles and a burlap sack with four full water bottles.” An analysis of the contents revealed that it contained “enough arsenic, mixed with glue and water, killing ca. 60,000 people. “
In a laboratory report, it was determined that they found arsenic both top, bottom and side of bread slices.
The report also stated that the amount of arsenic found in each slice, 0.2 gram, “in all most cases would be fatal.”
Why no lost their lives, is still a mystery. There are two main theories: One is that the Jews anointed too little arsenic, and the other is that the German prisoners knew something was wrong and therefore did not eat enough to die of it.
– Proud to have belonged to the group
Although they failed, they are surviving proud to have been a revenge attempt. 92 year old Yehuda Maimon, one Auschwitz survivors are pleased to have been involved in what he viewed as his “revenge duty.”
– It was extremely important to establish this group. If there’s something I’m proud of, it’s that I belonged to this group. God forbid that we after the war had just gone back to the routines again without revenge on those bastards. It had been horrible not to catch the animals, says Maimon.
Joseph Harmatz and Leipke Distal, who both worked at the bakery for months, was investigated by German authorities after they told about operation in a TV documentary in 1999.
the conclusion of the investigation was that they would not prosecute the two men, which they justified with the “extraordinary circumstances”.
Killed Nazis
But some SS men were killed by avengers. Josepth Harmatz describes in his memoirs, described by The Guardian, how the group “condemned” people, and consummated, death penalties.
The identified Nazis who had gone back to their civilian life after the war, abduct them. Some of them were strangled, others were hanged.
The book “Forged In Fury”, released in 1971 by the BBC’s former Jerusalem correspondent Michael Elkins, describes how high-ranking Nazis were found dead by the roadside .
Just how many were killed in revenge raids, no one really knows for sure.
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