The actual headline to the 2016 article from the AP was "Jewish avengers unapologetic for targeting Nazis after WWII," but I thought that headline watered down the truth of the matter. From the article (underline added):
Joseph Harmatz is one of the few remaining Jewish “Avengers” who carried out a mass poisoning of former SS men in an American prisoner-of-war camp in 1946 that sickened more than 2,200 Germans but ultimately caused no known deaths. A recently declassified U.S. military report obtained by The Associated Press has only added to the mystery of why the brazen operation did not kill Nazis, because it shows the amount of arsenic used should have been fatal to tens of thousands.
Still, the 91-year-old Harmatz says the message echoed into a rallying cry for the newborn state of Israel — that the days when attacks on Jews went unanswered were over.
“We didn’t want to come back (to pre-state Israel) without having done something, and that is why we were keen,” Harmatz said in a hoarse, whispery voice from his apartment in north Tel Aviv.
Despite a visceral desire for vengeance, most Holocaust survivors were too weary or devastated to seriously consider it, after their world was shattered and 6 million Jews killed during World War II. ...
But a group of some 50, most young men and women who had already fought in the resistance, could not let the crimes go unpunished and actively sought to exact at least a small measure of revenge. The Nuremberg trials were prosecuting some top Nazis, but the Jewish people had no formal representative. There was a deep sense of justice denied, as the vast majority of Nazis immersed themselves back into a post-war Germany that was being rebuilt by the Americans’ Marshall plan.
While there were some isolated acts of Jews harming individual Nazis after the war, the group, codenamed Nakam, Hebrew for vengeance, sought a more comprehensive form of punishment.
“We didn’t understand why it shouldn’t be paid back,” said Harmatz, who was nicknamed Julek, and lost most of his family in the Holocaust.
So the group set out with a simple mission.
“Kill Germans,” Harmatz said flatly.
How many?
“As many as possible,” he quickly replied.
The first plan of action described by Harmatz was audacious. Initiated by the resistance fighter and noted Israeli poet Abba Kovner, the idea was to poison the water supply of Nuremberg, a plot that could have potentially killed hundreds of thousands.
But there were deep reservations even among the Avengers that such an operation would kill innocent Germans and undermine international support for the establishment of Israel. Either way, when Kovner sailed for Europe with the poison, he drew suspicion from British authorities and was forced to toss it overboard before he was arrested.
Following that setback, attention shifted toward Plan B, a more limited operation that specifically targeted the worst Nazi perpetrators. Undercover members of the group found work at a bakery that supplied the Stalag 13 POW camp at Langwasser, near Nuremberg, and waited for their chance to strike the thousands of SS men the Americans held there.
It came on Apr. 13, 1946. Using poison procured from one of Kovner’s associates, three members spent two hours coating some 3,000 loaves of bread with arsenic, divided into four portions. The goal was to kill 12,000 SS personnel, and Harmatz oversaw the operation from outside the bakery.
While the mass death count of the first plan would have been disastrous for the Jewish people, the second’s more direct route was easier to accept, since its targets were the worst of the worst, said Dina Porat, the chief historian at Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial. She has written a biography of Kovner and is about to publish another book on the Avengers themselves.
“The terrible tragedy was about to be forgotten, and if you don’t punish for one crime, you will get another,” she explained. “This is what was driving them, not only justice but a warning, a warning to the world that you cannot hurt Jews in such a manner and get away with it.”
* * *
According to previously classified files from the U.S. military’s Counter Intelligence Corps, which investigated the 1946 incident and which the Nuremberg prosecutors did not have access to, the amount of arsenic used should have been enough to cause a massive number of deaths. The files were obtained by the AP through a Freedom of Information Act request to the National Archives.
In one memo from 1947 stamped “confidential,” investigators write that at the bakery they found “three empty hot water bottles and a burlap bag containing four full hot water bottles.” An analysis of the contents “revealed that they contained enough arsenic mixed with glue and water to kill approximately 60,000 persons.”
Another confidential report said a chemist called in to help in the investigation had determined “10 kilo of pure arsenic was present, mixed with water and glue for adhesive purposes.”
Laboratory investigators found arsenic on the bottom, top and sides of the bread, and reported that doctors said the SS men exhibited symptoms “similar to cholera and included vomiting, diarrhea and skin rashes.” The report added that the most amount of arsenic found on a loaf was 0.2 grams — which fell well within the range of 0.1-0.3 grams that would be ‘in most cases lethal.”
To this day, it remains a mystery as to why the poison failed to kill Nazis. The prevailing theory is that the plotters in their haste spread the poison too thinly. Another is that the Nazi prisoners immediately sensed something was off with the bread and therefore no one ingested enough of it to die.
After the attack, Harmatz, Distal and others had to flee quickly. At the border of Czechoslovakia they were met by Yehuda Maimon, an Auschwitz survivor from Poland who lost his parents in the camps and decided to join Nakam shortly after escaping a death march. He was responsible for smuggling the group out safely and bribing officials at the border. From there, they slipped into Italy before migrating for good to the Holy Land.
But in referencing the book Rise And Kill First by Ronen Bergman, the plot was not as ad hoc as the article seems to suggest. Bergman notes that the Haganah (what Wikipedia describes as a "Zionist military organization representing the majority of the Jews in Palestine from 1920 to 1948" and which was led by David Ben-Gurion) "sanctioned some types of reprisals against the Nazis and their accomplices." An endnote to the foregoing quote references the poisoning incident above, and relates that "[s]cientists in the Yishuv [i.e., the Jewish community in Palestine] supplied them with [the] arsenic". In other words, the Haganah had authorized both poisoning operations.
This wasn't the only act of vengeance. Bergman relates in his book that the Haganah set up a secret unit within the nominally British controlled Jewish Brigade operating in Germany after the war, but authorized and controlled by the Haganah high command, called Gmul whose mission was revenge, specifically targeting SS members and senior Nazis. The unit was able to recover Gestopo archives in Tarviso, Villach and Klagenfurt. One member of the unit, having infiltrated British intelligence, was able to get more names. And, per the book, "[a] few Jews in American intelligence also were willing to help by handing over information they had on escaped Nazis, which they thought the Palestinian Jews would use to better effect than the American military."
The book continues by relating that coercion also worked, relating one particular instance of a Polish-born German couple that were threatened with cooperation or death. "'The goy broke and said he was willing to cooperate,' said Yisrael Karmi, who interrogated the couple and later, after Israel was born, would become the commander of the Israeli Army's military police." The couple prepared lists of senior officials that he knew and who had worked with the Gestapo and SS.
Using this information, the Gmul agents would track down the Nazis and pressure them to provide more information. "They promised each German he would not be harmed if he cooperated, so most did. Then, when they were no longer useful, Gmul agents shot them and dumped the bodies." Bergman does not state whether this was the fate of the couple mentioned above. The book also describes that the agents would often disguise themselves as British military police when they approached their targets. Their targets would either be killed instantly or transported to a remote location before being killed. One account more specifically described in the book was of a female SS officer that was killed and her murder disguised as having the appearance of a violent rape. The operation supposedly lasted only a few months, ceasing after the British became suspicious. Bergman relates, however, that historians who have researched Gmul's operations believe that their identification methods were flawed and many innocents were killed.
In any event, after the Gmul operations in Europe were supposedly ended, the Jewish leaders in Palestine turned their attention to enemies in Palestine that had supported Germany during WWII (as well as prosecuting the terrorist campaign against the British in Palestine).
Perhaps to preface the campaign against the British and Israel's later international assassination programs, Bergman wrote (underline added):
The lessons that the new Jews of Palestine learned from the Holocaust were that the Jewish people would always be under the threat of destruction, that others could not be relied upon to protect the Jews, and that the only way to do so was to have an independent state. A people living with this sense of perpetual danger of annihilation is going to take any and all measures, however extreme, to obtain security, and will relate to international laws and norms in a marginal manner, if at all.
This is their origin story.
ReplyDeleteA defense and foreign policy based on revenge is not healthy.
Delete