The Jewish Vigilantes Of Nakam Who Tried To Poison Six Million Germans
Wikimedia CommonsAbba Kovner (right), who formed Jewish militia group Nakam, planned to kill six million Germans as reparations for the Holocaust.
It’s no surprise that Nazis have been the target of many true revenge stories. After the end of the Second World War, a man named Abba Kovner started a group of Jewish vigilantes under the name Nakam. Their mission: kill as many Germans as possible.
Kovner believed in an Old Testament-style of justice — since the Nazis had wiped out six million Jews in the Holocaust, the lives of six million Germans should also be taken as fair reparations. An eye for an eye, as it were.
Abba Kovner quickly recruited his fellow Jewish men to form the Nakam militia, a name likely drawn from the Hebrew word nokmim which translates to “avengers.”
“Heaven forbid if after the war we had just gone back to the routine without thinking about paying those bastards back,” said Nakam member Yehuda Maimon of the group’s objective. “It would have been awful not to respond to those animals.”
The group hatched a plan known simply as Plan A, which involved poisoning the water supply of five German cities. The targeted sites were Nuremberg, Weimar, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich; each one heavily-tied to the recently destroyed Nazi regime.
In their revenge plan, Nakam’s 50 or so members infiltrated the water departments in each city disguised as engineers and workers to study the water systems. The next part was to travel to Palestine and obtain moral permission — and poison for the mass murder — from one of Kovner’s friends; Chaim Weizmann, the future president of Israel, who also happened to be a chemist.
Wikimedia CommonsA U.S. lieutenant (left) and a German detective inspect the Konsum-Genossenschaftsbäckerei (Consumer Cooperative Bakery) in Nuremberg after the Nakam poisoning attempt.
The story goes that Weizmann was on board with the Nakam’s smaller revenge plan to poison Nazi prisoners, but he had no idea that they were targeting the water supply of millions of Germans. When the true nature of Plan A was revealed, Jewish leaders in Palestine contacted the British to stop Kovner during his travel back to Europe.
Having some misgivings himself about Plan A and sensing his imminent arrest, Kovner sent a letter instructing the Nakam to carry out Plan B instead and had the poison he carried with him dumped overboard just before British authorities moved to seize him as he reached Europe.
The new target was Stalag 13, an Allied POW camp in Nuremberg. There, the Nakam avengers intended to kill 12,000 former SS officers being held prisoner.
Under the leadership of Joseph Harmatz, on April 13, 1946, the group spread a mixture of glue and arsenic into 3,000 loaves of bread meant for the Nazi prisoners. By the end of the day, more than 2,000 Nazi prisoners were hospitalized.
Although the revenge plan was carried out successfully, reports following the mass hospitalization at the prisoner’s camp stated no deaths from the poisoning episode. Whether intentional or not, it’s possible the Nakams had spread the poison too thin, thus reducing its potency.
Ultimately, neither Kovner nor any other Nakam member was charged with any crimes in connection with these plots. German prosecutors investigated the matter decades later but didn’t file charges due to the “extraordinary circumstances” of the case.
