The Jewish Plot To Kill Millions of Germans As Revenge For the Holocaust
By: Grant Piper
Tags: Holocaust, World War II, History, Jewish, Europe

The Jewish Plot To Kill Millions of Germans As Revenge For the Holocaust

Abba Kovner pictured right, was the mastermind of the Nakam movement (Public domain)

In 1945, Abba Kovner visited the site of the Ponary Massacre. He would stare down into the pit where 100,000 people had been brutally murdered and dumped and begin to feel a pulsating rage that would go on to define him for years to come. After seeing evidence of the massacre, he visited the concentration at Majdanek.

Following the surrender of Germany in May, rumors began to abound of a terrible crime. There were whispers that thousands, perhaps millions, had been murdered in cold, calculated death camps and that the victims were mostly Jews. Kovner decided he had to see this evidence for himself. And he found it.

Abba Kovner was a guerilla fighter during World War II leading attacks against German occupation in the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe. After the war, he was determined to get to the truth of the rumors about the Holocaust. Once it became clear to him that the Germans had indiscriminately murdered his fellow Jews and other Eastern European undesirables, he decided that his next course of action was going to be large-scale revenge. If the Germans could do it, so could the Jews.

Plan A — A nation for a nation

Kovner began to interview groups of Holocaust survivors from places such as Auschwitz to hear about first-hand accounts of the atrocities and to gather sympathetic followers to his cause. He found both. In a matter of weeks, Kovner had recruited roughly fifty Holocaust survivors who agreed that revenge was a prudent course of action. They began to plan their attack and decided that the best revenge was an equal response.

A nation for a nation.

Six million Germans for six million Jews.

The group was named Nakam, meaning revenge, and was a spinoff of Kovner’s guerilla group that was called Nokmim, meaning Avengers. Their plan targeted the vulnerable water supply for the German people. If they could secure a shipment of poison, infiltrating and contaminating the water supplies of major German cities would not be hard to accomplish in the chaotic aftermath of the war.

Kovner agreed to be the one to secure the chemicals that would be used to kill the Germans.

Their first target was the former Nazi stronghold of Nuremberg. Kovner dispatched members of the group to begin gathering intelligence on the ground with the goal of finding a way to compromise the city’s water supply. In the meantime, Kovner was going to Mandatory Palestine, the British territory, to find a supply of chemicals to do the deed.

Kovner in Palestine

Flag used in British Palestine (Public domain)

To enter British Palestine, Kovner disguised himself as a Jewish Brigade soldier. He was questioned upon entering the territory by the Mossad and was released with the understanding that he was now on their radar. He began negotiating with the Yishuv, the Jewish leadership in the territory, as well as making contacts with local paramilitary groups. Despite finding sympathetic ears, few people were willing to go along with his plans for mass revenge. It also didn’t help that the Mossad were keeping a close eye on him.

Eventually, after weeks of trying, Kovner found a sympathetic party. While speaking to a group of Jewish chemists from Hebrew University, he managed to convince them to take supplies from their chemical storage unit at the school.

Obtaining the chemicals ensured that their revenge plot was still on. Kovner spent several days packaging the poison he needed and even managed to secure some funding in the form of gold. In December of 1945, he boarded a ship bound for France with a duffel bag stuffed with poison and gold.

The poison had been hidden in tin cans while the gold had been carefully placed into toothpaste tubes as not to arouse suspicion.

But suspicion had already been aroused many weeks before. After the ship left the dock, Kovner’s name was called over the ship’s PA system, and he was forced to dump his hard-won prize into the sea. Abba Kovner was arrested and questioned again and sentenced to two months in prison.

The authorities had seemingly not caught wind of Nakam’s plot for mass murder. Kovner was arrested on suspicion of helping the Zionist movement in Palestine, which drew the ire of British authorities.

Abba Kovner, the founder of Nakam, was now unable to continue the mission.

Plan B — Small revenge

The German bakery infiltrated by Nakam (Public domain)

When Kovner felt unable to secure the necessary chemicals while in Palestine, he messaged the group in Europe to begin preparing for Plan B instead. Plan B was not as grand or elaborate as Plan A and focused on poisoning German officers and SS troops being held in Allied custody. Instead of poisoning the whole German nation, they would settle for the nearest facilitators of the Holocaust.

Nakam contacted local chemists and pharmacists on the ground and began to build up a local supply of arsenic. Nuremberg was still the target of their operations as there was a large American prisoner of war camp outside of the city holding high-ranking Nazi SS officers.

Nakam began to infiltrate local bakeries that sold bread to the camp instead of targeting the city water supplies.

For weeks, Nakam began working for the bread bakers while accumulating a large stockpile of modified arsenic. Jewish run laboratories in the city started to formulate the poison into a paste that could be painted or smeared onto the bread loaves.

After weeks of preparation, Nakam planned on poisoning 14,000 loaves at once, but logistics and variables on the ground prevented them from being as effective. In April of 1946, Nakam managed to contaminate 3,000 loaves of bread bound for German prisoners.

Nearly 2,300 German prisoners of war would take ill from the poisoned bread, with 200 of them becoming violently ill. Ultimately, no deaths could be tied to the poisoned bread.

Aftermath

Investigators scour the bakery after the attempted poisoning in Nuremberg (Public domain)

In the end, Nakam did not kill a single German. At least, not officially. Both of their plans failed spectacularly. While Plan B managed to actually come to fruition, the members of Nakam overestimated the potency of their poison and managed to kill no one.

In 1948, the modern nation of Israel was founded. Many of the Jews in Europe who had revenge on their minds after the Holocaust switched gears to help the new Jewish nation become established. That included Abba Kovner, who joined the new Israeli Defense Forces and fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Other members of Nakam continued to try and harm Germans in Europe, but their movement fell apart after the failure of Plan B. Some turned to lives of crime and vigilantism, but none of them managed to get a group like Nakam together ever again.