We will post information from
Wikipedia and other links about Nakam, the Jewish Avengers.
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Vilna
Ghetto Fighters, some of whom joined the group 'Nakam'. (Abba
Kovner at the center, and Vitka
Kempner stands at the right, Yitzhak Avidav kneeling,
carrying a machine gun)
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The Nokmim (Hebrew:
הנוקמים), also referred to as The Avengers or the Jewish
Avengers, were a Jewish partisan militia, formed by Abba
Kovner and his lieutenants Vitka
Kempner and Rozka Korczak from the surviving remnants of the United Partisan Organization
(Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye), which operated in Lithuania under Soviet
command.
After World
War II, elements of the Nokmim combined with veterans of the Jewish
brigade in British Palestine to form a new organization
called Nakam (נקם, "Revenge"), a group of assassins that
targeted Nazi war criminals with the aim of avenging the Holocaust.
The name comes from the phrase (Dam Yehudi Nakam–"Jewish
Blood Will Be Avenged"; the acronym DIN means "judgement").
founded by Abba Kovner in 1945.
The 'Nakam' Group
The most extremist group was the Nakam
("vengeance") Group. They numbered around 60 Jews who were former
Partisans as well as other Jews who survived the Holocaust. The group arrived
in Germany after the war in order to conduct more complicated and fatal vengeance
operations. Their ultimate purpose was to execute an operation that would cause
a broad international response that would be a warning to anyone who might
consider trying to harm Jews again, as the Nazis had. Notables among the
Hanakam group were Abba Kovner, Yitzhak Avidav, and Bezalel Michaeli.
According to an interview with The
Observer with Lithuanian-born Joseph Harmatz, Kovner obtained a poison from Ephraim
and Aharon
Katzir. Karmatz also claims that later Israeli President Chaim
Weizmann approved of the plan. The poison was claimed to be used on 3000
loaves of bread for former SS guards in an American prisoner of war camp,
"Stalag
13", but he was concealing their bigger plan of poisoning the water
supplies of Munich, Berlin, Weimar, Nuremberg and Hamburg. The Nakam group
intended to kill 6 million Germans – as many as the Jews who were murdered in
the Holocaust. According to Harmatz, they would have taken care to exempt
American residential areas from the area, so as to murder only Germans as far
as possible. It was alleged that the Katzir brothers supplied Harmatz with the
poison and that the Haganah gave Kovner false documents of a supposedly Jewish
Brigade soldier, and he boarded a ship in Port
of Haifa. When the ship approached Toulon in France,
the British discovered that Kovner's papers were forged. His accomplices
managed to throw the poison overboard. Kovner was sent to an Egyptian jail.
According to Joseph Harmatz, leader of Nakam after Kovner's arrest, they were
betrayed. Although uncertain, he suspects the Zionists
sabotaged out of fear that such a crime would diminish support for a Jewish
state.
As a result of the failure of the mass
poisoning plan, it was decided to move to Plan B. Under the command of Kovner's
deputy, Yitzhak Avidav, the Hanakam group poisoned hundreds of loaves of bread
that were designated for the S.S. prisoners.
On April 14, 1946, Nakam painted with
diluted arsenic some 3,000 loaves of bread for the 15,000 German POWs from the
Langwasser internment camp near Nuremberg (Stalag 13).
The camp was under US authority.
On April 23, 1946, the New York Times
reported that 2,283 German prisoners of war had fallen ill from poisoning, with
207 hospitalized and "seriously ill". According to Harmatz (Nakam
leader), 300 to 400 Germans died. He said this "was nothing compared with
what we really wanted to do."
The public prosecutor's office within
the higher regional court at Nuremberg stopped the preliminary investigation of
attempted murder in May 2000 against two Nakam activists, who professed to have
involvement in the incident. The public prosecutor's office cited statute of limitations laws (In German:
Verjährung) "due to unusual circumstances" as reasoning for the
suspension of the investigation.
The Avengers in culture
Literature
- The most detailed document of the Avengers appears in Michael Bar-Zohar's book The Avengers, which was published in 1969.
- Hanoch Bartov's Novel, "Growing up Pains" of 1969, details the moral crisis of the Jewish Brigade veterans, who arrived in Germany after World War II ended, mulling over their desire, on one hand, to avenge over the murder of Jews, and on the other hand, how their conscience would not let them harm innocent people. Bartov describes how on the eve of their arrival in Germany, the Jewish Brigade's soldiers were warned that "The blood feud means a feud by all [of the Jewish People] any irresponsible act might hinder all", and how their conscience got the better of them, and the soldiers as individuals were unwilling and unable to avenge individually.
- Sam Bourne's "The Final Reckoning" (ISBN 978-000-726649-4)
- Mexican author Pedro Angel Palou's "La Amante del Ghetto" (The Ghetto's Lover) (ISBN 978-607-07-1810-6)
Music
In 2009, the song presenting story
about the Avengers, called "Six Million Germans (Nakam)", appeared on
the album of Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird
– "Partisans & Parasites".
Films
- A documentary TV film was produced by Channel 1 named "Those who do not forget" directed by Yarin Kimor. The film was shown on Israeli Television in 2014. The film tells the story of the Jewish Brigade of the British Army, with one aim: Revenge against the Nazis.
See also
References
1.
Freedland, Jonathan
(July 26, 2008). "Revenge".
The
Guardian.
Davis, Douglas (March 27, 1998). "Survivor
reveals 1945 plan to kill 6 million Germans". Jweekly.
"Gericht. Jüdischer
Giftanschlag auf Nürnberger Nazi-Lager verjährt. Tausende Laib Brot mit Arsen
bestrichen. Richter erkannten das persönliche Schicksal der Täter als Schuld
mildernd an" (in German), WAZ, 2000-05-09
Bibliography
- Tom Segev: The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust. 2000, ISBN 0-8050-6660-8
- Jim G. Tobias, Peter Zinke: Jüdische Rache an NS-Tätern . Konkret Literaturverlag 2000, ISBN 3-89458-194-8
- Imré Kovacs, Frédéric Ploquin: Le Vengeur – À la poursuite des criminels nazis, Fayard 2006, ISBN 2-213-62504-2
- Elkins, Michael (1971). Forged in Fury. Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-345-02162-2.
- Sack, John (1993). An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945. New York, NY: BasicBooks. ISBN 978-0-465-04214-2.
- Wiesel, Elie (1995). Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea. Knopf. ISBN 0-8052-1028-8.
- Butler, Rupert (1983). Legions of Death: The Nazi Enslavement of Eastern Europe. London: Hamlyn.
- Beckman, Morris (1998). The Jewish Brigade. Da Capo Press. ISBN 1-885119-56-9.
- Cohen, Rich (2000). The Avengers: A Jewish War Story. New York, NY: Knopf. ISBN 0375405461.
Fiction
- Bar-Zohar, Michael (1969). The Avengers. New York, NY: Hawthorn.
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