Top secret group of Holocaust survivors who plotted the murder of six million Germans.. THE JEWISH AVENGERS
AN extraordinary documentary by an Israeli film-maker tonight reveals the full story of how a band of 50 Holocaust survivors almost succeeded in wreaking terrible revenge on the defeated German people.
Screened on Holocaust Memorial Day – as the world remembers the six million Jewish victims of the Nazis and the millions who have died in genocides since – it tells of the single-minded determination of a group who called themselves The Avengers.
Their plan was simple: To take the lives of six million Germans by poisoning water supplies.
Tonight’s film reveals that in 1946 they had gone so far as infiltrating the waterworks of Hamburg, Nuremberg, Frankfurt and Munich.
The architect of the scheme was Abba Kovner, a survivor of the Vilnius ghetto.
During the war, while many Jews tried not to provoke the Nazis, he had released a manifesto urging them: “Let us not go like lambs to the slaughter!”
Putting his words into action, he led a group of partisans. And when the war ended he turned the aim of the group – known as Nokmim, the Hebrew for Avengers – towards revenge.
Kovner died aged 69 in 1987 after becoming an acclaimed Israeli poet.
But he still burned with hatred. He said: “There is no such thing as an innocent German. The German people must, for at least a generation, pay for it to deter the world in future.
“When I heard of the atomic bomb I dreamed I could drop it on Germany.”
Kovner’s son Michael says of the waterworks plot: “The idea was to put in poison in such a dose it would cause mass murder.
“It was to be indiscriminate. Everyone. Like a prophecy. From the children to the elderly. A Biblical prophecy.”
Kovner sent fellow Vilnius survivors Joseph Harmatz and Hasia Warshawski
It was to be like a Bible prophesy – from the children to the elderly MICHAEL KOVNER SON OF AVENGERS LEADER
Of course I thought of revenge...it was in the eyes of the executed LEOPOLD VASSIMAN WHO SUPPLIED ARSENIC
on missions to Nuremberg, Hamburg and Munich with Simcha Rotem, who sured the hell of the Warsaw Ghetto. Tight’s documentary features newly discovered tapes which show how close Hatz’s Nuremberg group came to the goal. From-maker Avi Merkado-Ettedgui On one of the tapes Harmatz says were ready. We were inside the plant.’ That’s something we t sure of exactly before.”
Home died in videos 2016, show of Harmatz, him explaining who what motivated him. He tells how he was forced to watch Jews placed in a pit and shot in ck of the head before their bodies burned. says: er pen Jewish from “The man images a dum-dum lying I have with bullet, seen... his head his of spilling out. Of a young man and n killed while embracing. a mother holding her baby who were both murdered. "When you have seen it with your own eye invades you so deeply that even if you want to break free you can’t.” For Avenger Simcha Rotem, 93, retaliation was also the only answer.
He is one of the last survivors of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising in which 13,000 Jews chose to die rather than submit to the Nazis.
He remembers: “Bodies were piling up everywhere. People were dying lying on the street. How can this be?
“One evening I’m walking and I hear a baby crying, now listen carefully look me in the eyes. I see a woman holding her baby I bend down and the woman is dead. What do you do?”
The Avengers may have infiltrated the waterworks but the plot had to be abandoned when Kovner was caught with a condensed milk can full of poison on a ship to Europe from Palestine and was forced to throw it overboard.
But his arrest was not to be the end of the group. The groundwork for Plan B had already been laid by Joseph Harmatz in Nuremberg. This time the target was 12,000 SS officers – enforcers of Nazi terror – who they intended to kill by lacing bread at two prison camps with arsenic. Israeli historian and politician Prof Michael Bar-Zohar, says: “They knew very well that the entire Holocaust was carried out by the SS. “Therefore by killing the SS officers they were taking direct revenge against the criminals.” In Nuremberg, Harmatz and 20-yearold Leibke Distel had already got themselves a job in the bakery supplying the SS camp. The new tapes reveal extraordinary details of the plot, including Distel explaining how they smuggled arsenic into the bakery in hot water bottles. He says: “They gave me three bottles of the substance. I hid it in my trousers and made it tight and got into the factory with it because I worked the night shift. “There were three of us on the mission.” The trio raced against the clock to coat as many loaves with arsenic as they could before sunrise. By daybreak they had put poison on around 3,000.
The trio then left, leaving fellow Avenger Rachel Glicksman, 24, to discover the death toll in the morning.
Thousands of PoWs were struck down with vomiting. But Rachel, hidden among a group of SS wives keen to discover their husbands’ fate, learned the plot had failed. No one had died.
Film-maker Avi said: “The Americans did what they could to stop people dying. They pumped their stomachs. I can imagine the result if people were dying inside, there would be riots all over the city while the Nuremberg trials were going on. I can’t imagine the Americans would have let that happen.”
Most of the Avengers made their way to British-run Palestine and were there to celebrate the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948.
Only six of the group survive today. For Leopold Vassiman, 93, who supplied the arsenic for Plan B, his treatment in Auschwitz left him with no alternative but to seek revenge. He says: “Of course I thought about revenge. I saw it in the eyes of those who were executed. They called for revenge.
“Revenge was my basic right and it didn’t matter to me if I lived. I thought just as they killed our children, we could kill theirs.”
But Hasia Warshawski, leader of the Hamburg cell, still has conflicting emotions surrounding her involvement. She says: “Years later I couldn’t understand how I could think like that. Only crazy people can think of such ideas. But we were crazy.”
Holocaust: The Revenge Plot, Channel 4, 9pm tonight.