The first plan of action described by Harmatz was audacious. “As many as possible,” he quickly replied. So the group set out with a simple mission. “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. While there were some isolated acts of Jews harming individual Nazis after the war, the group, code-named Nakam, Hebrew for vengeance, sought a more comprehensive form of punishment. 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. The Nuremberg trials were prosecuting some top Nazis, but the Jewish people had no formal representative. For even more, the whole concept of reprisals seemed pointless given the sheer scope of the genocide.īut 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. For others, physical retribution ran counter to Jewish morals and traditions. For most, merely rebuilding their lives and starting new families was revenge enough against a Nazi regime that aimed to destroy them. “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.ĭespite 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. 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.
A recently declassified US 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. 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. Seventy years after the most daring attempt of Jewish Holocaust survivors to seek revenge against their former tormentors, the leader of the plot has only one simple regret - that to his knowledge he didn’t actually succeed in killing any Nazis.
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