Nakam
The conspirators poisoned 3,000 loaves of bread at Konsum-Genossenschaftsbäckerei (Consumer Cooperative Bakery) in Nuremberg, which sickened more than 2,000 German prisoners of war at Langwasser internment camp.
[8] Generally known as Nakam ("revenge"), the organisation used the Hebrew name דין (Din, "judgement"), also an acronym of דם ישראל נוטר (Dam Yisrael Noter, "the blood of Israel avenges").
Members of the group believed that the laws of the time were unable to adequately punish such an extreme event as the Holocaust and that the complete moral bankruptcy of the world could be cured only by catastrophic retributive violence.
The group received a large supply of German-forged British currency from a Hashomer Hatzair emissary, forced speculators to contribute, and also obtained some money from sympathisers in the Jewish Brigade.
[14] Joseph Harmatz, posing as a Polish displaced person (DP) named "Maim Mendele", attempted to infiltrate the municipal water supply in Nuremberg; Nakam targeted the city because it had been the stronghold of the Nazi Party.
Through the use of bribes, he managed to place Willek Schwerzreich (Wilek Shinar), an engineer from Kraków who spoke fluent German, in a position with the municipal water company.
[15] In Paris, Pasha Reichman [de; he] was in charge of a Nakam cell including Vitka Kempner, Kovner's future wife and former comrade in the Vilna Ghetto underground.
[16] Reichman reportedly spoke to David Ben-Gurion during the latter's trip to a DP camp in Germany, but the latter preferred to work towards Israeli independence than seek revenge for the Holocaust.
[19] Kovner negotiated with Haganah chiefs Moshe Sneh and Israel Galilee in hopes of convincing them to give him poison for a smaller revenge operation in return for not linking the murder to the Yishuv.
[20] In September, Kovner informed Nakam in Europe that he had not had any success in locating poison, and therefore they should recruit Yitzhak Ratner, a chemist and former Vilna Ghetto insurgent, and focus on Plan B.
[22] Decades after the fact, Kovner claimed that he had pitched Plan B to Chaim Weizmann, then president of the World Zionist Organisation, who had directed him to the Katzir brothers.
[23] After several delays, Kovner travelled to Alexandria, Egypt, in December 1945 carrying false papers that identified him as a Jewish Brigade soldier returning from leave, and a duffel bag with gold hidden in toothpaste tubes and cans full of poison.
[27] Most of the Nakam action groups disbanded as ordered and their members dispersed into displaced persons camps, promised by the leaders that in future they would be reactivated to implement Plan A.
[29] Nakam focused on Langwasser internment camp near Nuremberg (formerly Stalag XIII-D), where 12,000 to 15,000 prisoners, mainly former SS officers or prominent Nazis, were imprisoned by the United States.
Leipke Distel, a survivor of several Nazi concentration camps, posed as a Polish displaced person awaiting a visa to work at an uncle's bakery in Canada.
The Nakam operatives met each night in a rented room in Fürth to discuss their findings, especially how to confine their attack to the German prisoners and avoid harming the American guards.
[31] Similar preparations were made with regard to a prison camp near Dachau and the bakery supplying it, an effort led by Warsaw Ghetto uprising veteran Simcha Rotem.
Subverting tight security aimed at preventing the theft of food, they smuggled the arsenic in over several days, hiding it under raincoats, and stashed it beneath the floorboards.
[34] According to documents obtained by a Freedom of Information request to the National Archives and Records Administration, the amount of arsenic found in the bakery was enough to kill approximately 60,000 persons.
They received a warm welcome at Kovner's kibbutz, Ein HaHoresh, from leading members of the Haganah and the Israeli Labor Party, and were invited to travel through the country.
[35] Although Kovner, and the majority of the operatives, considered that the time for revenge had passed, a small group led by Bolek Ben-Ya'akov returned to Europe to continue the mission.
[37] The breakaway groups faced mounting challenges, both logistical and financial, and the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949 made illegal operations even more difficult.
[45] According to Israeli counterterrorism experts Ehud Sprinzak [he] and Idith Zertal, Nakam's worldview was similar to messianic groups or cults because of its belief that the world was so evil as to deserve large-scale catastrophe.
