Their goal was to kill at least 12,000 SS personnel.
By Hezy Laing
In the wreckage of post-war Germany, a secretive group of approximately 50 Jewish Holocaust survivors known as Nakam (Hebrew for “Vengeance”) orchestrated an audacious plot to execute thousands of SS soldiers.
Led by the partisan poet Abba Kovner, the “Avengers” felt the Nuremberg Trials failed to deliver adequate justice for the six million victims of the Holocaust.
Their most successful attempt, dubbed “Plan B,” targeted the American-run Stalag 13-D internment camp at Langwasser where thousands of Nazi SS soldiers were interned.
The SS were uniquely reviled because they were the ideological vanguard of the Nazi regime, responsible for the most heinous atrocities of the Holocaust, including the operation of extermination camps and the brutal “anti-partisan” massacres of millions of civilians.
As volunteers who swore a personal oath to Hitler, they represented the industrialization of genocide.
In April 1946, Nakam operatives, including Joseph Harmatz, successfully infiltrated the Konsum-Genossenschaftsbäckerei, the local bakery supplying the camp.
Over the course of a single night, three members used a brush to coat the underside of roughly 3,000 loaves of black bread with a lethal mixture of arsenic and glue.
Their goal was to kill at least 12,000 SS personnel.
The following day, chaos erupted as over 2,200 German prisoners fell violently ill with severe arsenic poisoning, and 207 were hospitalized.
Despite the potency of the poison—estimated to be enough to kill tens of thousands—no deaths were officially recorded by U.S. military authorities.
Theories for the failure range from the glue hindering absorption to the prisoners vomiting before a fatal dose could be digested.
