On 13 April 1946, three members of the Jewish organisation Nakam (“Revenge”) hid poison in bread destined for German POWs held in Stalag 13 near Nuremberg. The next day on 14 April, over 2,200 POWs fell ill and 207 were hospitalised. According to some reports, there were no fatalities, while other sources said the death toll was as high as 400.
The Nakam members infiltrated the bakeries that made the bread before mixing in the arsenic.
Abba Kovner, a Sevastopol-born poet and former prisoner in the Vilna Ghetto, was a member of the Jewish group. According to survivors, Kovner was the first Jew in the ghetto to convince his fellow captives that the Germans intended to kill them; his calls for resistance reached ghettos in the Baltic States and Poland. Kovner organised an armed group in the Vilna Ghetto and managed to escape into the woods, where he established a Jewish partisan unit under his command.
After the war, Kovner organised a group of saboteurs and terrorists who called themselves Nakam to avenge the Germans for the Holocaust. Their plan consisted of two parts. Plan A involved the extermination of a large number of civilians (through poisoned tap water in Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, and Nuremberg); Plan B involved the mass poisoning of POWs. In total, Kovner sought to kill six million Germans.
In 1945, Kovner came to Palestine illegally, negotiating with the future founders and leaders of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann. On his way back to Europe, British authorities found poison in Kovner’s luggage and imprisoned him in Cairo. There were rumours that Kovner was turned over to the British authorities by Ben-Gurion himself, who was frightened by the radical views of the young vigilante and the possible consequences of his activities.
Kovner was released in 1947 and settled in Ein HaHoresh, a kibbutz in central Israel, where he lived until his death in 1987. In 1961, he would testify at the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Source:
“The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner”, by Dina Porat, Translated by Elizabeth Yuval (Palo Alto, United States, Stanford University Press, 2009)
