13. A Post-WWII Jewish Vigilante Group Tried to Poison Thousands of SS Prisoners (1946)
In the direct aftermath of World War II, a group of fifty Jewish Holocaust survivors, partisan fighters, and ghetto fighters formed a secret vigilante organization called Nakam (the Hebrew word for “Revenge”). Led by charismatic poet and former Vilna Ghetto fighter Abba Kovner, the group sought radical retribution against Nazi perpetrators for the genocide of six million Jews. While Kovner originally plotted to poison municipal water supplies in major German cities, his conspirators executed a secondary targeted plan on April 13, 1946.
Nakam operative Joseph Harmatz infiltrated the Konsum bakery in Nuremberg, which supplied bread to the nearby Stalag 13 prisoner-of-war camp at Langwasser. Over several night shifts, operatives painted roughly three thousand loaves of black bread with arsenic dissolved in kerosene. When guards distributed the poisoned bread to thousands of captured German SS officers, over two thousand prisoners fell severely ill, resulting in widespread hospitalizations across military medical facilities. Primary records from American military intelligence confirm the mass poisoning, highlighting the profound, chaotic vengeance that erupted in Europe’s post-war power vacuum before international war crimes tribunals were fully established.
