Abba Kovner and the Nakam organization orchestrated a grim post-Holocaust revenge plan targeting six million Germans, born from the trauma of insufficient Allied justice. While their initial water poisoning plot failed after Kovner's detention in Palestine, a secondary bread-lacing operation sickened over 2,200 former SS guards near Nuremberg and Dachau. Though some fighters later joined the IDF and Mossad, the episode concludes that indiscriminate mass killing remains morally flawed, highlighting the complex legacy of vengeance amidst the establishment of Israel and the Nakba. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
New Episode with Hillary Duff00:02:55
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's 2 a.m.
2 a.m. Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like wild bats.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, You're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful.
I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, listen to Las Culturistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Most people out here think that taking care of one another is important.
And most people would step up for a neighbor going through a tough time.
Most people around here help out friends and family when they need it.
But the funny thing is, most of us won't look for help when we need it.
Talk to someone if you're struggling with mental health because most people out here really care.
Find more information at loveyourmindtoday.org.
That's loveyourmindtoday.org.
Brought to you by the Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario.
People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower, or it's really like a stone sculpture.
You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
Take to interactive CEO Strauss Saunders and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Sylvie, make sure the episode starts about six minutes back.
This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast by Robert Evans about Robert Evans, the bastard who just went.
Yeah, I was like, I really, I don't like that.
I had so many weird noises today.
You hate it, Sylvie.
I didn't know what was happening, and now I'm trying to leave.
This podcast is an engine, and the fuel is you being frustrated with me.
We are going to be the first human beings on fucking Mars, is what we're going to do.
What is happening?
Can you just just we're starting.
Are we announcing the competitor to SpaceX that you started?
Yeah, yeah.
SpaceX is going to get their asses kicked by frustrated Soph X. You frustrated Soph X. Can it be frustrated Soph A?
Underground Railroad for Vengeance00:15:37
I don't like the X X groups me out.
I thought it was SpaceX Y and it was a reference to Transwing at the hell.
Nice, nice.
There's a lot of things that could be a reference to.
Margaret.
Yes.
Killjoy.
That's what do you, what do you, what do you, what do you, what, what do you do at the start of this podcast?
What do you do?
What do you, what do you justify my existence?
That's right.
Because everyone has to.
That's harder.
I write stuff.
I write fiction so far.
I write a podcast called Cool People.
Yeah.
Good so far.
It's really cool.
And what else do I do?
I hang out with my dog.
He's becoming a reasonable creature.
He's about 14 or 15.
He's a very old boy.
Yeah.
Way more handleable.
And I live alone on a mountain in West Virginia and I watch the world crumble as I install solar panels and run another podcast about prepping called Live Like the World is Dying.
That does sound nice.
That does sound nice.
Margaret, you know who didn't live on the top of a mountain?
Is Abba Kovner?
He lived in Vilna, which was a rough place to live in the period of time that we're talking about.
Yeah.
He beat the odds.
That's the depressing way of saying it.
He has already beaten the odds because nearly everyone he knows has been exterminated by the Nazis.
Yeah.
As we start, part two.
So Kovner has just issued what will become known as the Ponari Manifesto, and it electrifies the room.
There's also, and this is not his fault, one of the problems that exists within kind of the way in which some people talk about the Holocaust is there's this attitude that there's this errant belief that Jews went to the death camps kind of passively, like sheep to the slaughter, right?
Like that.
And that some of that comes from he says, let us not go like sheep to the slaughter.
And there were some like mistranslations that like make it seem like he's saying people were going like sheep to the slaughter.
None of this, even if you're looking at the stories of people who were killed in the camps, it was very rarely passive, even to the extent that like people were trying to like take care of their families and keep their children from panicking.
Like none of this was like passive.
People were dealing with a nightmare in the best way that they had available.
And there was in fact a lot of resistance, which we're going to talk about.
And this is a story.
Oh, yeah.
I'm aware of like one pop culture touchstone from this.
I get into arguments periodically online with people about, you know, armed self-defense.
And one of the things that keep that some folks will bring up is that like, well, none of it, you know, none of it would have helped Jews during the Holocaust.
And the reality is that having guns did help quite a few Jews during the Holocaust.
There was a tremendous history of partisan resistance.
And if you would like to see a reasonably good movie about that starring Daniel Craig, you can watch the movie Defiance, which is about the Bielski Autriad, which was a group of eventually a couple of thousand centered around these brothers who I think were basically gangsters prior to the war, which is why they had access to some of the some weapons.
I'm not 100% on that, but I believe that's the story with them.
But it's about this group who took to the woods of Poland after the German invasion and eventually were able to protect several thousand people and fight as partisans.
There were a significant number of partisans.
And Kovner and his members of the Hatzomer Hatzer are going to become some of those partisans.
And one of the things that I get really frustrated when people talk about that kind of stuff, too, is that the first thing, again, the only one I've done a lot of research about is the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
And the main task in front of people, the dangerous immediate task, was literally just getting small arms.
Yeah.
Small arms, making explosives, manufacturing.
Yeah.
Anyway, I don't know.
Anyway, yeah, I don't know.
I got really mad at the way people talk about a lot of this stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think one of the things, because we're, again, Kovner ends on a problematic note, shall we say.
But one of the things he's right about is that, like, look, now we know what's happening.
Nobody's coming to save us.
We have to find a way to kill as many of these Nazi sons of bitches as we possibly can, which is a great thing to do.
Again, a nun is smuggling hand grenades into the ghetto so that they can murder Germans.
Like this is where, this is where the line is now.
Yeah, totally.
So Connor, the Poneri Manifesto electrifies, because he delivers this first to just kind of a room full of youth movement members that he reads it to during a meeting that they were holding because it was during New Year's celebration.
So it was easy to kind of disguise the fact that people were gathering.
But it spreads very quickly through Jewish Europe and it ignites a rapid change in the kind of conversations being held underground in ghettos across the greater German Reich.
No longer was the discussion about hiding and avoiding German wrath.
Talk started to turn towards the concept of resistance and reprisal.
In 1942, Kovner helped to found the FPO or United Partisans Organization.
This was a pan-ideological because, again, even after the Nazis took over, a lot of these different because you've got your communists, some of whom are like insurrectionary, some of whom are Zionists, and you got your socialists, and you got your kind of more centrist or even right-wing folks who are Zionists, and you've got, you know, again, people who aren't Zionist, but who are like left-wing activists, all these different youth organizations that are constantly fighting each other.
And Kovner's like, look, we can't do that right now.
That can become later.
It's going to take everything we have just to not get wiped out.
So let's all like, basically, and his pitch is basically like, nearly all of us are dead already.
What do politics matter?
It's time to kill these fucking Nazis.
And basically, at this point, basically everyone's like, yeah, you know what?
That actually makes a lot of sense.
So the FPO gets formed.
Kovner's one of the people starting this.
There's a number of leaders and stuff in the area of Lithuania that are doing this.
The guy who gets elected to lead the, they hold a vote, because there's about 300 of them.
They hold a vote, and the guy who gets elected to lead is a very cool dude called Yitzhak Wittenberg.
And he is a communist.
And they split the organization up into these five-man cells.
And several five-man groups make up a platoon.
And then the platoons are split into two battalions.
And Kovner is commanding one of these battalions.
He calls his men the Avengers.
And they set out soon to the work of stealing.
Yeah, yeah.
To the work of stealing more guns and explosives in order to prepare for a broader armed insurrection of the ghetto.
The FBO makes contacts with Soviet partisans in the woods, and they work alongside the Polish communist underground.
These are just like Polish communists who aren't Jewish, to launch a series of daring attacks on German military targets.
And I'm going to quote now from Elat Gordon Levitan: quote, the Vilna ghetto fighters blew up a German military train, smuggled in arms, sabotaged German military equipment, and set up an illegal printing press outside the ghetto and established ties to the Soviet resistance in the city in the forests.
They also sent emissaries to the Warsaw and Bialystok ghettos to warn the inhabitants about the mass killing of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union and to incite resistance.
And they do like a meaningful amount of damage.
They destroy, I think, a few dozen trains.
They kill like 71 Germans.
They rescue a couple of hundred like Jewish people who are going to be eradicated and whatnot.
They do quite a bit of damage.
And they focus mostly, a lot like the anarchists in Russia right now are focusing on blowing up trains, on destroying trains and derailing trains, right?
To stop the flow of war material and harm the Nazi war effort and also harm their effort to like deport and murder more Jews.
Yeah, by 1943, the Germans have grown wary enough of the FPO that they launched a major crackdown and eventually succeeded in capturing several officers of Vilna's non-Jewish communist underground.
From these men, they learned that Wittenberg was the elected head of the Jewish resistance.
They surrounded the Vilna ghetto and promised to destroy it all and kill all 20,000 people inside unless Wittenberg was turned over to them.
And this is a fascinating story because Wittenberg gets captured at one point and they carry out a prison break and they free him.
But then the Germans are like, we're just going to kill everybody if we don't get this guy.
So in an act of almost unfathomable courage, Wittenberg hands himself over to the Nazis and then commits suicide in German custody to save everybody else.
And control of the organization now is handed over to Kauvner.
When the Nazis destroy the ghetto anyway later that year, Kauvner and his surviving men flee into the woods around Vilna, where they liaise with Soviet partisans and carry out even more insurgent attacks against the Germans.
By July of 1944, the German military is collapsing in the east, and Kaufner takes part in the liberation of Vilna with other partisans.
It was a pyrick victory at best.
More than 40,000 Jews had been killed.
The ghetto was basically nothing but ashes and bones.
As this quote from the book Nakam makes clear.
The visitors returned stunned and tense from the blunt reality bespeaking wide-scale slaughter into gigantic round pits and from the bestial brutality of those who had aimed deadly gunfire face to face at living creatures.
Evidence of that brutality was still visible.
Scattered bodies remained that had not yet received proper burial, and the visitors knew very well who had been killed there at the edge of the pits.
Their parents and all of their neighbors, acquaintances, well-to-do and proletarian, pious, assimilated and baptized, communal leaders, synagogue functionaries, peddlers and drawers of water, communists and Zionists, intellectuals, artists, and village idiots, some 4,000 babies, all of them, as writer Amos Oz described the end of a Jewish community.
When the visit was over, Kaufner composed a detailed questionnaire, and the survivors who had begun to gather filled it out.
The copies were collected with a view to preparing for future trials, punishment, and vengeance.
Now, Kauvner gets no time to like, what's that?
Oh, it's just, I mean, one, I just have to sit on that, right?
But one of the things that it occurs to me, I mean, I remember a friend of mine describing, to continue with Margaret's crime school, sometimes it's safer at the front.
Not like the front in terms of like a war, right?
But like, you know, sometimes being up where the conflict is happening is safer, like literally.
And I'm not trying to tell people what they should have done retroactively.
It's just interesting to me that it's like, I mean, it sounds like the reason that the partisans survived is that they were partisans and they were used to moving in and out to the woods.
Yeah.
Yeah, and they escape.
A lot of them get out through the sewers and stuff.
Like they barely make it out in a lot of cases.
Yeah, and I'm sure a ton of them don't.
I'm not trying to be like, oh, it was easy.
Everyone should just go do that, you know, but yeah.
Anyway.
Yep.
It is pretty fucked up, Margaret.
So Kovner was soon obliged to leave Vilma with his Avengers.
He doesn't really have any time to like...
Nobody has time to process this, right?
Yeah.
Like they might not want to yet.
That's later.
That's exactly what we're doing.
They move immediately on with the advancing Red Army, right?
And are continuing to act as insurgents, basically kind of ahead of the main advance, harassing Nazi forces as they retreat.
And while he's doing this, he repeatedly lobbies with the Soviets to establish a partisan regiment of Jewish Holocaust survivors to carry out acts of sabotage in Germany, to like sneak into Germany and start blowing up German infrastructure.
The Soviets don't entirely trust him or other Jewish youth movement veterans since they're all Zionists and this does not happen.
Fucking Stalin.
And also, Kaufner is breaking Soviet law in this period because while he is fighting and while he's advancing, he's this kind of guy who is, he's just an expert organizer.
So while they're doing this, he is building an underground railroad to smuggle Jews from the fires of the Holocaust over to the British Mandate in Palestine.
He's like building an organization to do this as he is running an insurgent war.
He's very good at organ.
Obviously, he's not the only one doing this, but he's a major, major figure in it.
His experience building and maintaining connections between a far-flung network of insurgents made him kind of the perfect man for this.
And again, it's worth remembering that during this period, getting Jews out of Poland and into Palestine was often the only way to keep them alive.
Pogroms and massacres of Jews continued even as the Nazis retreated.
We're going to talk about that more later.
He established another clandestine organization as he traveled across Europe.
I believe it's called Brika.
And it's, again, it's this underground railroad type sort of situation.
As he makes connections with survivors across Europe's Jewish communities, he starts to come face to face with survivors of the Nazi death camps.
He and his, and again, these guys, these guys aren't going to camps, right?
In Lithuania and Vilna, there's not like a big they're being shot in the fucking woods.
That's how that's how the Holocaust starts.
Yeah.
So they're finding out about the death camps as they're moving west and meeting people who had been there.
And then later in 1944, he and his Avengers help to liberate Mazhdanek, and they see their first concentration camp.
Now, Mazhdanek was located in a suburb of Lubland, Poland, and somewhere around 360,000 people were massacred there.
So Kovner comes from Vilna, where 40 to 60,000 Jews are killed.
And this just, this has like already broken him, right?
This has like turned him into this kind of force for vengeance.
And then he realizes that like Vilna is a blip on the radar in the total number of people who are being killed.
And he starts to realize the scale of the Holocaust, right?
The like the truly titanic scale of the killings that have been carried out.
Coming face to face with Mazdanek convinced Kovner that simple military victory against the Germans was no longer sufficient.
Images of a death camp were stuck in his mind now.
He had spent years obsessed with the destruction of the Vilna ghetto, his home, and then he'd come face to face with a massacre six times greater than the entire Jewish population of his hometown.
And even as the war ended in German defeat, stories of more massacres poured in.
Some of these were stories of the greatest death camps like Auschwitz, but others were stories of massacres of Jews committed by forces who were not Nazis.
And I'm going to quote again from the book to come.
When Jews returned in July 1944 to Kiev and hoped to reoccupy their houses, they discovered Ukrainian squatters who refused to vacate.
The Ukrainians started throwing Jews from moving train cars and beating random Jews.
The feeling was of an impending pogrom.
There was no one to turn to with an alert.
In July of 1944, upon the liberation of Lithuania, Jews who returned to their homes from the forests and hideouts, attempting to find relatives and perhaps a small fraction of their properties, were murdered on their doorsteps by neighbors and local Lithuanian gangs who had hidden in the forests and elsewhere in order to not be conscripted by the Germans.
In the pockets of five Jews who had survived the Holocaust but were then murdered in the Lithuanian town of Issakis, a note was found in Polish saying, This will be the fate of all the Jews left alive.
Survivors Facing Impending Pogroms00:05:28
So this doesn't put Kovner and his men into his men and women, by the way.
There's a pretty, I think it might even be a pretty even split of men and women in his insurgent organization.
It is like they're kind of out of their minds at this point, right?
Not only you have to like because the Holocaust is still happening because now it's a consensus going off.
Yeah.
Because everyone wants them fucking dead.
Yeah.
And this is, again, if you have ever had PTSD, what that means, I'm not trying to, I'm not, again, I have had it.
I'm not, I've had it, I've had a couple of PTSD breaks.
I am not trying to be, I don't mean this in a negative way.
You're crazy, right?
Like, that's what you're, you're kind of out of your mind for a while.
That's part of the problem.
And these people are dealing with not only like the most PTSD I can fucking imagine, but now they realize that like it's not over.
The massacre is continuing.
And all of this is happening like while they are continuing to fight a war.
And so between the grief of losing all of their loved ones and friends and the trauma of years of underground fighting, deadly partisan combat, these people are in what you might call a particular state of mind.
The most obvious consequence of this is an obsession with vengeance, which the end of the war does not slake.
And as the war kind of comes to an end, a lot of these Jewish partisans, people who are friends and affiliated with Kaufner, members of different Zionist youth groups in Poland, they start to carry out attacks in areas that have already been liberated, places where the war has come to an end.
And I'm going to read a quote from the book Nakam here.
Naza Gruppe, a group of Zionist youth members from Bedzin, Poland, aimed to exact vengeance in Germany.
Emil Brigg, later a hero in Israel's war of, well, in the Arab-Israeli war, recounted, she uses the term Israel's war of independence, like you can, whatever.
We had nothing to lose.
We wanted only revenge.
Young men and women burning for vengeance, with nothing in their world but a mighty urge to kill Germans and to destroy whoever was collaborating with Germans.
Some members of Naza Gruppe, who had volunteered for the Red Army, succeeded in acts of vengeance, but not as much as they had wished.
Not as Jews, not as representatives of the entire Jewish nation against the entire German nation.
One of them, Manos Diamant, visited Auschwitz as soon as the war ended, and he saw this command written on one of the walls of the torture chambers.
Jews, take vengeance.
These words guided his future.
He and Alex Gatman, a fellow member of the group, headed a squad in Austria that executed those who had been found guilty.
Most of the members felt as if they were judges without robes, judges of a special kind who together delivered and immediately carried out their sentences.
They bound and gagged suspects, held a few minutes of trial proceedings for each, and read an indictment.
They prosecuted murderers who had been active in the ghettos and concentration camps, those who had killed with their own hands and could be reliably identified, in the group's opinion, by at least two witnesses.
No court of true justice in the world would have handed down a different verdict if he confessed on his own without being interrogated, said Diamant.
These killers were mostly, but not always, SS troops.
The group then killed the suspect.
For example, four young men who had been freed from the Landsberg Koffering concentration camp near Munich stole British jeeps and drove to a neighboring town where they mounted a pogrom of their own for four or five hours, punching and beating.
Soldiers of the Jewish brigade who arrived at the scene stood there stunned.
They couldn't agree with this and sent us away.
We broke everything around.
We broke windows.
We hit children and old people too.
The hatred inside of us was terrible, a heavy burden of rage.
It is difficult to determine how many such incidents occurred with survivors taking action either independently or with a few comrades.
So again, there's like, this stuff is happening as the war ends.
There's like guys busting, like stealing British military shit and just driving into German towns and just beating the shit out of everybody they encounter.
Yeah.
Which like, I get it, man.
Like, yeah.
Yeah.
It's like, it's not good.
It's not justice.
But it's inevitable.
It's going to happen.
It's the inevitable consequence of what the Nazis did, right?
Yeah.
I feel like there's a difference between justice and consequences that doesn't get talked about enough where it's just like, I don't know, like you do a bunch of bad shit and some other bad shit's going to happen.
And it's not justified inherently like that kid who got beat didn't do anything, you know?
Yeah.
And like, it's not good.
It's a it's just a thing.
It's just it is going to yeah, if you're going to say, and I think it is like it's bad.
It's bad if like children are getting beaten in the street because even if the children believed the fucked up things their parents told them, they're not responsible for it.
But also like the bad thing that's being done here, I would say, even though it's being committed by these like Jewish concentration camp survivors, the evil is still on the Nazis.
They're responsible for those kids getting beaten in the street, right?
It's not the fault of the people who lost everything and are like, what, these people just get to go on living their lives?
No, we're going to start hitting them with a fucking bat.
Like, that's, you know, it's not on them is what I will say.
Yeah.
Like, just like those kids can't be responsible, nobody who's just gotten out of a concentration camp can be responsible for their actions in this case.
Yeah.
That's.
Eating Wall Broke Financial Talk00:03:04
Yeah.
God, that's interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a, it's a kind, like, if, you are a person who believes that, like, temporary insanity can render one less complicit in an act of violence, you have to say it applies here.
Like, I can't imagine a better example of that.
Yeah.
Um, but you know what I can imagine, Margaret?
What can you imagine?
A beautiful world, a perfect world, Margaret.
A shining city upon a hill where people can purchase the products and services that support this podcast.
Oh, wow.
A whole city.
A whole city, Margaret.
Of just gold and podcasts.
That's right.
That's right.
We're going to build it together.
We're going to make it real as one.
I'm so excited to be part of this.
So am I.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I said, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict me.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Yeah, mom.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
Wow.
This program.
I'm a guy.
Open your free iHeart radio app.
Search the Ceno Show.
And listen now.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything.
But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
Here at the Nick Dick and Pole Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
Justifying Revenge Against Nazis00:16:00
What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
The president?
You think he was the president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Leslo proves that.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it at like it's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It was a good one.
I like that saying.
An actual Polish site.
It is an actual Polish site.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
Listen to the Nick, Dick, and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, we're back.
We've just built a shining city upon a hill.
It's great.
You can get like five different kinds of mattresses there.
Yeah.
Back to the story.
So Kovner and his mates, along with a lot of other Holocaust survivors, are kind of spiraling as the war comes to an end.
And once the fighting actually stops for them, everything gets worse, right?
As bad as their mind state had been previously, they at least had had fighting to focus on.
Once the fighting's, once there's no fighting for them to do, like they have nothing but their thoughts, right?
And that is not a good place to be in.
Yeah.
So while they're kind of trying to cope with the end of their part in the war, the Allies are arresting a bunch of German officers.
They are starting to carry out like the justice part of the victory.
But it quickly becomes clear to Abba Kovner that the Allies aren't really interested in ensuring anything that he would consider to be justice.
Right.
So in April of 1945, mere weeks before Hitler's suicide, Abba Kovner met with a number of his partisans and a group of Auschwitz survivors in a flat near the recently liberated city of Lublin, Poland.
This is right after they've liberated that death camp Mashdanek.
Kovner, the man who had first warned Jewish Europe about Germany's plans to kill them all, delivered another address.
He warned them first that the Holocaust was not over and that some terrible form of terrible vengeance against the Germans was necessary as an act of self-defense.
Part of what he's saying here is: look, the Poles are still killing us, the Ukrainians are still killing us, the Lithuanians are still killing us, the Nazis are gone, but they're still killing us.
And it's because they think they can get away with it because the Germans did.
And so we have to carry out an act of vengeance against the Germans so people stop killing us.
Oh, interesting.
Okay.
He tells them the act should be shocking.
The Germans should know that after Auschwitz, there can be no return to normality.
And this is their versions of this idea.
There's one famous survivor and academic who I think the exact line is: poetry after Auschwitz is obscene, right?
That like the mute, the severity of this crime has rendered the human attempt to create art an obscenity.
Yeah.
There's a variety.
And Kovner's attitude is that they can't do this and just continue to be a country.
Like it's this, I think.
Yeah, like it's hard to argue with the man, right?
So survivors at the meeting recalled that as usual, Kovner's eloquence was hypnotizing.
One person who was there described their mind state listening to him this way.
Those who came away from the smokestacks of the crematoria know what they want.
We want tanks demolishing city streets.
Rebuilding comes later.
Our job now is destruction.
Who dares deny it to us?
We are Frankensteins.
We who came away from the ruins will show the world.
We will snatch up the name Jew in every language and uplift it.
Words of vengeance will light our way.
For as long as one member of this nation remains, we shall not rest.
Now, this yeah, that's sketchy.
Yeah, this is this is some unsettling shit that we're delving into.
And this is that in a like no one should be calling themselves Germans because we've destroyed the state of Germany?
Or does that mean like literally every German citizen must die?
Let's talk about that in a little bit, Margaret.
Okay.
What you should know is that on a religious note, the idea of vengeance is not something that is permitted in the Jewish faith.
In Talmudic law, and the Talmud is you've got like the Torah, right?
Which is the Old Testament effectively.
The Talmud is like, I think like 800 years of basically commentary from different religious scholars on the Torah.
And in Talmudic law, personal vengeance is forbidden, right?
Like vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.
That means like vengeance is something God can do.
God can take revenge.
You should not take, because it's bad for you, right?
It's like bad to, like, it is bad for people to obsess over revenge.
Yeah, and it doesn't fit within my context of like, and this is like, I'm not like sitting on my rolly chair in my studio at home in West Virginia and like trying to cast judgment.
But like one of my favorite anarchist assassins, whose name I suddenly forget, I think it's Kurt Wilkins.
His quote after he killed someone who had killed 1,500 anarchists and Indigenous people in South America, his quote was, vengeance is unbecoming of an anarchist.
Even though he had just done a vengeance, he saw it as this like problem solving, right?
Yeah.
But the concept of vengeance is like not problem solving.
It's problem perpetuating most of the time.
And so it's like not inherently just.
But that said, and so that maps as, I don't know, I'm just mapping Talmudic law to that as well, I guess, as like this idea that vengeance is not good, but it's maybe understandable.
It's not good, and it is within kind of the strictures of the Jewish religion.
It is something that specifically you're not supposed to seek as a person.
Kauvner and his fellow survivors, though, again, these guys were not, most of the, many of them, some of these guys had been like religious Zionists.
Some of them had not been Zionists.
A lot of them had been communists because Kovner's more on the left.
These guys are secular.
And even the ones who had been religious before the war, and again, this is pretty common.
By the end of the Holocaust, they don't believe anymore.
That's also not universal, but fairly common.
So they're not, they don't really care that they're not supposed to seek vengeance, right?
One of them credits this to the power driven into us by Hitler, right?
That's one of the lines that you hear from one of these guys in this meeting is that like Hitler has like driven into us the power to commit vengeance by the crimes that he committed against our people.
As the meeting wore on, Kovner laid out his plans for a quote unique operation of organized vengeance.
Jews, including Kovner and his men, had already carried out numerous assassinations of German leaders and collaborators, but this was not enough.
The Holocaust was not purely an act of the Nazi military or a bunch of party functionaries.
The normal people of Germany had cheered the slaughter on.
They had demanded it.
Bit by bit, Kovner talked himself and the other survivors into a new idea.
He described it as, quote, to pay the Germans back in a way that only the survivors of such a massacre can.
An idea which the man on the omnibus, to use a figure of speech, could only consider deranged.
But I will not claim that our thinking was far from deranged in those days.
Maybe worse than deranged.
A terrifying idea made wholly from despair and carrying a sort of suicide within it, a mental inferno, an eye for an eye.
In other words, wiping out six million Germans.
God damn it.
God damn it.
So that's the plan that they land on is we're going to kill six million of them, one for one, you know, or close to it.
Yeah.
That's bad.
I'm just going to go.
That is bad.
Be on record as saying that that's bad.
Individuals can be culpable of crimes, but people are not culpable of crimes by where they live.
They are not.
And I will say, obviously, it's bad to plan to kill six million civilians.
Don't think we need to belabor that point, but you also, it is not illogical.
Yeah, no, no.
Standing where they are.
And I think the way that they would have defended it then, because Kaufner later, that quote comes from him later.
He's like, yeah, we were deranged.
We were crazy, right?
Yeah, okay.
But having that attitude then, you're looking at the slaughter continuing and you're looking at like, he's not wrong.
Regular Germans are complicit in the Holocaust.
Every single person who stayed in and was a part of that nation at war has a degree of complicity in the Holocaust.
That is undeniable as a historical fact.
But his attitude is, if they get away with it, other people will keep trying and maybe they'll try again.
The only way to make it clear that you can't do this, right?
That you can't do what the genocide as a nation is if a nation is wiped out for doing it, right?
That's his attitude.
And that is the attitude of a genocide survivor.
And it is, I will, I'll say this.
This is another thing where there's this conversation we have about history.
And it's usually by like the worst people in the world where they're like, well, you have to judge people by the standards of the time.
And they usually mean that by it wasn't bad to own slaves.
Right, right.
Right.
Which it was.
And there were a lot of people at the time who knew it was bad.
Where I actually think it's, that's an interesting conversation to have is situations like this.
Because I cannot personally find it in me to morally judge a person in Kaufner's position for wanting to kill six million Germans.
It's wrong, but I can't judge it.
Right.
Right.
Because who wouldn't think that way?
Right.
In this time.
It kind of probably depends on how far along in these plans he gets, to be honest.
God, that's such an interesting question of culpability, right?
Because in the immediate aftermath, right?
You're like, you know, the sort of temporary insanity as a way of understanding culpability makes a lot of sense.
But then like sitting down and planning something, like, I don't know, it is interesting to me.
Again, this is not me trying to like sit and be like, well, I would have done it differently.
I don't know what that is.
No, no, fuck, I wouldn't.
Of course, I'm going to tell you right now, I suspect had I been in his position, I would have agreed with his thinking and supported it.
Yeah, like I'm not, yeah.
That's not good.
I'm not like proud of that.
I just like, yeah, man, if everyone I loved went up in a fucking smokestack and all these people just got to keep having a country, I would probably support some terrible things.
Right.
No, totally.
And it's God, it's so interesting, too, because it's when you're blaming the nation of Germany and its people as constitute it, it's sort of this interestingly like fundamentally nationalist kind of idea that like the people are their nation.
Right.
And that's, but and that is the attitude that the Germans had applied to justifying.
Yeah, yeah, no, totally.
You know?
Yeah.
And so part of what they're saying is like, all right, motherfuckers, turn about as fair goddamn play.
Right.
And it's the like, okay, you killed.
Yeah.
You killed my husband, so now I'm going to kill your husband is like, no.
Yes.
This is the you kill my husband, I kill you.
That's legit, but again, whatever.
Talking about whatever.
It also leads to problem.
You know, this is why in Rojava, and we talk about this a lot on the women's war podcast, so much of the justice system that they have built is based around ending reprisals, is based around someone killed someone.
We have to bring the families together and get the families of the victims to agree to a situation by which the punishment on the person who committed the murder is severe, but the families are not locked into a cycle of vengeance.
Right.
Because that's what's been destroying us and it will destroy us if we let it, right?
Absolutely.
And they're right to do that.
And this is like, again, killing six million Germans is insane.
It's just, it's an insanity that I cannot more, like, there's no moral judgment here when I say that.
Right.
These are, as Kaufner said, they are deranged and they are embarking on a deranged plan.
And so to the extent that what they're doing is evil here, I again, I place this evil at the Nazis' feet.
Yeah, that's fair.
Yeah.
Kaufner just wanted to be a poet farmer.
Yeah.
Right?
He didn't want to be doing this.
You know, so, you know, again, I, if you're, I think the basic level, like the basic moral question here is illustrated well, as most moral questions are in the movie Rambo First Blood, right?
They drew First Blood, you know?
I haven't seen that in so long.
It's pretty base.
Yeah, I remember that.
I remember liking it.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
So, so.
So, how far along do they get in this terrible plan?
I'm kidding.
Because I'm really tired of talking about how he's curious because he obviously later was like, just kidding, that wasn't the best plan.
Not entirely, Margaret.
We will talk about that more too.
But yeah, it's time to move on.
So before we get into what he does and how he tries, I do want to make the point that he is completely right when he says that the Allied justice was not sufficient.
And to make it clear how insufficient it was, I want to read a quote from an article in The Guardian by Jonathan Friedland.
After the war, Allied officials identified 13.2 million men in Western Germany alone as eligible for automatic arrest because they had been deemed part of the Nazi apparatus.
Fewer than 3.5 million of these were charged, and of those, 2.5 million were released without trial.
That left about a million people, and most of them faced no greater sanction than a fine or confiscation of property that they had looted, a temporary restriction on future employment, or a brief ban from seeking public office.
By 1949, four years after the war, only 300 Nazis were in prison.
From an original wanted list of 13 million, just 300 paid anything like a serious price.
Because it would have been a never-ending task, says David Cesarini, a research professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a leading authority on the Holocaust.
He cites the British attempt to convict those responsible for the killing at Belzen.
The trial took nine months and left the British exhausted.
That was just one camp, and there were what, 70 camps with hundreds of people at each one, to say nothing of the Gestapo officers and the men of the Einsetzgruppen.
Pursuing all those responsible for the slaughter of the Jews would have meant trying thousands upon thousands of people, and it would have ended in the jailing of almost the entire adult male population of Germany.
The Allies put their hands up in despair.
And what I will say is, yeah, maybe we should have jailed the entire adult male population in Germany, right?
Like maybe some, maybe something, certainly more than 300, right?
Doctors Who Saved Jews in Camps00:09:15
And again, just murdering 6 billion people indiscriminately is not certainly not the right answer.
But I don't know if you're going to say what should have happened.
I tend to consistently line up with a fuckload more of those people should have been killed.
Yeah, I mean, if they were going around being like, sorry, you were in the Nazi army.
I don't care that you're a private.
You're dead now.
Yeah.
Because I think that's just like the consequences of a decision you made.
We make permanent decisions every day.
Yeah.
And if you're a permanent decision you made as you join the Nazi military, people fled.
People died.
People tried to sabotage the Nazi military.
There's even motherfuckers like there are a couple of cases of like doctors who joined the SS under duress and then saved people in the camps who were like rescued from trials because Jews that they'd saved came forward.
Like, no, no, this guy was like actually, people did.
And if you didn't, I think the thing to I, here's what I'll put out: take a leaf out of the Romans book.
And of those 13.5 million, kill one in 10.
See, and I do love a good decimation, but I think that my issue with this, I actually would rather that these Holocaust survivors who are not part of a, who have their own militia, go and kill a huge chunk of people who were part of the Nazi party rather than a system, an apparatus that like tries and like condemns people to death.
It's like, and it's a weird anti-death penalty thing for me that is like gets back into this idea that like I don't trust the systemization of murder, right?
And so any system that could have killed all of the Nazi soldiers later would absolutely do even worse than these other people who are dreaming of revenge.
Maybe.
Yeah.
Maybe.
That's what I'm saying.
You know what?
Maybe a cool thing to have done.
I say cool in an inappropriate sense, but you take these groups who, by the way, these folks like Kovner and like the folks I read a quote about earlier, these different Jewish armed organizations, they kill somewhere around 1,500 Nazis after the war.
Something in the end and maybe you just say, hey, guys, you have a license to do whatever you want in bringing people to justice for a two-year period or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Free travel throughout Europe.
You know, you take this on.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Certainly what we can all agree on is what was done was woefully insufficient.
And it's probably part of why there have been so many genocides since.
Because one of the things that World War II proved is that actually you can wipe out people and kind of get away with it.
Yeah, the only thing you can't do is be a private invading Russia.
Yes.
Oh, no, you will not get away with that.
So in July of 1946, Polish residents of Kielsi murdered 42 Jews who'd returned from Nazi camps to their homes.
This sparked a mass exodus of survivors from Poland.
Prior to the massacre, around a thousand Jews per month had been immigrating from Poland.
The month after Kielsi, 20,000 fled.
It was 30,000 the month after that.
And as best as anyone can tell, around 2,000 Jews were massacred post-war by Polish civilians and similar killings.
And another one of the questions you can have after this is like all the shit that happened in Palestine after this, how much of it would have happened if people had felt like they didn't have to flee their homes in order to not die?
Right.
There's a question to be had there too.
So Kovner and his comrades saw have decided we're going to kill 6 million Germans.
And they named their new organization, which was about 50 or 60 people.
This is not a huge group.
They name it Nakam, which is the Hebrew word for revenge.
Now, there was a lot going on in the Jewish underground just after the war, and Kovner was an integral part of a number of different organizations that were dedicated to smuggling survivors out to Palestine and to providing people with emotional and financial support through building a European survivors network.
So people getting out from these different areas, fleeing places that still weren't safe, would immediately be met face to face with another Holocaust survivor.
So that, like, the person who was helping them would like know what they had been through.
Yeah.
So he has access to a potentially limitless number of volunteers.
And by the way, one of the points you kind of encounter reading Nakam is while they don't tell a lot of other people about their plans, many of the folks that they are working with would have agreed with this.
Yeah.
And again, because they've all just survived the Holocaust.
Not hard to see why.
But he is, these are, and one of the things about this is like, having gone through what they've gone through in the war, the 50 or 60 people that he's picked are like perfect.
insurrectionaries.
They are, none of them will talk.
None of them will break under any kind of torture or question.
Yeah, there's nothing.
These are the best underground.
Like you, you could not find a more capable group of underground fighters than the people in Nakam.
And he specifically, he handpicks the people in this organization.
He will only, we use the term Holocaust survivor very broadly, right?
And it applies to people who like, you know, they got beat up in the street by Nazis in 1933 and then they fled the country, right?
That's a Holocaust survivor.
Right.
And I wouldn't, I wouldn't take that.
Or somebody who, you know, gets out in 40 and manages to like flee into France and then get to England or something right ahead of them.
That's a Holocaust survivor.
Somebody who hides out in another person's house for the whole war or pretends to be a Gentile.
Those are Holocaust survivors.
But they are not the same kind of Holocaust survivors as somebody who sees his home burnt to the ground and fights in the woods for three years or somebody who is interned at Auschwitz and watches, you know, a million people die around them.
There is a difference, right?
And Kovner will only accept into Nakam people who have been in the death camps, people who have been partisans, and not just even that.
They have to have taken a form of individual personal sabotage against the Nazi state while in that situation.
So these are, these are tough people.
These are some very frightening motherfuckers.
And Kaufner is so respected and the desire for vengeance is so overwhelming that a lot of the partisans he picks when they learn about the plan are almost delirious with joy.
Kaufner gathers his hand-picked partisans with him in a flat in Budapest where they all live communally as they're carrying out the early stages of this operation.
And by late 1945, he and his top lieutenants had picked out two plans, plan A and plan B. Plan A is to acquire poison and send it through the water supply in Nuremberg and Munich, indiscriminately killing the populace of both cities.
Mira Verben Shabletsky, a member of NACOM, told Dina Perat later that she was in seventh heaven when Kaufner revealed the plan.
Another member, Zila Rosenberg, said Kovner's words shouted inside me in an insane tailspin.
They are on board.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm going to quote next from a report from Heretz on how Plan A goes.
Joseph Harmut was chosen to be in charge of the activity in Nuremberg, one of the symbols of the Nazi regime.
I was grateful to be chosen for this job, he said before his death in 2017.
Working under him was Willik Shinnar, who was hired to work in Nuremberg's Center for Distilling Drinking Water.
Perat discovered that he was able to obtain the plans of the water system and in the end even gained control of the main valve.
While the group members were preparing to carry out the mission, Kovner was supposed to provide them with the poison.
But he lingered too long during his visit to Palestine.
Only in December 1945 did he return to Europe, disguised as a soldier returning from leave.
According to his testimony, before boarding the ship, friends in the Haganah, the pre-state military force, provided him with poison packaged in tubes of toothpaste and shaving cream.
However, on his way back, he was detained by the British on the deck after his forged papers aroused suspicion.
The poison, which he was holding, was tossed into the sea.
So, number one, there's a lot of debate about whether or not the Haganah tipped off the British, right?
That, like, some of them handed over the poison.
And then, when others found out, they were like, we probably should let this go down.
Yeah.
But the poison winds up in the ocean.
And it is impossible to say how many people might have been killed if Koffner had gotten the poison to Europe.
Right.
They have control over the main water valve in Nuremberg, right?
It's 6 million is probably not a realistic estimate, but they could have killed tens of thousands.
I mean, potentially when you consider how chaotic things were at the end of the war, the lack of basic medical infrastructure, the lack of functioning hospitals, it's not unreasonable to think they might have been able to kill hundreds of thousands if they had gone and actually been able to try this, but they're not able to.
Kovner spends months in custody, and kind of afterwards, he is a known man to the Allies.
And so he can no longer participate in Nakam's plans.
He eventually settles on a kibbutz in Palestine.
Settling Into Advertiser Support Life00:03:34
What if he is able to settle into a quiet life of supporting advertisers?
Oh, Jesus Christ.
That was bleak, Margaret.
Thanks.
Wow.
Thanks.
Really just.
I show a different side of myself for this.
Margaret's like, this is not my show.
Here's some ads, I guess.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I was, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is this badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk come on.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
And without this program, I'm going to die.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search the Ceno Show, and listen now.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wild Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wild Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken.
Take to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Poisoning Water to Blame the Jews00:14:47
So Kovner is kind of out of the picture of Nakam.
He does invite, and you kind of get the feeling that he starts to like pull himself out of the tailspin a little bit.
He invites a bunch of members of the group over to his kibbutz.
They visit.
Some of them start to give up at this point, but others decide to carry out a plan B.
Okay.
Do they have the plan B the whole time?
Or is this?
Oh, yes.
Yes.
Yes.
And the Allies, the Allies, and they're working towards Plan B at the same time as they're working towards plan A. You can always have a backup plan.
And this is actually cooler.
Indiscriminately poisoning the water supply of a large city is a bad thing to do.
This is kind of rad.
So the Allied authorities had interned former SS members at detention camps outside of Nuremberg and Dachau.
One of the Avengers, Liebke Distal, was hired to work at the bakery that supplied bread to prisoners and guards at the Nuremberg camp.
According to Dina Perat, quote, he first thought to inject poison into the bags of flour in the warehouse, later into the dough mixers.
And finally, he reached the conclusion after consulting with the group members that the poison should be spread on the bottom of the loaves.
So Distal spends months rising through the ranks at the bakery staff until he gets in charge.
Yeah, rising like bread.
Until he's put in charge of the bread warehouse and he learns every aspect of the distribution system.
This included the fact that German captives were given cheap black bread while the American guards were given more expensive white bread.
This was a big break for Nakam.
They were willing to mass murder Germans, but they like, again, the Americans have just liberated Nazi Germany.
They don't want to murder those guys very much.
Like they would feel kind of bad about that.
Now, I should note that there's also some quotes you'll get, some really chilling quotes.
Like there's one member of Nakam was like, if Kovner had wanted us to murder a Jew for some reason to carry out our plans, we would have done it.
Like we would have done anything he told us to.
Yeah.
If you're willing to poison indiscriminately a city, you're going to kill a lot of Jews.
Yeah, yeah.
That is also probably.
Well, actually, given the realities of the Holocaust, probably not at that point.
Yeah, okay, fair.
I don't actually know enough about when people started getting back into Germany and started living in those cities again.
Yeah.
So, yeah, he is.
So this is the plan.
And again, this shows like what competent because they have, in the space of a few months, gotten people at high levels in the water distribution network, like in like managing the water, like the fresh water system in fucking the city of Nuremberg.
And they've gotten other people managing like the bread distribution at this prisoner of war camps where huge numbers of SS prisoners are being held.
And they do this all simultaneously.
And Distal and his chunk of Nakam find another source of poison and they smuggle it into the warehouse under a raincoat.
Several members of Nakam succeed in hiding themselves in bread baskets where they wait for the night to fall.
When the other workers had left for the day and locked up, they all left hiding and start painting poison using paintbrushes over loaves of bread.
This was a static work for them.
And when they'd covered 3,000 loaves, they paused to kiss each other.
It's arsenic that they're putting on this bread.
Two days later, Germans at the camp started to fall sick.
More than 2,200 former SS men caught stomach poisoning.
And it is unclear if any die.
Records aren't great at this time.
Some reports you'll hear is that it was like close to a thousand, you know, several hundred prisoners died eventually as a result of this.
Fuck yeah.
Dina Parat claims they failed to kill anyone.
I don't really know who's right here.
Dina kind of has a vested interest in making it seem like they didn't kill people.
Okay.
I don't actually know what went down, but they certainly get a lot of SS men sick.
And you know what?
I don't care what happens.
Oh, I don't care at all.
Like, I don't care at all.
Even if they're prisoners, I don't care.
Well, I mean, especially...
I think it is beautiful that it is not their prison.
They're not their guards that are killing them.
It's their former victims.
It's their former victims.
Fuck yeah.
That's fine.
That's completely fine.
No notes on this one.
Yeah.
Except that the poisoning is apparently.
Every time I've read about people like trying to do mass poisoning in history, it usually fails really terribly.
It all nearly always.
Yeah.
It's actually very hard to do.
And it's hard to say, like, would the water plan have worked?
They had a lot of poison.
It was supposed to be a pretty good quality.
It's also kind of worth noting part of why they choose to poison the water is that for hundreds of years in Europe, like every time water would go bad in a well or something, the Jews would get blamed and murdered.
And so they were kind of being like, we're going to do it this time, right?
Like that was like part of the thinking.
That tracks.
That tracks so well to just be like, you call us monsters for a thousand fucking years.
Literally a thousand years.
Yeah, we'll do it now, motherfuckers.
I get it.
Bad thing to do, but I get it.
Yeah.
So the Allies never caught Nakam for the poisoning, but when they analyzed the arsenic used, they concluded that they could have killed about 60,000 people with it.
It's suspected the reason why this doesn't work that well is that they spread it too thin on the bread.
And this is something that members of the group would regret for the rest of their lives.
Yeah, fair.
I get it, guys.
I get it.
So not long after, another group of Nakam insurgents, headed by a hero of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, attempted to carry out the same plan in the Dachau camp.
The plan was canceled at the last minute for unknown reasons.
And it's kind of at this point that Nakam starts to fall apart.
The mania of the wars, the derangement, as Kovner would later claim, has faded.
And now people are starting to look at the possibility of a future, right?
There are a few men who stayed loyal to the mission.
After a visit to Kovner in Palestine, a small group returned to Europe to try again.
Their efforts were constantly stymied by the new Federal Republic of Germany, and many of them were arrested after turning to crime to finance their efforts.
They all eventually immigrated back to Palestine, where many turned the rage and hate that they'd failed to spend upon the Germans towards a new enemy.
So a bunch of the guys who are in Nakam become senior officers in the Israeli defense establishment.
One becomes chief of the IDF at one point.
A couple, one or two become generals.
A number of Nakam fighters and affiliates and other Jewish militant organizations start the Mossad.
And yeah, a lot of very nasty things result from that.
They do kill like about 1,500 Nazis too, which is fine.
But, you know, the Nakba happens.
There's the establishment over time of an apartheid state, the displacement of a large number of people.
A lot of pretty ugly stuff.
And a lot of it is done by people who had been in this group and these other groups.
Now, Kovner, because he's tried to poison six million people, has kind of ruined any chance of a political career for himself.
But he remains a prominent and a popular poet and inspirational war leader.
During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, he was made a propaganda officer, and he used his skill at poetry to try and encourage his soldiers to carry out violence without sympathy or guilt.
He issued a series of battle missives, one of which was published after the surrender of an Israeli unit during the Battle of Nitsanim.
Now, these Israeli soldiers had been hopelessly outnumbered and cut off by the Egyptians.
They're kind of surrounded and they surrender to the Egyptian army.
Kauvner is furious about this.
He sees them as traitors.
He calls them traitors.
And he publishes a poem titled Failure, just days after the fighting.
And I'm going to quote now from a study by Michael Arbell.
Denouncing them for not fighting to their last drop of blood and for not defending every inch of territory with their lives.
By failing to do so, Kovner claimed, the surrendering fighters demonstrated to the Egyptian enemy that it was possible to vanquish the defenses of a Jewish settlement within a matter of hours and undermined the conviction essential to the morale of every Israeli fighter that the few are capable of defeating the many.
Toward the conclusion of the missive, Kovner vehemently called out, Better to fall in the trenches of home than to surrender to a murderous invader.
To surrender so long as the body still lives and the last remaining bullet continues to breathe in its magazine.
Tis a disgrace to emerge to the invaders' captivity.
Tis a disgrace and a death.
Now, this caused outrage at the time because he's calling these soldiers who have like fought and surrendered like cowards.
And this is compounded in 1949 because Kauvner's wrong.
He's saying, the Egyptians are murderous monsters.
How dare you surrender to them?
And the Egyptians treat these Israeli soldiers as lawful prisoners of war.
Yeah.
And they return them to their home because it's a war and there's rules.
Yeah.
And they return them home afterwards.
So these guys don't die.
Yeah.
That's because they surrender, which is why it's good to respect the rules of war.
Which he clearly no longer cared about as soon as he exactly.
Exactly.
Again, we all understand how he came to stop caring about them.
Every enemy is the Nazis, right?
That's not just him.
That's a lot of these people, right?
Even though, like, you know, the Egyptians are not the Nazis.
Not that there's not ugly stuff that happens in these wars that are going to follow, but it's not the same.
And these returning soldiers attack Kaufner for calling them treasonous.
And a later investigation by the IDF concludes that the soldiers had acted appropriately.
Kauvner had simply lost all sense of proportion.
He remained an influential poet for the rest of his life, though, winning the Israel Prize for Poetry in 1970 and dying in 1987 from laryngeal cancer because he is just when I tell you this guy was a chain smoker, you have to think about like what it means to be a Holocaust survivor and a chain smoker.
This guy is this guy consuming cigarettes at like the nation state level.
Yeah, I mean, a cigarette is a symbol of no future, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Like that is, that is its charm and its poison, is that it is a symbol of I'm doing something because I don't care what happens to me.
Yeah.
There may be no people alive who smoke the way this man was capable of smoking.
We've lost the capacity for smoking like that in the species.
So other members of Nakam, though, remain alive into the 21st century.
And they don't really, no one really talks about what has this is kind of like not very well known at all.
I mean, it's still not that well known, but this is really not known at all until kind of the 1980s when some of the people who survived start to be like, oh, we're not going to live forever.
We should probably like talk about what happened, right?
And so that's the point at which historians and sociologists start to interview them on their about how their feelings on revenge had evolved throughout the decades.
And by the way, there's going to be, if you start researching this, you may find some of the books you read by some of these survivors, there are points that I've laid out here that they will disagree on.
There's several books by survivors, and then Dina Perat has written two books, and she's kind of the academic who has talked to the most of these guys.
There's points of disagreement.
There's things we don't know because, again, everybody, like the fog of war, everybody's like older, like they were kind of crazy at the time.
There's points that you're not going to get the exact history on because nobody knows it, right?
There's disagreement from people who were all there.
That's just the reality of historiography.
So, but there are interviews with a number of these guys.
So, we have kind of information from historians and sociologists about how these people's feelings on revenge had evolved through the decades.
And as far as I can tell, they didn't change their minds.
Molak Ben Yakov, who led Nakam after 1947, said that he could not have looked himself in the mirror if he hadn't tried to get revenge.
He still regretted that it had failed.
Most of his comrades seemed to agree, feeling that the Germans had deserved it and ruined that they had not succeeded in carrying out plan A. When one survivor was asked how she could possibly have made peace with the mass poisoning of babies, children, and other civilians, she answered, If you had been there with me at the end of the war, you wouldn't talk that way.
That's completely possible.
Yep.
Again, doesn't make them right.
No, no, no.
It's just like, yeah, you can't expect people, like, it's obviously not everyone who lived through that.
In fact, most people who lived through that didn't feel entirely the same way.
Yeah.
But a lot of them did.
Yeah.
And that's valid.
Yeah.
I'm glad they did not succeed in poisoning six million people to death indiscriminately.
Right.
But I get it.
And it's, it's the um, you know, there's um, there's a really good song about this whole story by a he's a German Jewish musician.
Um, the band is one sec, I'm gonna pull this up right now.
It's actually how I heard about this story first, and then I wound up reading the books.
Um, and it's it's a pretty, pretty dope song.
It's called um Six Million Germans by Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird.
And there's um, there's a couple of lines in there because it kind of ends with him talking about how these guys all became part of the Israeli military establishment of the birth of this apartheid state of all this violence that gets done in the wake of that.
And there's a line he has in there: convenience set, or uh, one sec, let me pull up theory because I don't get this wrong.
They put aside their rage and hate and worked to build a Jewish state with Jewish towns and Jewish farms and Jewish guns and nuclear arms.
Now, can vengeance put upon the shelf be taken out later on someone else?
Be careful how you read this tale, lest your own prejudice prevail.
Look around the world today and consider the role that vengeance plays.
For history has its unpaid debts, and is it better if we forget?
I like that it ends with a question.
You know, yep, it's a good song.
Yeah.
I mean, it's like it's so hard because if you come with almost any other story, it'd be so easy for me to be like, Well, here's how I feel about vengeance, and here's how I feel about justice.
And, you know, and you look at this and you're just like, Yes, shit's fucking messy.
Shit is fucking messy.
This is not, you know, as uplifting maybe as some of our other Christmas episodes.
I would not feel confident calling these people bastards because I think to some extent the things they have lived through make it impossible for me to fully morally judge them, even for the bad things that they've done.
That's where I am.
You're allowed to feel however you want to feel about this stuff.
But, you know, it's worth thinking about.
Yeah.
Would a Nazi World Have Been Better00:03:49
I will say when we're talking about things that the Nazis have done that are evil, obviously all of the killings, all of the millions and millions and tens of millions of deaths are the worst.
But one little crime of the Nazis, I will say, is the fact that as I was researching this, I had a literal moment where I thought, well, shit, would the world have been better if they'd done it?
If they'd killed six million Germans, and that was the lesson everyone else who thought about genocide for the rest of history took out from it, right?
Yeah.
And the answer is no, by the way.
But the fact that I, and I'm going to guess most of you are going to spend some time actually thinking about that, is another crime we should lay at the Nazis' feet.
No, that's such a fucking good point.
I had a moment where I was like, whoa, what would have happened if they'd done that?
And it's like, it doesn't matter.
Because spreading the idea that killing millions of people indiscriminately can ever possibly.
That there's ever a good way to do it.
Right.
Yeah.
And it was interesting because if it's like, if they had dismantled, whatever, there's a million hypotheticals.
But the idea that Germany should cease to exist, which I also don't, whatever.
Whatever.
I don't think any country should be.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
But like, you know, if like Germany does so bad that it doesn't get to exist anymore.
It's so.
And then it, I would love to know more, you know, because it's like, as far as I understand, as explained to me by an Italian friend, the Italian fascist system like stayed kind of intact and just changed its name in a lot of ways.
Or at least a lot of the individual functionaries continued.
And like, I don't know.
And versus Germany that seemed to like Germany presents itself as having had a national reckoning.
Well, I mean, certainly I will say of the Axis powers, they have done the best job of that.
That is probably very fair to say.
You do get these weird moments.
I was visiting Saxonhausen, which is, it's not a death camp, but it's a concentration camp.
So obviously a lot of people died there that its main goal was not killing, that had started as a place for political prisoners and continued that way under the Nazis.
It's a very bleak place.
Although it is, the museum that the Germans have set up there is very, very good.
If you are ever near Berlin, you have a chance to see Saxonhausen.
I think you kind of owe it to yourself to see it.
I went during the dead of winter, so it was snowy, and there was this moment where you're like walking through it.
You know, we're all bundled up in three layers and it's just frigid.
And then you walk in to one of the indoor areas and the first thing you see is one of the uniforms, the winter uniforms that the inmates wore.
And it's very affecting.
But as we're like coming into it, we have this great tourist guide who's this Brit who has been living in Germany for like 30, 40 years.
And he's walking us through and he points out this building outside of kind of the museum area.
And he's like, back when the camp was active, that's actually the administrative building.
That's where like they did all of the sort of administrative tasks for it.
And I was like, well, what is it now?
And he said, oh, well, it's like a training facility for the Berlin police.
Right.
Right.
Totally.
Yep.
Great.
So, you know, there's critiques I might have.
But yeah, I mean, generally speaking, yes, the Germans have done of the Axis powers the best job of reckoning with those crimes.
And I think probably it also would be fair to say a better job of reckoning those crimes than like the United States has done with slavery.
Totally.
But also, like, there are repeated, we've just, we just had another group of like right-wing Germans arrested for trying to overthrow the government and storm the Reichstag.
So, you know, there's issues to work with.
I mean, like, there's, there's Nazis everywhere now.
Like, that's another.
Yeah, there are Nazis everywhere.
I will say, I am not convinced.
I don't think, I think it's probably fair to say there's not like more Nazis as a percentage of the population in Germany now than a number of other places.
Escape from Incel Island Book Plug00:04:14
Totally.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Like, this is not a thing where I can say, and here's the moral lesson to take out of this story.
This is just some stuff that happened that I think you should think about.
Yep.
Another good episode.
Thank you for having me.
Merry Christmas.
Messy.
Yeah.
Happy holidays.
Oh, fuck.
Great.
Great.
Yeah.
Organ, is there anything you want to plug?
Well, if you like light-hearted violence, goddamn it.
I have a book coming out called Escape from Incel Island, which asks the very important question of what if all of the men who felt like they were owed a woman by the government got tricked into moving to an island where they were stuck.
And it's coming out on February 1st.
You can pre-order it.
You can get it through the publisher Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness.
Or if you're listening to this in the future, you can get it wherever books are sold.
And I have a podcast called Cool People Did Cool Stuff.
And I have another podcast called Live Like the World is Dying, which is about community and individual preparedness.
That's what I have to plug.
Sophie, do you have anything to plug?
Behind the Bastards is doing a live show at SF Sketchfest in January on the 20th.
We have lots of good podcast at CoolZone Media and all the things.
Yeah.
Maybe I'll find an even more fucked up story to talk about in a room full of people where you all have to stare at each other and think about the ethics of violent responses to genocide.
Yay.
Yay.
Nah, nah, it'll probably be about some guy who sold children poison or whatever.
It'll be fine.
It'll be funny as hell.
Yeah.
Well, here we go.
Happy, happy Christmas.
Bye-bye.
Yeah.
Talk about Nakam to your family at the dinner table this year during the holiday.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's 2 a.m.
2 a.m. Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like wild bats you were wet.
It was like a first like closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, listen to Las Culturistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Most people out here think that taking care of one another is important.
And most people would step up for a neighbor going through a tough time.
Most people around here help out friends and family when they need it.
But the funny thing is, most of us won't look for help when we need it.
Talk to someone if you're struggling with mental health because most people out here really care.
Find more information at loveyourmindtoday.org.
That's loveyourmindtoday.org.
Brought to you by the Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario.
People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower, or it's really like a stone sculpture.
You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
Take to interactive CEO Strauss Selnick and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.