The One from the Other

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Nakam, or Vengeance, squads were real. Just after the war, a small group of European Jews, many of them survivors of the death camps, formed the Israeli Brigade. Others acted from within the U.S. and British armies. Their sworn purpose was to avenge the murders of six million Jews. They murdered as many as two thousand Nazi war criminals, and planned or carried out several large-scale acts of reprisal. Among these was a very real plan to poison the reservoirs of the cities of Berlin, Nuremberg, Munich, and Frankfurt, and kill several million Germans—a plan that fortunately was never carried out. However, a plan to poison the bread for 36,000 German SS POWs, at an internment camp near Nuremberg, did go into action, albeit in a limited way. Two thousand loaves were poisoned; four thousand SS men were affected, and as many as a thousand died.

Lemberg-Janowska, the camp where Simon Wiesenthal was interned, was one of the most barbaric in Poland. Two hundred thousand people were murdered there. Friedrich Warzok, the deputy commander, was never caught. Eric Gruen, the Nazi doctor, was never caught.

Adolf Eichmann and Herbert Hagen really did visit Israel. Eichmann was trying to make himself an expert in Hebrew affairs. He planned to learn the language. He also met with Haganah representatives in Berlin.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a ferocious anti-Semite who led several pogroms in Palestine, which resulted in the deaths of many Jews. He had been canvassing a “final solution to the Jewish problem” as early as 1920. He met with Eichmann in 1937, and first met Adolf Hitler on November 28, 1941. This was less than eight weeks before the Wannsee Conference, at which Nazi plans for the “final solution of the Jewish problem in Europe” were outlined by Reinhard Heydrich.

During the war, Haj Amin lived in Berlin, was a friend of Hitler’s, and personally raised an SS Moslem Division of 20,000 men in Bosnia, which murdered Jews and partisans. He tried to persuade the Luftwaffe to bomb Tel Aviv. It seems quite probable that his ideas had a profound influence on the course of Eichmann’s thinking. Numerous Jewish organizations tried to have Haj Amin prosecuted as a war criminal after the war, but they were unsuccessful, despite the fact that arguably he was as culpable as Heydrich, Himmler, and Eichmann in the extermination of the Jews. Haj Amin was a close relative of Yasser Arafat’s. It is believed that Arafat changed his name in order to obscure his relationship with a notorious war criminal. To this day, many Arab political parties, most notably Hezbollah, have identified with Nazis and adopted symbols from Nazi propaganda.

In 1945, the American Office of Scientific Research and Development conducted medical experiments on prisoners in state penitentiaries in an effort to develop a vaccine for malaria. See Life, June 4, 1945, pages 43-46.