Obs: Exclusive: The Jewish executioner: Joseph Harmatz fought in the Jewish resistance. When the war ended, he planned to avenge the Holocaust with the lives of six million Germans (1998)
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resistance. When the war ended, he planned to avenge the Holocaust
with the lives of six million Germans.
The Observer (London, England) (March 15, 1998): p2.
By: MICHAEL FREEDLAND
Joseph Harmatz looks the very epitome of the man he has been for 50
years. As he sits in his favourite armchair it is not difficult to
believe that people all round the world have sent him letters of
genuine appreciation. The photographs of him with heads of state
testify to his standing. If you get him in the right mood, he might be
persuaded to show you the medal Pour la Merite awarded by a grateful
French government.
The medal is hidden away in a drawer in his study, along with some
very different documents. Like the diary in which he details the
events in which he personally killed at least 300 and possibly 400 men
in 1945, after the Americans had overrun the part of Germany in which
he was living. Joseph Harmatz has kept silent about these events for
50 years; now he has spoken for the first time. And he's done so
without the slightest suggestion of regret at the mass killing he
planned and administered.'We were the Avengers,' he says of himself
and of four others who broke into a bakery outside Nuremberg in April
1945, less than a month before the end of the Second World War, and
poisoned 3,000 loaves of bread. 'Unfortunately, we did not do more.
Our ultimate intention was to kill six million Germans, one for every
Jew slaughtered by the Germans.' Harmatz draws none of the usual
distinctions between Germans and Nazis. 'I put them all together,' he
says. 'And I don't feel any differently today. When I read of the
Queen Mother unveiling the statue to Bomber Harris who was responsible
for the bombing of Dresden, I was very pleased. I was very happy to
hear about Dresden itself. That was vengeance.
'Would the British and Americans ever have bombed Dresden if the
Germans had not bombed Coventry? It was revenge quite simply. Were we
not entitled to our revenge, too? People forget there were two big
fires at Dresden. The first was in 1938 when all the synagogues were
burnt down and Jews were murdered.' An outline of the story of the
Avengers was first revealed in a BBC Everyman television programme. It
told of the group who called themselves 'DIN', a Hebrew acronym for
the initials standing for 'Jewish Blood Will Be Avenged'. (The word
'Din' itself means justice). Harmatz appeared for less than a minute
in the TV programme, in shadow, wearing dark glasses and under the
pseudonym of 'Menachem'. His memoirs, to be called From The Wings, a
title chosen because he saw so much, will be published in May. Last
week in Tel Aviv, though, he told me more, much more, than he reveals
in his book. It is a story not so much from the wings as from the
centre of one of the greatest tragedies of human history, the
Holocaust.
Sitting in his apartment in the fashionable suburb of Ramat Aviv, a
block away from what had been the home of murdered Israeli Premier
Yitzhak Rabin and equally close to the flat of former Prime Minister
Shimon Peres, he told for the first time how he and his comrades
talked of the killing of six million Germans and also of the intricate
planning of an attempt to break into the Nuremberg court room and kill
Herman Goering, Rudolph Hess and the other 13 war criminals on trial
for their lives. 'It didn't work out,' said Harmatz regretfully. 'The
300 or 400 we poisoned was nothing compared with what we really wanted
to do.' To understand what happened and how it all came about, we have
to know something about Joseph Harmatz himself.
He is a small, bald, rounded man. It is difficult to imagine a less
likely candidate for the planning of executions on such a scale. As he
told me: 'Governments and armies would require vast machinery for
this. We did it all on five fingers.' But then you realise that
planning has been his speciality for decades. When the war was over,
he graduated in law and economics. He ran a French shipping line in
Israel and from 1960 until four years ago, he was a director of ORT, a
Jewish-sponsored international organisation that specialises in
vocational education. For the last 13 years in this job, Harmatz was
in London, where Michael Heseltine, as President of the Board of
Trade, and numerous Education Secretaries consulted him on setting up
vocational schools here.
He was an adviser to Unesco and sat on various UN committees. Every
African country has ORT establishments, set up with Harmatz
supervising their operations. In West Africa, they have been
responsible for building roads. In China, Harmatz advised on how small
communities could be revived and saved from the mass exodus to the big
cities. He even went to Germany to consult on overseas aid projects.
He saw the irony in that, but told me: 'It was a different world. And
I was loyal to my organisation.' Indeed, it is because of that loyalty
that he waited until he was safely retired before telling the full
story of DIN.
Harmatz was born in Lithuania, although one could never be sure. One
moment his small town of Rokishkis was in that country and the next it
was in Poland. His father was a prosperous man, who made his money
from importing British goods. 'He was very rich and had no desire to
leave the country when other people said he should go to Palestine or
to America or South Africa where a lot of them were going. He said,
'All you would find in Palestine, America or South Africa I have here
in Lithuania.' Even the outbreak of war in September 1939 didn't worry
his father. His business had been nationalised by the Russians but
then Rokishkis was to be taken over by the Germans as part of the Nazi-
Soviet pact. He just moved his family to the Lithuanian capital of
Vilna (now Vilnius) and bought three big factories, one serving the
Lithuanian Tobacco Company, one making saccharine and the third, a
soap-making plant. 'I went to school and had a great time. I graduated
the day before the Russian-German war started. I had a new girlfriend.
It was fantastic.' But with the invasion in June 1941, all that
changed. The Germans were in Vilna, a town so steeped in rabbinical
learning it was called the Jerusalem of Lithuania. They began rounding
up Jews and, before long, herding them into a ghetto. Harmatz was not
particularly religious. He was a member of the Young Communist
organisation, a fact that shaped the rest of his life and was to be
indirectly responsible for the setting up of the Avengers.
'The few Jews at my school were leftists. When war broke out, we were
called in by the authorities and because we were known as leftists, we
were all given guns and told we should protect the most important
crossings of communications and the main factories. The advance of the
Germans was absolutely unbelievable. We did not expect it.' Some
people welcomed the arrival of an army that would free them of Soviet
domination. It was a fact that came home to the teenage Harmatz very
quickly. A youngster at his school betrayed him to the Gestapo, who
called at his home. The family were out. 'So I started to hide. There
was a place under the stairs. My parents started moving to places of
people whom they knew. I was so frightened I was trembling.' When the
Nazis set up the Vilna ghetto, Harmatz recalls that 'it was a relief,
because in that mishmash, tens of thousands of Jews squeezed into that
little space, no one could find me.' From the ghetto, he got a job
working on the railway, which meant he became the family breadwinner.
His father was so distressed at being unable to get a certificate
allowing him to work that he wrote the family a note on the back of an
envelope, saying he was committing suicide. He was never seen again.
It was while working on the railway that Joseph discovered the
existence of a Jewish underground movement. There were about 200
people involved, Jews armed by the Russians who conducted whatever
resistance they could. Harmatz became a ghetto policeman, a breed both
revered and reviled in the area. Some police helped the Germans round
up Jews. But others manned the gates of the ghetto. That was Joseph's
job.
'Many of our people had come from camps of armed forces where they
would work. Through our connections with people outside the Communist
Party we would buy guns. I would let the people who had guns in
through the gates. A guy called Baruch Goldstein would come through an
entrance to the ghetto, which was very high up. When he had guns, he
would raise his finger. So we started pushing and shouting and he
would sneak in with guns under his clothes.' The Jewish underground
met in cellars. 'We were instructed in the use of arms, pistols and
grenades.' When the ghetto was liquidated, they went into the sewers.
'The tunnels were so narrow that when I saw The Third Man, I was
jealous. I contemplated committing suicide except that if I did, it
would have blocked the way of the people behind me.' From the sewers,
they moved to the forests, 40 kilometres south of Vilna. By then,
Harmatz's mother and two brothers had disappeared. 'We assumed all the
Jews in the ghetto had been taken out to the town of Polnar nearby and
shot. We knew nothing of the concentration camps.' He and his fellow
partisans, as they now were known, concentrated their energies on
blowing up railway trains and destroying convoys. 'Sometimes, we had
battles with the Germans.' Their biggest difficulty was food, which
was taken from villages sometimes 30 miles away. 'We would take
wagons, which we had to fill with food and then we would take a cow or
a pig (Jewish tradition allows any law to be broken in the course of
saving lives) which you couldn't put on a wagon, so it was a very
slow, very dangerous journey.' Dozens of partisans lost their lives.
'I never expected to survive,' says Harmatz today. 'Never!' On the
other hand, the Jewish police who had been responsible for killing
their fellow Jews did expect to survive, but in the final round-up on
the road to Auschwitz, the police were taken, too. Some thought they
had escaped. 'They came to us and expected to save themselves. But
they didn't do so. People had seen what they had done, and in the
forest eight of them were tried, sentenced and executed. One was shot
immediately after the liberation. He thought that he was also
liberated.' The notes of the investigation sit in the drawer alongside
his diary.
It was in the forests that the idea of some kind of revenge, should
any of them survive, was first born. The partisan leader was a young
man who, when he wasn't firing his machine gun or lobbing a grenade,
or working with Harmatz setting fuses to railway lines, was writing
poetry. His name was Abba Kovner. One of his principal lieutenants was
a girl named Vitka. Later, they would marry, although most of their
time was spent planning the day of vengeance.
Kovner was a charismatic character with a shock of black hair and
mesmerising eyes. He was the perfect leader, although Harmatz would
later take over from him. It was he who coined the phrase of Jews
going 'like lambs to the slaughter'. 'What he said has been
misinterpreted,' Harmatz says now. 'He told Jews not to go like lambs
to the slaughter.' I asked him something I had always wanted to know.
Was he resentful of the way six million did go, mostly without
resistance, to the gas chambers? 'I have to say we were disappointed.
Later on we realised that the German tactics were to demoralise Jews
before killing them. And when you are demoralised and you are weak and
you are hungry and you haven't slept for nights and for weeks and you
have your children around you, you are ready. You don't mind. Let them
do to us what they want to do. There is no power, no strength, no
meaning to life. And that is one of the things that made us hate the
Germans as we did. We saw the process. We saw what happened. We saw
that people who were fine elements in normal life were made
schmatters.' The Yiddish word means 'rags' or 'rubbish', but, in this
context, much more or perhaps much less than that.
Harmatz's response to witnessing these events was unequivocal. 'We saw
what the Germans did. And not just to Jews. We saw the trains carrying
Russian prisoners and after the train had passed, hundreds of dead
soldiers on the line those Russian prisoners. The thought running
through our minds was not just that six million Jews had been killed,
but the many more millions who would have been born to those six
million and the contributions they could have made. If you ask me what
I think of Germans today, I do not think of that. I think of those who
would have been born to their victims.
'I am not being racist in saying that. I am not racist against the
Arabs. In the War of Independence here I had my gun and I shot Arabs
but only in their legs. I didn't want to kill them. I knew I had to
defend myself and if I hit them in the legs they wouldn't be able to
run after me. I didn't feel like that when the Allies took Germany .'
Once the war in their part of Europe was over, there were new tasks.
Harmatz, in his early twenties, set out to help to organise the then
illegal immigration of Jews into British-mandated Palestine. 'And then
Abba Kovner and Vitka came to talk to me. Would I think of joining
them? That was the beginning of the story of our vengeance.' Others
were thinking along similar lines. Members of the Jewish Brigade, a
British Army division made up largely of Jewish Palestinians, had
begged to be allowed to move into Germany, but had got no further than
Italy. Some of their members would, before long, personally execute SS
personnel. In one operation, dressed as military policemen, they 'took
in for questioning' all the members of a Nazi cell and strangled them
except for one SS man who was thrown, alive, off a cliff.
What Abba and Vitka and now Joseph Harmatz had in mind, though, was
much more ambitious. 'There were 50 of us, working at first in
Bucharest. We went to Italy to meet the brigade. We wanted to gain
friends for our aims and ideas and we thought the best communication
and understanding would come from people who were fighting people. We
would be soldiers talking to soldiers about our aims. I speak of
vengeance.
'The meeting was a wonderful one. They received us with such
friendship, such deep understanding. They didn't expect to have people
who had fought in forests and ghettos. They didn't expect to find
anyone alive. You could feel the warmth. Individually, personally, we
had never had such warmth.' By now the stories of the death camps were
coming out. By some miracle, Joseph's mother had survived and they met
again. His two brothers had ended up with the rest of the six million
in a lime pit or in an oven. Having the news confirmed only spurred
him to take action.
The first move was to contact the Zionist leadership in Tel Aviv and
Jerusalem. Abba Kovner was chosen to go. It was a disappointing
moment. David Ben Gurion, who headed the Jewish Agency and would later
become Israel's first Prime Minister, and his closest colleagues, all
of them later members of his Cabinet, were hostile to the very notion
of revenge. Zalman Shazar, later to be an Israeli President, told
Harmatz: 'We have other priorities. We will take revenge on the
Germans as a state.' 'His idea of revenge was the reparations that
Israel would later exact from the Germans,' Harmatz says, and then he
adds: 'It was not mine.' The one person who was ready to help was
Chaim Weizmann, who became Israel's first President. An eminent
scientist, Weizmann had known Winston Churchill since his appointment
as Munitions Minister in 1917. A year before, Weizmann had discovered
a revolutionary means of extracting acetone, an essential ingredient
in explosives. Kovner told Weizmann of the plan to poison the bread
intended for former SS men now being held in camps where until
recently they had been the guards. 'He approved of our plans and
recommended a scientist who would make a poison for us,' says Harmatz
now. 'He was told about the four places we intended to infiltrate.'
Harmatz told me, for the first time, just how intricate had been the
process of involving Weizmann, and all that he represented. Even in
his book, he calls him simply 'an elder', but to me agreed that
Weizmann was the pivot in the whole operation. 'I did not want the
fact to have come from me,' he explained.
They did not, however, tell Weizmann about what was called in Hebrew
'Tochnit Aluf' Plan One. This was far more audacious and much more
deadly than merely poisoning a few thousand loaves of bread. 'We did
not want to frighten him,' Harmatz says now. He goes on to explain in
stark detail Plan One: 'We were going to poison the water supply of
Nuremberg.' Harmatz had been in charge of drawing up the scheme. 'We
had managed to get someone into the filtration plant. We had found
ways of diverting the water so only Germans would be hit. The part of
the city where the Allies were was all ready to be cut off. We just
had to wait for the poison to be delivered.' Eventually, Weizmann made
contact with the scientist who would make the poison, a professor at
what was then called the Sieff Institute in the town of Rehovot in
Palestine. (It has since been renamed the Weizmann Institute). Harmatz
says he has no idea why Weizmann agreed to co-operate. 'I can only
think that he was the leader of the Jewish people and that, like many
of these leaders, he had the feeling he had not done enough during the
years of the Holocaust. I am so sure of that. I can tell you that some
of the great leaders had not done enough. Maybe things would have
happened differently and I think that when he faced Abba Kovner, he
meant it when he said, 'If I had been with you and as young as you, I
hope I would have done the same.' The professor delivered the poison,
a substance, Harmatz says, that had no smell or colour and could not
be detected in the water supply. Kovner took a British steamer from
Alexandria en route to France, the poison hidden in his cabin in tins
of condensed milk. Just off the coast of Toulon, British police, who
had been on board all the time, arrested him. The poison was
apparently thrown overboard by another member of the group. Kovner was
taken back to Egypt and imprisoned.
Harmatz claims to have overseen the plan from Paris. When the group
heard about what for them was the disaster, they went into mourning.
To this day, Harmatz is not sure who gave the game away. Since the
only people outside the group who knew about it were members of the
Jewish authorities and their own underground army, the Haganah, the
suspicion persists that the Zionist movement itself was responsible.
It was frightened of the possible effect on their plans for a Jewish
state to say nothing of not wanting to be associated with the mass
murder.
'That was when Plan Two was put into effect the only one we had told
Chaim Weizmann about.' Four camps housing SS prisoners were earmarked,
Harmatz says, including Dachau, the first of the concentration camps.
There were 33,000 SS men there. This and two other schemes came to
nought when rumours of the 'raid' leaked out. The only remaining camp
was what had been Stalag 13 at Nuremberg.
Joseph Harmatz says he was there to plan and then carry out the
operation painting, with a fine artist's brush, 3,000 loaves of bread
with a mixture of arsenic and glue prepared by another scientist.
Some of the details of the raid were revealed in the Everyman
programme, in which Vitka Kovner took part. Others came out in a
fictional book by the BBC correspondent Michael Elkins. Harmatz's
story is recalled in his diary - which he had been ordered not to keep
for security reasons. 'I wrote it in Lithuanian, which I knew none of
the others could read. I have forgotten the language since then, so I
had to get someone to translate it for me.' It tells how Liebke
Distel, one of the group, had been working in the stores at the bakery
for some time and had told them the routine there. The operation was
planned for a weekend when the bakery, just outside the camp, would be
understaffed. It would have to be on a Saturday night because the
black bread planned for delivery on Sunday would be eaten only by the
Germans. The American guards had white bread on Sundays. 'We believed
we would kill about 12,000 people,' he says now. 'We smeared the bread
on the back of the four-cornered bread. On the bottom of the loaf
there was always a little bit of flour which we used as the base. We
had worked out how many people would eat it because we knew each loaf
was cut into four pieces and each prisoner would get a quarter of a
loaf. That means 3,000 loaves, good for 12,000 people.
'What was very important was that the material we used was arsenic, a
poison which settles, so we had to have people mixing it all the time
while I was smearing it on to the bread. We had at the beginning
thought we would just inject the stuff, but then we discovered it lost
its strength in the baking. So there was no other way, but to paint
it. To enhance the secrecy, we called it the 'schnapps'.' As far as
Joseph Harmatz was concerned, it was going to be a wonderful day.
'That morning, I thought of my family. I felt very good that a job was
going to be accomplished. Excited? Not excited because we had to think
of all of us finishing the story and not being caught.' The diary
records the intricate planning involved. 'At seven in the morning,
seven of our people would enter the building and two more would enter
between three and 3.30 in the afternoon. We would have the schnapps
brought in with us. At 22.00hrs we would leave by car for
Czechoslovakia. My diary says how we cleaned everything out of the
apartment where we were staying, but how it all had to look normal. I
wrote down that the day before, at 8.45, I had to be at the dentist
and I was at the dentist. Unbelievable!' Another reason that night was
chosen was they knew there would be a full moon. They couldn't use
electric light. But still things didn't go completely according to
plan. That April day in 1945 was windy. A shutter clattered and
alerted some bakery workers and the guards. 'We were prepared for
that. We had already simulated a robbery, having some loaves stacked
in a few sacks by the window, in case anyone came. Bread was very
precious at the time. It could be exchanged for anything, so it was
not at all surprising there should be a robbery. The bakery people
came while we hid under the floorboards and some of us jumped from the
window. When they saw there had been a 'burglary', they left.' So the
task went on. But the poison didn't work as well as they hoped. 'It
wasn't strong enough. We know 300 to 400 men were killed, but it
should have been more. The newspapers later told of how the US
hospital had pumped the stomachs of more than 1,000 Germans.' After
the exercise, a car was waiting beneath a window and took them to the
Czech border, where US troops stopped them. They were freed when
Joseph gave one of the Americans a watch he was wearing.
IT WAS THEN, Harmatz says, that they began on the abortive Plan Three.
'We were going to kill all the Nuremberg defendants. We were
distinctly unhappy about all the playing about that there was, the
questioning, asking whether they were guilty or not guilty, all the
time talking of bringing justice to the 15 prisoners. So we thought we
would do it for them.' The idea was to storm the courtroom and kill
the men with machine guns, not bothering about the consequences. 'We
had it worked out very carefully so that only the prisoners would be
killed as they sat in the dock. They were being guarded by the
American First Division. So I started looking for Jewish officers who
could help us. I knew we could do it with an insider but not without.
I found three and talked to them and asked if they would cooperate.
But we couldn't find one who would assist. I am not complaining about
that. I mean, an officer of the American army is first of all an
officer.' With some sadness Harmatz recalls how that plan, too, had to
be abandoned. There's a footnote to this story, though. When Harmatz
was appointed to an ORT position in Geneva, he succeeded a man who
told him they had met before when he was an American officer at
Nuremberg.
Now, Harmatz claims to have a certain sense of satisfied vengeance in
the very fact that he is here to tell his story. After the war, he
resumed his studies, got his jobs with ORT and fought in four Israeli-
Arab wars (the last one with his elder son).
Abba Kovner was never satisfied to have just closed the book. 'He
wanted me to join him in a new operation, but I told him we had a
state now. It was for our government to take action.' It wouldn't be
long before Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped in Argentina and Abba Kovner
settled down to being Israel's leading poet. He died 10 years ago.
In his book, Harmatz quotes a Kovner verse which could well serve as
his own epitaph: 'Oh my friends, why are you silent If the silence is
not?' The agony of that silence is evident still, as you see this
elderly man sitting in his comfortable chair, contemplating all that
has gone before him. There are still no apologies. There never will be
any. But there is still within him a cry, a need for people to
understand.
I asked him if he thought he was psychologically disturbed when he and
his friends planned the executions. 'Very probably I was, yes.' But
you know what he is thinking: something had to be done.
'When we speak of resistance, anything we did that was not following
German orders was resistance. A woman in a concentration camp who
refused to do something she was ordered to do was a greater hero than
I was. It was resistance against the Germans, by just giving a piece
of bread to someone when you were told not to do so. And should I look
to my conscience? Maybe I was a bastard. But there is no pardonez-moi.
There have never been any such feelings of conscience. So many other
people should look to their consciences, not us. I want to tell you
something. Then and for years later, what we did straightened out the
backs of many people.'
Michael Freedland
Joseph Harmatz's 'From the Wings' will be published by The Book Guild
in May. Michael Freedland was, for 23 years, the presenter of the BBC/
LBC series 'You Don't Have to be Jewish'. He writes widely on Jewish
affairs