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00:08These individuals are all in their 90s.
00:14Grandparents leading ordinary lives.
00:17But 70 years ago, they were part of a secret organisation
00:22that planned one of the most terrible acts of revenge in history.
00:30In May 1945, Hitler's thousand-year right lay in ruins.
00:39Evidence of the mass slaughter of Europe's Jews began to emerge.
00:46And the most senior Nazis were put on trial.
00:52But for one group of Holocaust survivors, this wasn't enough.
01:09They dedicated themselves to seeking the ultimate retribution.
01:15Killing six million Germans for the six million Jews' murder.
01:20They called themselves...
01:23The Avengers.
01:24The Avengers.
01:28The agenda is to force them to be a mass.
01:32People, people and their...
01:35All of them.
01:37All of them.
01:37They saw...
01:40...their t'anachite.
01:43Now, based on the testimony of the last remaining survivors, some speaking for the first time and with extraordinary new
01:52evidence, this is their story.
02:18In 1985, this house was the location for an extraordinary meeting.
02:29Gathered there were members of a group of Holocaust survivors.
02:33The leader was the famous poet Abba Kovner.
02:40Kovner had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
02:43But before he died, he wanted his group to record the details of one of the most astonishing stories to
02:49emerge from World War II.
02:51For years, these tapes have been kept in a vault.
02:55They have only recently come to light.
02:59Even those who are there have never heard them.
03:09The one who was a leader of the army.
03:14The most important and important thing was that the army was not a failure.
03:23It was a very good and bad for us.
03:28that we are going to make a decision for the Germans
03:33and a non-conventional act
03:38that we are going to make a decision for 6 million people.
03:45Just as the Nazis had murdered 6 million Jews,
03:49Kovna's avengers had planned the mass slaughter of 6 million Germans.
03:55He even gave their organisation a name.
03:58They were called the Nakam.
04:00It means Vengeance.
04:12The story of the Avengers began in Lithuania in Northern Europe
04:17during the darkest days of World War II.
04:21In June 1941, the capital, Vilnius, home to 80,000 Jews,
04:28was stormed by the Nazis.
04:32Within weeks, the Jews were rounded up and imprisoned in a ghetto.
04:47Then came a horror beyond all imaginings.
04:51More than 60 years later, Yosef Hamatz, one of Kovna's future avengers,
04:57returned with his family to the site of one of the worst massacres of the war.
05:04Hamatz died in 2016.
05:06This home video is one of the few accounts he gave
05:09of an appalling atrocity that he witnessed.
05:15He was 18 years old when the Nazis ordered him to join a work detail
05:18in the nearby forest of Ponar.
05:23There were 76,000 Jews.
05:27They took a group from the village.
05:32They brought them here.
05:35They destroyed them with scrims.
05:39They took them to the village.
05:42The prisoners were stripped, then shot in the back of the head,
05:48their bodies piling on top of each other.
05:52Hamatz's work detail was then ordered to incinerate the corpses.
05:57The pictures that I saw,
05:59how a Jewish man was born,
06:02and his head was not broken from the sky,
06:05and the skin was gone from the sky.
06:09How a young man and a young man were born
06:14and a young man were born,
06:16and how a mother was raised by them.
06:19and the two of them died.
06:22But when you see it and it's not in you, it's going to take you a lot of time.
06:28If you want to die, you can die.
06:37At the end of 1941, stories of the Panar massacres were relayed to Abba Kovna.
06:44The future leader of the Avengers was then a 23-year-old art student in Vilnius.
06:51Abba Kovna was studying in the same time as I studied.
06:58All of them were loved here, as I can say.
07:04It was clear, first of all, he was a small person, let me tell you.
07:10He was a small person, small person, which I felt like.
07:21Kovna convened a meeting to rally the resistance in the ghetto.
07:25The Jews of Vilnius, he said, must not go like lambs to the slaughter.
07:31They must fight back.
07:37In September 1943, the final solution arrived in Vilnius.
07:46As happened all across Europe, the Jews were rounded up and deported to the death camps.
07:54One of those transported was Rachel Glixman.
07:57She was a 19-year-old student and future avenger.
08:02The Vilnius Jews were told they were being moved to Gittos.
08:04In the last day of the Gittos,
08:07the Jewish government was determined that we were close.
08:14We were close to the Gittos.
08:16We were close to the Gittos.
08:29The Vilnius Jews were told they were being moved to labor camps in the east.
08:35We didn't believe that it was to work.
08:38We all knew.
08:43It was not to go to the village.
08:58Kovna now activated a plan to escape the ghetto.
09:08With so little time, only those armed that could carry on the fight would be smuggled out.
09:18Hasia Varshavskii, another future avenger, had to abandon her mother.
09:24She was just 18 years old.
09:26She remained so traumatized by her experiences that she has never spoken publicly
09:31and even now will not appear on camera.
09:34She was just 19 years old.
09:40She was just 11 years old.
09:43I I thought about her.
09:44She was not removing me.
09:48She was and this was how I felt about the helicopter her family and her care of.
09:55She was chanting the daughter of Gittos.
09:58The children of Gittos like the mother of Gittos.
10:08Kovna's resistance fighters made their escape through the sewers.
10:29I have to take care of them, so I have to take care of them.
10:42When I came from the beautiful hall, I was in a quiet room.
10:50The church was so small, so it was all about me.
11:01Kovna, Josef Hametz and Hasia Varschavsky now fled into the forests around Vilnius.
11:10They would go on to form the core of the Avengers.
11:15After two years of fighting with the partisans, Abakovna's Jewish resistance fighters joined
11:21up with the Russian army as it swept through Lithuania in July 1944.
11:34When they entered the capital, Vilnius, they found that of the 80,000 Jews who had lived in the city,
11:41just a few thousand had survived. Hasia Varschavsky had lost her parents and her brother.
11:50Josef Hametz, survivor of the Panar forest, lost his brother and father.
11:57Kovna's mother had been shot at Panar.
12:05But at this stage, they had no idea about the full horror of what had happened to Europe's Jews.
12:26Kovna's family remembers the effect news of the Holocaust had on him.
12:32I think that it was a good thing that he was spotted on him.
12:35It turned to him into the world.
12:39I think that from the Maivar, who I thought that was a professor of the history of the Holocaust,
12:43that he was a man who was a man who was under the area.
12:46He was a man who was under the air.
12:53He was a man who was under the air in his own hands.
13:11Kovner's thirst for revenge led him to look for like-minded souls.
13:20He sought them among the thousands of rootless Jews now criss-crossing Europe.
13:26Many were trying to flee to a land where they thought they might always be safe.
13:31Israel.
13:35Their root took them via the Romanian capital, Bucharest.
13:42In the tapes from the 1985 meeting, Kovner revealed the kind of person he was looking to recruit for his
13:47revenge.
14:06One such person who made it to Bucharest was Leopold Wasserman, then just 21 years old, nicknamed Poldeg.
14:16This was a dream that I was in Poland.
14:22This was the first time I was in the U.S.
14:24This was the first time I was in the U.S.
14:30This was the first time I was in the war.
14:33The first time I was in the war, the people who were living in the war were to be the
14:39first time.
14:41I was in the war.
14:44I was in the war.
14:46I was in the war.
14:49I didn't think I would be.
14:57Simcha Rotem, nicknamed Kadjig, also ended up in Bucharest.
15:04Today he is the last survivor of the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto.
15:18The people were really dying,
15:23on the outside, on the outside.
15:31How could it be to be?
15:35You know what I was saying?
15:39I came in the morning one day,
15:43and I was listening to Buchi of Tynokit.
15:49Listen, listen, listen, look at my eyes.
15:54I see a woman like this.
15:58She took a Tynokit.
16:01I see a woman in my life.
16:09What are you doing?
16:13What are you doing?
16:14I'm going to ask you.
16:24Poldek and Kadjig are called to a secret meeting.
16:30The Kadjig arrived at the hospital.
16:33He said to them,
16:35he said to them,
16:35he said to them,
16:39the children and the Kaaba.
16:42Kovner unveiled an astonishing plan.
16:48He proposed they kill 6 million Germans,
16:52for the 6 million Jews exterminated.
16:56An eye for an eye.
16:59I think, as if they were children, we would be able to support them.
17:12I'm doing a change in my opinion.
17:15I'm not going to Palestine, as they said,
17:21but I'm staying there, in Europe.
17:26In order to fight Germany.
17:44But Kovner had not yet worked out precisely how to inflict his revenge.
17:50He decided to seek an alliance with some Jews he thought could help.
18:00While Kovner was in Bucharest, a British army unit, like no other, was advancing through Italy.
18:08The Jewish brigade consisted entirely of Jews from British-occupied Palestine.
18:13Trained by the British army, none had seen or experienced the Holocaust.
18:18Among them, Chaim Miller.
18:21In 1943, we knew what was happening in Germany.
18:28We didn't know things, but we knew something happened.
18:32We were Jews from there.
18:36Then, in spring 1945, as they reached Tarvisio on the Austrian-Italian border,
18:43they started meeting Holocaust survivors who shared their stories.
18:51Enraged, a secret unit within the brigade decided to seek revenge.
19:01Their target was the SS, the elite of the Nazi machine.
19:07The SS ran the death squads.
19:10And extermination camps.
19:25Acting on tip-offs from informers,
19:27one such operation targeted a suspected SS soldier in hiding near the Austrian border.
19:37Chaim Miller is the last surviving member of that group of assassins.
19:47He was able to send the soldiers to the Jajitsu's war.
19:53He came to us.
19:55They took us this time.
19:56We went to Italy.
20:02He visaged us some fleets.
20:14and he did a job.
20:16He told me about this and this, yes.
20:22You did this and this, yes.
20:24You did it and you did it.
20:27Is it true that you did it?
20:28Yes, I did it.
20:34It's not good if everything is like this,
20:36but you have to pay for it.
20:43One unit and everything.
20:52No one knows exactly how many alleged SS soldiers the brigade killed.
20:58But estimates suggest it may have been more than a hundred.
21:07In July 1945, Kovner went to Italy and met the brigade.
21:14He hoped they would support his plans to kill millions.
21:18But they refused, telling him they were only after definite war criminals.
21:24If Kovner wanted to commit his indiscriminate act of slaughter,
21:29he would have to do it without them.
21:40By now, Kovner's avengers had spread across Europe.
21:45The HQ was in Paris.
21:48Running day-to-day operations was Kovner's deputy,
21:52Hashel Reichman,
21:53who had fought with the partisans in Ukraine.
21:57He'd lost his parents and his sister to the Nazis.
22:01Mavau would travel constantly between the different cells
22:04in Germany and in Romania and in Poland and in Italy.
22:13Pauldeck, the Auschwitz survivor, was based in Italy.
22:30Pauldeck came up with an ingenious source of cash.
22:34Forged five-pound notes that the Nazis had hoped could undermine the British economy.
22:40We were founded in Italy.
22:44The war was the one that we received from war or from war,
22:49and we gave it to the end of the war.
22:55Pauldeck, the Nazis had made Jews in concentration camps, forged the notes.
23:00Now it was bankrolling the Avengers.
23:11From the HQ in Paris, Avenger hit squads were dispatched to several major German cities.
23:20Survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, Kajic was in charge of Munich.
23:26Josef Hamatz, witness to the slaughter at Panar,
23:30commanded the Nuremberg cell.
23:34Vilnius veteran, Hasia Warschavsky,
23:37went to the north of Germany to run Hamburg.
23:42As Pauldeck traveled supplying each cell with cash,
23:45he saw how the war had brought Germany to its knees.
23:50We were able to see the German figures.
23:56They were able to get to the Nuremberg,
23:58and they were able to have a little coffee with all of them.
24:06The Germans were able to get to the Nuremberg,
24:10and they were able to have a little coffee with all of them.
24:14But they had the Germans, not of all of them.
24:19It was able to get to the area of the Nazis.
24:29The Germanians, the men of France,
24:30The Germans was able to take a living room,
24:30because they were able to deal with them.
24:30They were able to help them if they were able to buy them.
24:34By now, Kovne and Reichmann had worked out how to commit their act of mass killing.
24:41In the 1985 tapes, they talk of how they approach their mission.
25:09They will be a fighter.
25:14That chosen weapon was poison.
25:21The idea is to make a lot of such a way that is to the mass mass.
25:27It is a heavy burden of men, men and men.
25:34that this is not a point,
25:36not German-class war,
25:37not a war-truck or a war-truck,
25:40or a war-truck,
25:40or a war-truck.
25:40All, all.
25:43Like...
25:44...like a word in the word,
25:46from the word of God,
25:48a word, like you said, biblical,
25:50a word of God.
25:54The word of God is about the world,
25:57in the history of the world,
26:11In December 1945, Abakovna's Jewish avengers had been dispatched to the smashed remains
26:18of four German cities.
26:23Their plan was to infiltrate the waterworks in each city and then poison the water supply
26:29to six million people.
26:33The only thing missing was the lethal chemical itself.
27:03In search of the poison, Abakovna traveled to Palestine.
27:10In Tel Aviv, he claimed to have met a famous Jewish chemist and future president of Israel,
27:17Chaim Weizmann.
27:21Abakovna's account of their alleged conversation about the plot can be heard here for the very
27:26first time.
27:42Abakovna claims that Weizmann then referred him to another chemist, Efraim Katsir, another
27:50future president of Israel.
28:06Kovner had his poison.
28:15On December the 14th, 1945, he left Israel, disguised in a British army uniform, with
28:22the poison hidden in cans of condensed milk.
28:30Back in Europe, the Nukam cells were now in position across Germany.
28:52Their plan to poison the water supplies was well advanced.
28:56In Nuremberg, a team of Avengers infiltrated the waterworks.
29:02Their leader was Yostef Hamatz.
29:17Back at Avenger HQ, Pasher Reichman was waiting for Kovner's poison to arrive.
29:31Instead, he received a message.
29:37Kovner had been arrested and the poison thrown into the sea.
29:46This plan of revenge was something that held them together.
29:50And when news reached them that it was all over, after all the effort that they'd put
29:57into it, and after all the hopes that they'd pinned on it, my father, like everybody else,
30:03is devastated.
30:08To this day, no one knows who gave Kovner away.
30:14Yehuda Friedman, known as Edek, was part of the Munich cell.
30:18Oh, you've been warned.
30:23You've been warned!
30:24I've been warned, no one of them today.
30:25Come on, come on.
30:32They're killed in the sea.
30:32Well, I'm afraid, I'm afraid.
30:34You're done.
30:35We'll be warned of them and have they had no better.
30:37I'm afraid of them.
30:53But it wasn't quite over for the Avengers.
30:57Before his arrest, Kovner had laid the groundwork for another plan.
31:03Plan B.
31:09Plan B was more focused.
31:11It was aimed entirely at the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the SS.
31:18The intention was not to kill just a few individuals like the Jewish Brigade had done,
31:25but tens of thousands.
31:28Huge numbers were being held in prisoner of war camps awaiting trial.
31:33They knew very well that the entire Holocaust operation
31:38was carried out by the SS.
31:41Therefore, by killing SS officers,
31:45they were carrying out a direct revenge against criminals.
31:55Josef Hamatz, the head of the Nuremberg cell,
31:58went to scout the prisoner of war camp there.
32:02He noticed that the Americans provided all the food,
32:07except the bread.
32:08That was made locally.
32:14The bakery would be their way in.
32:18The plan was, first of all, to get hired as workers in the bakery,
32:25in the huge bakery of the camp.
32:28Once in, they could lace the bread with poison and kill thousands.
32:39With Kovner in prison, his number two, Pasha Reichmann, took charge.
32:45He split the Avengers into two units,
32:48each heading to a different SS prisoner of war camp.
32:53Dachau, the former concentration camp just outside Munich,
32:57was the target for Kajik and Edek.
33:02Stalag 13 in Nuremberg
33:04became the target for Josef Hamatz and his friend Ariel Distel,
33:09known as Leibke.
33:24On the 1985 recording,
33:27Josef Hamatz reveals how Leibke infiltrated the bakery.
33:33He was a woman that was raised in the morning.
33:50Maybe he was a man who was raised in the morning in the morning,
33:55but if you remember what happens to him,
33:57we had to tell him that Leibke is a woman.
34:02The second bakery, targeted by the Avengers, lay 150 miles away, at Dachau.
34:12Edek used his experience before the war to get a job there.
34:30With the agents in place, they worked out how many SS soldiers they could kill.
34:37Yosef Hametz did the calculations for Nuremberg.
35:02All they needed now was the poison.
35:10With Kovners lost during his arrest, Poldak contacted an agent who could source arsenic from contacts in the tanning industry.
35:30It was the police, and he did the crime.
35:38The date for their revenge could now be set.
35:4213th of April, 1946.
35:57Information reached my father that something went wrong in Dachau.
36:05Dallayla.
36:07Dallayla.
36:08Diyah Amudin Shalala.
36:10Umasad.
36:12Rashi Tonot.
36:13And Makhono.
36:14Alou alayla.
36:16I'm going to admit, before the situation,
36:20that Nuremberg was ready.
36:23Everything was ready.
36:25Dachau.
36:26Everything was ready.
36:28And all of them were ready.
36:32Dachau.
36:32Fearing the American authorities running Dachau might be onto them,
36:37Pasha faced a choice.
36:39Continue with Kajik and Edek's operation.
36:42Or abort.
36:45Dachau.
36:46Dachau.
36:48It was a very, very difficult decision to make.
36:56Masu.
37:01They say,
37:03Here Amo
37:03You will not go to it.
37:09You will not khuras before you escape.
37:15They will take us.
37:15Oh, ah Tapi.
37:20One action here.
37:27All hopes for revenge now rested with the Nuremberg team.
37:35Two days before the Jewish avengers planned mass killing,
37:39the arsenic arrived in Nuremberg.
37:43Leibke Distel, the man who infiltrated the bakery,
37:47died in 2000.
37:49But in the 1985 tapes,
37:51he revealed how he smuggled at him.
38:18The hot water bottles were stashed under the floorboards.
38:21Until they were kneaded.
38:24The plan was to poison the loaves on the Sunday,
38:27after the final shift of the week.
38:29That bread would then be delivered to the SS prisoners on the Monday morning.
38:48During the guard's shift change,
38:52Leibke and two other avengers got to work.
39:12The arsenic was mixed with glue to stick it to the undersides of the bread.
39:25They had until sunrise to poison as many loaves as possible.
39:34And so we continued to work.
39:37We opened the 1000s.
39:42We continued, we continued, we continued.
39:45We had a lot of space in this place.
39:50Then, at 3 o'clock in the morning, I'm going to sleep.
39:53I'm going to sleep.
39:55I'm going to sleep.
39:57I'm going to sleep.
40:04I'm going to sleep.
40:06I'm going to sleep.
40:21I'm going to sleep.
40:21At this point, we saw something that happened.
40:35We had a machine, a machine, a machine, a machine.
40:43There were a machine.
40:44At the moment, I was going to sleep.
41:03He came to see a thing, nothing.
41:37Back in Paris,
41:39Pasha Reichman was desperate for news.
41:42He decided to activate an agent.
41:44He chose Rachel Glicksman,
41:47the young girl who had survived the ghetto in Vilnius.
41:58It was a high-risk assignment.
42:09Then they told me,
42:10like this,
42:11when they look at you,
42:13we don't know them only when you see it.
42:16From the head.
42:19The task was to count the bodies being removed from the camp.
42:24When we came to Nirenberg,
42:27I met, on the ground,
42:29many very few people,
42:31in general,
42:32who came or saw what happened to their employees.
42:35The team was on the ground,
42:49who saw the ambulance,
42:50who saw the ambulance.
42:51The job was a very, very happy,
43:19The official investigation into the incident claimed more than 2,000 Germans had been poisoned.
43:27But no one had died.
43:41But Israeli historian Michael Bar Zahar has spoken to several of the Avengers involved.
43:48His controversial, personal view is that Plan B may have been more deadly than reported.
43:55I believe by the different testimonies that there were about a hundred or more people died.
44:04I believe that they didn't publish it into their paper because of the panic that could have erupted in many
44:13of the camps.
44:28Nearly 4,000 Jewish refugees arrive at the port of Haifa, Palestine.
44:35Shortly after the team made their escape, the Avengers received another message from Kovna.
44:41Stop the killing. Come to Israel and help build a new homeland.
44:50It was already a night.
44:53We looked at the city with all the children.
44:59There was a quiet, quiet.
45:01There was a quiet and quiet.
45:11There was a peaceful and quiet and quiet.
45:16There was a quiet.
45:17They were quiet.
45:22More than 70 years on, only six of 50 Avengers remain alive.
45:29Decades later, they're all scarred by their experiences and conflicted by their actions.
45:47They have to be able to do it, but we are still working.
45:55It was a long time.
45:58It was a problem that we didn't do it.
46:02Maybe with the water and the water and the water.
46:08It didn't have a place like that we had.
46:16We have to do it.
46:18I don't think I'm going to do it against a man.
46:19I think that in the world my love will not be sad.
46:25But it doesn't mean that I'm able to stay in the same way
46:29that I did it against my father,
46:34against my father, against my mother, against my father.
46:37And I think that in the end of the day,
46:38I can see it on the day,
46:41when I was in the middle of the night.
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