What if the Nakam attempted to kill six million Germans?

Would the Nakam have been able to kill six million Germans?

  • Yes

    Votes: 5 4.9%
  • No

    Votes: 86 84.3%
  • Unsure

    Votes: 11 10.8%

  • Total voters
    102
In the aftermath of World War II, there were a group of Jews called 'the Jewish Avengers' which would perform extrajudicial executions of anyone they thought was a Nazi. These Avengers were made up of ghetto resistance fighters, partisans, Jewish soldiers of the British Army, etc. This vigilante justice was also meted out to Nazi collaborators.

However, for one group called the Nakam (The Hebrew word for revenge), assassinating individual Nazis was not good enough for them. Led by Abba Kovner, their plan was in the vein of 'an eye for an eye'

Their plan? Poison the water supplies of Hamburg, Berlin, Munich, Nuremberg, and Weimar and kill six million Germans, mirorring the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust.

Codenamed Plan A, this was a plan Abba Kovner seriously considered and was prepared to carry out.

Kovner went to Palestine to both get the poison and support from the Jewish leadership. After David Ben Gurion rejected the plan, Kovner went to Ephraim Katzir and his brother, two microbiologists in Chaim Weizmann's chemistry lab for the poison. The Katzirs gave Kovner the poison. Kovner and a accomplice then boarded a British destroyer, en route to Germany. However, Kovner was arrested while en route, but he was able to throw the poison overboard. As a result, Plan A was abandoned and Kovner was imprisoned in Cairo for a few months.

However, there was a similarly planned attack, which was carried out, on 12,200 SS guards being held as prisoners in Germany. The Katziers later claimed the poison Kovner requested was for this plan and not for Plan A. Nobody died in this attack.

No one knows how Kovner was arrested. Some say the Zionists tipped off the British because they feared Kovner's plan, had it been carried out, would've blown back on the Jewish people and prevented them from obtaining a homeland in Palestine.

But what if Kovner had not been arrested and made his way back to Germany and attempted to carry out this attack?
 
This is a very interesting historical tidbit that I've never heard about. It would make a great PoD for a Grimdark Cold War timeline.

I highly doubt they would be able to kill 6 million Germans by poisoning Hamburg, Berlin, Munich, Nuremberg, and Weimar considering practically everyone in all those cities would have to die to reach around 6 million. That being said, they could likely kill in the tens to hundreds of thousands, and almost completely spoil any good negotiating positions for the establishment of Israel ("We changed our minds about the Palestine thing, have fun in Alaska with the Yiddish Policeman's Union".)

Also, you never know when when an anti-Jewish riot is going to spring Fuhrer Donitz from Spandau...
 
This is a very interesting historical tidbit that I've never heard about. It would make a great PoD for a Grimdark Cold War timeline.

I highly doubt they would be able to kill 6 million Germans by poisoning Hamburg, Berlin, Munich, Nuremberg, and Weimar considering practically everyone in all those cities would have to die to reach around 6 million. That being said, they could likely kill in the tens to hundreds of thousands, and almost completely spoil any good negotiating positions for the establishment of Israel ("We changed our minds about the Palestine thing, have fun in Alaska with the Yiddish Policeman's Union".)

Also, you never know when when an anti-Jewish riot is going to spring Fuhrer Donitz from Spandau...

Even that figure seems like it'd require everything going right in multiple locations in five different cities. I highly doubt they'd be that competent or that lucky. Or, honestly, even have the manpower and other resources to attempt this, but I've never heard of this group before, so eh.
 
Maybe if Nakam somehow got their hands on a nuclear bomb? If there were any nuclear bombers stationed in West Germany directly after the war, then maybe they could get one from a disillusioned Jewish American pilot? I don't know how many nukes the US had in 1945-1946, and if they even had any stationed in Germany.
 
Not sure if it would had been succesful but probably it would had accidentally killed Americans, Brits, French and Soviets too. THis would be serious backblow for Jews. Might be that antisemitism would be bit more common than in OTL when neonazis would state that Jews aren't any better than Nazis.
 

chankljp

Donor
Honestly? If you look at OTL examples of terrorist attacks carried out using chemical warfare via a small group of participants (Such as the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack, and all the previous attempts by the Aum Shinrikyo cult to do similar attacks), they have a tendency to either fail, or result only in a limited number of actual deaths compared to what they had hoped for, though the level of non-fatal injuries can still be high. As such I don't think it will be possible for a group of 60 people to kill 6 million Germans, maybe a dozen at most, with a few thousand injuries.

... But literally NOTHING good will come from this. In the eyes of the German people, and maybe even the world, it might end up 'proving' that the Jews were indeed planning to destroy the German people. Not to mention that out of all the possible methods that they could have used.... They picked poisoning the water supply of population centers, and hence taking one of the oldest antisemitic accusations besides the infamous blood libel, and LITERALLY MAKING IT TRUE!!! It sounds more like the type of false flag operation that a group of fanatical Nazis (Think the SS Werwolf resistance force) would do in an attempt to get the German people to rise up in rebellion against the Allies.
 
It probably means Germany won't be paying any reparations to Israel for persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany (including the Holocaust). Quite a few political forces in Israel might agree given the protests in Israel about receiving reparations from Germany.
 
This might even be enough to prevent the formation of Israel--or if the nation was started, to disable the Jewish lobby that is necessary in the USA to keep it alive. No modern weapons from the USA and it's overrun.
 
This might even be enough to prevent the formation of Israel--or if the nation was started, to disable the Jewish lobby that is necessary in the USA to keep it alive. No modern weapons from the USA and it's overrun.
Actually during the formation of Israel and its first 20 years they had little contact and support from the US. The USSR was Israel's main patron until the realignment of major parts of the Arab World towards the Soviet Union due to the rise of secular left-leaning Arab Nationalism and the late 50s and 60s.
 
Only if they do it slowly and over a long period of time. (And I'm not talking the length of time WW2 took); They'll still be working on the number today, with a tally counter on their website: As of 17 November 2017: 52,758, 183 "Solved" [based off the Nazi calling the holocaust a 'solution'] OR a countdown: 7, 242, 817 remaining as of 17 November 2017.
 
There's an article on this in todays London Daily Telegraph based on an upcoming tv programme on the topic. I have to say that for a determined group to contaminate reservoirs serving four German cities in late 1945/early 1946, the only problem I could foresee preventing success would be acquiring suitable chemicals in quantity.
 

Deleted member 1487

It probably means Germany won't be paying any reparations to Israel for persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany (including the Holocaust). Quite a few political forces in Israel might agree given the protests in Israel about receiving reparations from Germany.
Yet those reparations were critical to forming their economy after the '48 war
 
Given the difficulty to effectively poison the water supply (either you would need truckloads of nerve agent style stuff to go into the long term reservoirs, or if you just drop poison into municipal water tanks they can be flushed and replaced after the first complains arrive). In any case the dosage will probably just about suffice to kill a few people with the least resistance to poisons, e.g. the very young and the very old.

Do I need to go into details about pictures of dead babies this will produce? Even if it is a double digit number of victims, this will probably single-handedly return antisemitism to be an acceptable position in polite society. Not cool.
 
Not with simple chemicals .. they would need some sort of WMD and the chances of getting hold of a nuke would be essentially zero ... on the other hand getting access to the Nazi stocks of SARIN and TABUN should have been easy enough in the chaos of the end of war ...you would only need a few tons ..

However, deploying it is another story .. SARIN dissolves easy in water so maybe the water supplies really would be a plausible vector ...

What state was the water supplies in anyway ? I mean, wasn't the whole distribution system disrupted by bombing ? - after people start to drop dead in the street after loading buckets from the 'stand-pipes' the authorities will quickly turn the taps off and start investigating ...
 
The poison dissolves so much in the water that it only ends up having a handful of victims. The healthcare system, utterly broken by the war is unable to identify and connect together the source, blaming anything from food poisoning to chemical pollution to broken/old pipes to old age.
 

Deleted member 94680

Maybe if Nakam somehow got their hands on a nuclear bomb? If there were any nuclear bombers stationed in West Germany directly after the war, then maybe they could get one from a disillusioned Jewish American pilot? I don't know how many nukes the US had in 1945-1946, and if they even had any stationed in Germany.

Do they get the ASBs to help them carry out the plot? There were 60 of them, mostly ghetto survivors and former British Legionaries - who has the know-how to work the cutting edge technology of a nuclear bomb in 45/46? That’s assuming 60 men is even enough to take a nuke if (and I stress if) there were any in Germany. Which I severely doubt.

Not with simple chemicals .. they would need some sort of WMD and the chances of getting hold of a nuke would be essentially zero ... on the other hand getting access to the Nazi stocks of SARIN and TABUN should have been easy enough in the chaos of the end of war ...you would only need a few tons ..

Which explains why so many people walked off with tons of sarin and tabun OTL? Seriously, it’s not ‘easy’ to get ‘only a few tons’ of gas weapons.



Why, pray tell, would people continue to drink the water in these cities when thousands of people have died? To reach six million is fantasy, to attempt to accomplish it with sixty people is idiocy. They couldn’t even forge documents sufficiently to avoid detection, according to the wiki article.

Your POD here would be a vastly different Nakam, with more members, better training, more resources and a long-term plan.
 
Do they get the ASBs to help them carry out the plot? There were 60 of them, mostly ghetto survivors and former British Legionaries - who has the know-how to work the cutting edge technology of a nuclear bomb in 45/46? That’s assuming 60 men is even enough to take a nuke if (and I stress if) there were any in Germany. Which I severely doubt.
Still more realistic than there poison scheme.
 
There would have to be way more people involved to make such large scale attacks possible. Perhaps if they got 1,000 members instead of 60 they could poison the water supplies. This may kill and sicken hundreds of thousands if they are lucky, but nowhere near their intended 6 million. Then you have international reaction to this Jewish terrorism.

Antisemitism and Neo-nazism will surely rise significantly in the new Germany, and around the globe. "Perhaps these nazis weren't entirely crazy with their antisemitism due to these events." may be a response. Maybe a coup reinstating Donitz as a "fuhrer" of a new nazi state? It'd be interesting what butterflies arise from such terrorist attacks.
 
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