Nakam was a paramilitary organisation of about fifty Holocaust survivors who, after 1945, sought revenge for the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust. Led by Abba Kovner, the group sought to kill six million Germans in a form of indiscriminate revenge, "a nation for a nation". Kovner went to Mandatory Palestine in order to secure large quantities of poison for poisoning water mains to kill large numbers of Germans. His followers infiltrated the water system of Nuremberg. However, Kovner was arrested upon arrival in the British zone of occupied Germany and had to throw the poison overboard.
A US Army lieutenant (left) and a German detective inspecting the Konsum-Genossenschaftsbäckerei (Consumer Cooperative Bakery) in Nuremberg after a poisoning attempt
The Konsum-Genossenschaftsbäckerei (Consumer Cooperative Bakery) in Nuremberg
Kibbutz Ein HaHoresh in 1940
Abba Kovner was a Jewish partisan leader, and later Israeli poet and writer. In the Vilna Ghetto, his manifesto was the first time that a target of the Holocaust identified the German plan to murder all Jews. His attempt to organize a ghetto uprising failed. He fled into the forest, joined Soviet partisans, and survived the war. After the war, Kovner led Nakam, a paramilitary organization of Holocaust survivors who sought to take genocidal revenge by murdering six million Germans, but Kovner was arrested in British-occupied Germany before he could successfully carry out his plans. He made aliyah to Mandatory Palestine in 1947, which would become the State of Israel one year later. Considered one of the greatest authors of Modern Hebrew poetry, Kovner was awarded the Israel Prize in 1970.
Kovner testifies at the trial of Adolf Eichmann
Kovner (right) briefs members of the IDF in Yad Mordechai during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War
Kovner's grave in kibbutz Ein HaHoresh
Abba Kovner drawn by Chaim Topol