By Philip Rife
Europe, 1945:
“It was a covered truck we were using. To get in the back, you had to part the tarpaulin and thrust your head in first. The moment the man’s head appeared inside, one of us seized him by the throat and jerked him forward. The action was usually enough to strangle him or break his neck. Each man died without a word and often without a cry.”
The chilling account you’ve just read isn’t the confession of an SS member sent to liquidate Jews. Just the opposite. The victim in this case was a former SS man living in postwar Austria. The narrator was a member of an organized Jewish campaign to exact extra-judicial revenge on Germans after the war ended.
In the beginning, these death squad members were secretly recruited from the ranks of a British army brigade formed in Palestine during the war. One of the brigade’s stated “commandments” toward former Nazis stated: “Cursed are they, they and their wives and their children, their goods and all that is theirs. Cursed are they forever.”2
Their unofficial slogan was Dahm Yisrael Nokeam: “The blood of Israel will take vengeance.”3
The decision to form small, disciplined revenge squads was made after Jewish brigade members indiscriminately assaulted men, raped women and burned homes in an ethnically Austrian town in northern Italy. Correctly sensing the real possibility for acts of mass retribution, the British had stationed the brigade in Italy, not Austria or Germany. However, that didn’t stop clandestine killings carried out by individual death squad members in all three countries.
Team members compiled hit lists based on information obtained surreptitiously by American and British Jewish soldiers who worked for Allied intelligence. In some cases, intended victims who were being held in British military prisons “escaped” with the connivance of Jewish brigade guards. On other occasions, patients were abducted from their hospital beds.
The death squads’ usual modus operandi was to pose as British military policemen supposedly sent to bring a man in for questioning. Instead, the victim was taken to an out-of-the-way spot and shot in the head. Recalled one death squad member: “When we arrived at the home of our suspect, we would put on [British] military police helmets and armlets. Then we would enter the home and take the suspect with us, saying we wanted him for interrogation. Usually, they came without a struggle.”4
The scene recounted at the start of this article was a method employed when speed or silence was required.
Sometimes the death squads took measures to ensure the bodies of their victims weren’t discovered, as in the following account of a killing carried out in Austria: “We took him to the large lake just outside the town. We bound him hand and foot, gagged him, tied a large stone to him, then threw him alive into the lake. So far as I know, none of his family ever learned what had happened to him.”5
Other victims were hanged in hopes their deaths would pass for suicides or their bodies were placed by the side of roads to look like they were hit-and-run victims. In one case, a man was killed in his hospital bed when kerosene was placed in his bloodstream.
Despite all the murdered bodies turning up and the many missing person reports being filed by the victims’ frantic relatives, Allied authorities turned a blind eye, allowing the assassination teams to carry out their grisly work with impunity.
A favorite claim of former death squad members and their defenders is that they always took great pains to accurately confirm the identity of their chosen victim before killing him. Imagine the surprise for one team when Israel announced to the world the capture of concentration camp administrator Adolf Eichmann in 1960. That’s because the team had killed a man in Austria in 1946 who they’d boasted to fellow avengers at the time was Eichmann. They never discovered the actual identity of the unfortunate Austrian man they’d murdered by mistake. Eichmann was located in Argentina by other death squad members who reluctantly agreed to let the Israeli government take him to Israel for a show trial and execution. Their original plan had been to torture Eichmann, his wife and their children before killing them.
Death squad members expressed no regret or guilt for their actions either at the time or later in life. Said one who became a general in the Israeli army: “My vengeance was sweet, very sweet. Yes, I killed more than once, and I’ll tell you this—if it had to be done again, I’d do it. We were wholly justified morally, and I’ve never felt the slightest pang of remorse.”6
While most acts of Jewish revenge occurred in Germany and Austria, hit squads roamed the globe for years. They carried out assassinations in Belgium, Holland, France, Spain, Italy, Canada, Latin America and Palestine. One estimate puts the number of these individual killings at 1,500.
Not content with dispatching their enemies one at a time in targeted killings, some Jewish vengeance seekers hatched plans to kill German men, women and children indiscriminately on a mass scale. There was no indication any of the intended victims had ever harmed Jews. Apparently their only “crime” was that they were German.
On one occasion, a death squad directed its hatred at a group of local youths meeting in a Bavarian forest simply because they suspected them of being neo-nazis. The attack with automatic weapons and grenades left all 140 young Germans dead. The killers later claimed their unarmed victims had weapons hidden underwater in a nearby lake, but this was never proven. The attackers were long gone by the time anxious parents reported their children missing.
In another operation, a Jewish major in the French army provided death squad members with a vehicle, uniforms, identity papers and explosives which they used to massacre 200 German prisoners of war at a camp in Muenster.
In 1946, a group of Polish Jews affiliated with the death squads of the British army’s Jewish brigade poisoned bread used to feed 36,000 German POWs being held in an internment camp near Nuremburg. The conspirators murdered a bakery night watchman to gain access to the bread and brushed it with poison. According to a report in the
New York Times at the time: “Approximately 1,900 German prisoners of war were poisoned by arsenic in their bread in a United States camp, and all are ‘seriously ill’.”
Approximately 1,000 prisoners are believed to have died as a result.
Years later, one of the bread poisoners admitted that the vengeance seekers’ ultimate aim was to kill 6 million Germans, one for each Jew alleged to have died in “the Holocaust.” Like other death squad members, he made no distinction between former Nazis and innocent German men, women and children: “I put them all together. 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.”8
Other Jewish vengeance seekers gave serious consideration to blowing up the Austrian apartment building where Adolf Hitler was born (primarily as a symbolic gesture, although there undoubtedly would have been casualties among the local population). The chance of collateral casualties evidently was never a major concern. Another reckless action under consideration called for planting a bomb in the courtroom during the Nuremburg war crimes trial.
A different Jewish-led group wanted to kill German civilians on a truly massive scale. One idea was to set fire to whole towns. Another was to poison the municipal water supplies of Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Nuremburg. The latter plan was thwarted when the individual transporting the poison from Palestine in cans of condensed milk was arrested by British authorities aboard a ship bound for Europe.
The exact number of German and Austrian victims of Jewish revenge killings after World War II will probably never be known. People who’ve studied the subject are convinced the number of victims would’ve been much higher and the death squads would’ve operated far longer if not for the fact that many of the killers were summoned to Palestine to participate in a campaign of assassinations and other terrorist acts against British authorities enforcing the partition between Arabs and Jews (including the murder of UN envoy Count Folke Bernadotte and the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, which killed 91 innocent people) and the conflict with Arabs over creation of an all-Jewish state.
Curiously, Hollywood—which has covered every other aspect of the Jewish experience surrounding World War II ad infinitum for decades—has never seen fit to make a truthful movie about the postwar Jewish death squads and genocide plotters.
The only state-sponsored plan for postwar genocide against the German people was the handiwork of an American Jew. FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. proposed turning Germany into “a country primarily agricultural and pastoral.”9
According to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, the results of such a program would be catastrophic: “The Morgenthau Plan would wipe out everything in Germany except land, and the Germans would have to live on the land. This meant that only 60% of the German population could support themselves, and the other 40% would die.”10
War relief expert and former President Herbert Hoover was also strongly opposed to the plan, saying: “It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25 million people.”11
To put that in perspective, 25 million German deaths would’ve been more than four times the oft-cited (albeit demonstrably inflated) figure of 6 million Jewish deaths alleged to have occurred in “the holocaust.”
For his part, Secretary of War Henry Stimson faulted Morgenthau’s basic motivation, saying he was “biased in his Semitic grievances.”12
Gen. George Patton concurred, saying Morgenthau was taking “Semitic revenge.”13
Not surprisingly, when the German people learned about Morgenthau’s postwar plans for them (through a 1944 news leak pounced on by Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels), it stiffened their resistance. U.S. intelligence head (and future CIA director) Allen Dulles described the negative consequences of Germany finding out about the plan: “The soldiers at the front, the workers in the factories and the inhabitants of the bombed cities are holding out because they feel that they have no choice, and their existence is at stake.”14
FDR’s son-in-law, Lt. Col. John Boettiger, said exposure of the plan was “worth 30 divisions to the Germans.”15
U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe Gen. Dwight Eisenhower both blamed Morgenthau’s plan for increased German resistance on the battlefield.
Once the cat was out of the bag, Morgenthau took to the airwaves to gleefully describe his plan’s expected outcome: “We are going to level Germany to the ground, burn it up, and let anybody left be potato farmers.”16
Like some of his fellow Jews in postwar Europe, Morgenthau evidently believed that genocide is acceptable if the right people are committing it. Morgenthau’s boss, FDR, must’ve agreed. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the plan, saying the German people “should only have soup for breakfast, soup for lunch and soup for dinner.”17
The Morgenthau Plan also fit nicely into the vision of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin for a Communist-dominated postwar Europe.
In the end, saner and less vindictive views prevailed, and Morgenthau’s draconian plan was never fully implemented. It was replaced by the Marshall Plan, which was more humanitarian (or at least more cognizant of the new Cold War reality).
Morgenthau reportedly resigned “in a huff” after FDR’s successor, Harry Truman, outright rejected his final solution for Germany, calling it “an act of revenge.”18
For Morgenthau, such stinging rebukes may not have been the most painful memory evoked by the reaction to his menacing plan. He had to live with the knowledge that by prolonging the fighting, the threat of his plan not only resulted in thousands of additional battlefield casualties on both sides, but also led to countless deaths from disease among mostly Jewish labor camp inmates during the final months of the war (including famed diarist Anne Frank, who died from typhus in March 1945) when Allied bombing of rail lines prevented normal deliveries of food and medical supplies to the camps.
In a final irony, Henry Morgenthau found himself a mere spectator as his tax dollars helped feed and rebuild postwar Germany . . . the exact opposite of what his vengeful plan intended.
ENDNOTES:
1 The Avengers, Michael Bar-Zohar, Hawthorn Books, 1967.
2 Ibid
3 www.cwporter.co.uk
4 The Jewish Brigade: An Army With Two Masters by Morris Beckman, Da Capo Press; 1998.
5 The Avengers, Michael Bar-Zohar, Hawthorn Books, 1967.
6 Ibid.
7 New York Times, April 20, 1946.
8 The Observer, March 15, 1998.
9 Hitler’s War, David Irving, Focal Point Publications, 1991.
10 Other Losses, James Bacque
11 UN Chronicle, April 14, 2008.
12 After the Reich, Giles MacDonogh
13 A Genius for War: A Life of George S. Patton, Carlo d’Este, Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (September 27, 1996).
14 Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler, Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams, Sterling Press, New York,
15 The Conquerors, Michael Beschloss, Simon & Schuster, 2003.
16 The Glenn Miller Conspiracy: The Never Told Story of His Life and Death, Hunton Downs, Creative Book Publishers International, 2009.
17 After the Reich by Giles MacDonogh.
18 Ibid.
Philip Rife earned a journalism degree from Penn State University and served in the U.S. Air Force. The author of nine books and numerous historical articles, his most recent book is Bones of Contention: Uncovering the Hidden Truth About America’s Lost Race.