Before agreeing to accept Bergers proposal, the DIN assassins decided to check him out with a Jewish American Army Sergeant named Meyer Tugend, who worked for the CIC in Frankfurt. Berger checked out, so Judah Klein was sent to negotiate the final terms of the agreement between Berger and DIN.
Berger told Klein that Konrad Schumann was among some 800 SS men being held for interrogation at a POW camp in Muenster.
Berger claimed that Schumann possessed false identity papers which described him as being a member of the Panzer Lehr Division. He claimed that an additional 200 men were being held separately at this same facility, because it was alleged that they had served as guards in concentration camps, or were ex-members of the Einsatzgruppen. It was these accused 200 men that Berger proposed to "give" to the DIN assassins in exchange for Schumann. Berger was too well known at the facility, so he proposed this scheme to the DIN squad:
He would give Klein papers from the French war crimes commission along with a forged temporary transfer request for Schumann. He also proposed to give him an official armoured vehicle, some French army uniforms, and a hundred pounds of explosives. He had stolen all of these items weeks before and assured his accomplices in crime that they could never be traced.
DIN was delighted with the arrangements and accepted the plan with enthusiasm. Four days later, Klein and four other assassins drove up to the compound, armed with the forged warrants, the explosives , and boxes of wine.
The explosives were diverted toward the area which allegedly held the 200 ex-camp guards. The wine was supposedly a delivery for the Americans. The plan worked like a charm. Almost as soon as they drove out of the gates with their handcuffed victim, the bombs detonated and the force of the explosion was so great that it nearly blew them off the road. Body parts of the murdered were strewn all over the camp.
The Jews retreated to the safety of a Jewish Displaced persons camp, which served as the base for their murderous activities. The camp was under the protection of the UNRRA. Schumann was handed over to Berger, who tortured him all the way to a little town named Sondershausen.
Berger gagged and tied his victim in the manner utilized by serial killers and left him on the floor of the vehicle, which he parked in the middle of the town square before dawn. Berger thereupon exited the vehicle, locked the doors, and lit the fuse to a half case of dynamite hidden in the trunk. In this manner he murdered a man alleged to be Schumann. Publicly the murder was hushed up by the authorities and simply referred to as a "terrible accident."
Months later, the French authorities were able to trace the disappearance of the stolen items to Berger, who was ignominiously released from service in the French army. He was not indicted for any of the murders which he himself committed or was responsible for arranging. As for DIN the taste of blood left them thirsty for more. Word of their bloody exploits reached the ears of the Jewish survivors still residing in the DP camps throughout Germany, but, instead of denouncing the band of murderers to the authorities, they decided to assist them! A simple denunciation was all it took to set the wheels of murder in high gear.
Every Jew with a grudge denounced Germans for whom they held a grievance.
DIN did not bother to question the veracity of any claim. The process by which people were denounced and then slated for assassination was relatively uncomplicated.
The survivors" took their information to the headquarters of the Sheerit Hapleetah, the Jewish DP organization, where the organization would then forward the complaint to the military authorities.
That was the "official" version; unofficially, the reports went to one of DINs "plants." There were dozens of Allied agencies dealing with "war criminals", and in most of these were Jews who were ready to lend a hand to the shadowy group of avengers. Materials were secretly copied from files, photos of the accused were passed on to the agents of DIN, along with complete personnel records.
Many of these files came from the Red Army, as in the case of "Ivan the Terrible."
The Red Army passed these alleged "authentic" documents on to two Poles who were appointed to prosecute accused war criminals on behalf of Poland-Tadeuz Cyprian and Jerzy Sawicki.
A Jewish lawyer working for Sawicki photographed the materials and sent them along to his masters in DIN. Every man kidnapped was told he could save his life if only he would lead them to others "bigger" than himself. Some of the victims, out of fear for their lives, implicated other individuals. The Jewish assassins broke their promise and murdered not only the person in their charge, but also any other individuals named by their victim.
Soon DIN developed a "hit list" - "targets", "marks," similar to those composed by the Mafia. It was when this master list was finally completed that they referred to their grisly conspiracy as "the Hunting Season." To execute the plan, DIN became better organized, despatching hit squads to various locations throughout Germany. These were divided into four zones, and the squads were accommodated with a list of secret Jewish operatives whom they were to contact for additional information. The contacts also supplied them with fake ID, uniforms and sometimes "get-a-way" vehicles. They were given insignia from the various armed forces.
If the items could not be obtained from a Jewish plant, then they were taken by stealth or by force. Vehicles were easier to obtain in the British Zone, as many members of the "Jewish" Brigade were stationed there. In fact, there was NEVER an instance where the Jewish Brigade ever refused its services to the assassins. Thus, this hit squad achieved a high degree of organization. People simply disappeared off the streets-even in broad daylight. Victims were simply whisked away, like Eichmann, never to be seen again. The methods of killing varied. Most of the victims were garroted-Mafia style.
Others were simply tortured to death. Distraught families searched frantically for their loved ones, who were by then lying dismembered in a shallow grave. Often "suicides" were arranged. In fact, suicides" were rather common-place. According to DIN, they murdered the following individuals:
In short, practically any one who could have shed light on the Jewish policy of the Third Reich was murdered! Denunciations and "documents" supplied by the Soviet Union assured that each and every victim would die a very unpleasant death. Within two months, these self-appointed death squads had murdered at least 200 individuals.
Soon, whether out of greed or fear, the DIN agents decided to relocate their base of operations to ALT-AUSSEE, where it was rumoured that Himmler had hoarded millions of dollars worth of gold. The killers now became treasure hunters. However, being unsuccessful in this venture they soon reverted to what they did best-murder. Their next move was to lie in wait outside of the Salzburg POW camp. There they once again left a trail of blood.
They allegedly ambushed and killed Colonel Fritz Suhren, former Commander of Ravensbrueck,, along with approximately 20 other individuals whom they claimed were former commanders or members of the Einsatzgruppen. In spite of their overwhelming success in "getting away" with multiple murders, or perhaps BECAUSE of this fact, the DIN members soon became more enterprising. Steeped in blood though they were, their appetite for the red liquid could not be satiated to their satisfaction. Not ENOUGH blood had been shed. Not enough individuals had been butchered.
The assassins talked it over, and soon decided to abandon bloody work in favor of a new plan, which they dubbed "Tochnit Aleph-Plan A-the plan to murder 1.5 million German civilians. The real author of Tochnit Aleph remains unknown to this day.
No one would take credit for it publicly and no one broke the OMERTA of silence, but the details are well known. The idea behind the plan was to poison the water supply of a 1.5 Germans, much as Jews were once accused of poisoning the wells of Europe.
Death in this case would come out of the turn of a faucet. Only the most ruthless members of DIN were chosen to carry out this heartless task. Once the assassins were chosen, the band split up and the remainder of the group fled to Palestine. The hard core of assassins sat down to work out the details. They identified four trouble-spots in implementing their nefarious plan, according to the author of "Forged in Fury":
1. The poison had to be odourless, tasteless, colourless, and hygroscopic- capable of maintaining fatal virulence when mixed in any amount of water.
2. The had to select a city or cities, target areas relatively free of Jews.
3. They had to place their agents in a position where they could introduce the poison directly into the water supply.
4. They had to work out an escape route to Israel.
Their headquarters were stationed in Augsburg, with the man called "Israel" coordinating the effort from that vantage point. His assistant was Hannah "Little Sister" Baum-a tried and tested member of the inner core of assassins. She, like Emma Goldmann, who would not flinch from planting bombs to assassinate the innocent, was to be Israel's "Chief Lieutenant."
Once the dirty deed was accomplished, the fugitives planned to flee from Europe by way of Marseilles. Berger was to supply the necessary papers. Two members of the "British" Jewish Brigade were appointed to serve as "technicians." It was these last two who chose the targets: MUNICH, WEIMAR, NUREMBERG, and WANNSEE.
Symbolism obviously played a major role in their selection. The two engineers trained the men who were to serve as plants and agents to distribute the poison in the water supply of the doomed cities.
Though it took some time and intricate manoeuvring, their agents were soon prepared to carryout the foul deed in at least two cities-MUNICH and NUREMBERG-one city being the birth- place of the National Socialist Party and the other being the domain of Julius Streicher and the site of the Nuremberg rallies-a German city which, perhaps more than others, symbolized the essence of National Socialism.
A total of 1,380,000 German souls became their intended target.
Malachi Wald, Avraham Becker, and Judah Klein were chosen to obtain the lethal poison, but it was once again Victor Berger who provided the first essential leads in carrying out the plan. Berger, through his wartime association with French bacteriologist and chemical warfare expert Professor Pasteur Valery- Radot, arranged to meet him for dinner one evening and liberally plied the unsuspecting man with drinks.
By the time the evening was concluded, Berger had all the information he required: A couple of men, armed with a few suitcases full of a variety of choice compounds, and with access to bakeries, dairies, or bottling plants or the reservoirs, could in theory at least leave the cities a graveyard. The professor indicated two possible choices: a compound of an irritant poison unaffected by heat or the baking process, and which would cause rapid paralysis of the respiratory system, or one could spread Bubonic Plague-the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Berger jotted everything down and returned to DIN headquarters.
The plotters were now ready for their next move. It was clear that a scientist was needed. One who could be relied upon. Clearly, they needed a Jew or number of Jews sympathetic to their plans. They needed Jews motivated by revenge.
The answer seemed clear to those present: The search for a bacteriologist must be undertaken in Palestine, either at the medical school of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, or among the Jewish scientists at the research institute in Rehovot, around the Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, who was himself one of the worlds great bio- chemists.
The decision being made, Malachi Wald was dispatched to Palestine to make the necessary arrangements. Wald entered the country equipped with false identification papers describing him as a Palestinian born building worker named Eleazar Ben-Chaim.
His mission was to make contact with Jewish resistance cells in Palestine and enlist their support, but things had changed while he and his fellow assassins were in the midst of their machinations in Europe, Wald was informed that a new group was being formed which would supplant the DIN organization, as it was felt that DIN had served its purpose, and should now be dissolved to hide all traces of the criminal murder squads.
Not that the work would be discontinued, no-the assignment would simply be transferred to new agents operating under a different guise. But Wald was not satisfied with this proposal. He for one did not plan to sit idly by and watch all of DINs plans go down the tubes.
The decision had already been made to murder over one million German civilians, and that is what he intended to do-with or without the Haganah. Wald decided to approach Chaim Weizman on his own initiative. No record exists of this meeting between the respected bio-chemist and future president of Israel and the terrorist spawned out of the Ghettoes of Eastern Europe. No two people could have been less alike, yet, Wald was able to conjure up demons to frighten the old man who had lived through so much and fought so hard to achieve a dream which was once thought to be an impossible proposition.
According to Wald, the venerable old man seemed to wince and shrink back with grief and pain. Finally, he is alleged to have said, "If I were you, having lived as you, I would do what you will do."
Thereupon, Weizman, according to Wald, gave him the name of a bacteriologist, allegedly one Berman, and signed a message of introduction for him.
According to Wald, a man honoured as none other by the Jewish people had given backing to the depraved plan hatched by the conspirators back in Augsburg. Wald did indeed meet with the chemist, who has since been identified. This chemist did indeed supply Wald with the lethal vector necessary for the implementation of his plan. Wald had one more item to fill on his agenda before embarking for Europe: a meeting with the heads of the Haganah in Palestine. Wald informed them of DINs plan as well as having received what he believed to be the blessing of Chaim Weizman. He had but one request of Haganah organization: that they furnish succour in assisting the conspirators to flee from Europe to Palestine once their mission was accomplished.
One month later, Wald was summoned to Haganah headquarters where he was informed that he was to be smuggled out of Palestine and into Egypt, where he would pose as a Polish officer making his way back to Europe.
Once there, he was to contact Haganah agents who would escort him to DIN headquarters. From that point on, they were on their own. Haganah agreed to smuggle the assassins out of the country once the plot was executed. Armed with the poison, Wald set out as arranged, but was apprehended by the British authorities while in transit and thrown into gaol. Thus the dream of murdering one million Germans vanished with the click of British manacles around the wrists of Wald. How did the British discover the plot? No one knows for certain and no one is claiming the credit.
Wald himself believes the Haganah betrayed him. He completely discounted the notion that Weizman was the informant because Weizman referred him to the chemist who supplied him with the poison. On the other hand, it is possible that the French were the informants. Perhaps Professor Valery-Ridot was not as drunk as Victor Berger had thought.
This explanation seems to be plausible when we consider that it was the French who discovered Bergers involvement in DIN in the first place, the consequences of which precipitated his dishonourable discharge from the French armed forces. Needless to add, none of these crimes have ever been accounted for and not one of the murderers was ever brought before the bar of justice to answer for their horrible crimes. When one considers that, according to the Bible, 77,000 Persians were once slain upon the mere complaint of a Jew that one man was planning the destruction of the Jewish race in Persia, one wonders why those who planned to murder one million Germans should go unpunished and continue living a life of ease and comfort in Israel today.
As a curious footnote to the above, Haganah called the remaining assassins back to Israel once Wald had been apprehended. The remaining DIN members refused to comply with the order. Like the tales about the Devil leaving a foul stench before being induced to depart from tormenting the living, the DIN assassins were not about to retreat without spilling more blood in their wake. Thus, Victor Berger reappeared and proposed TOCHNIT Beth-Plan B.
By this time, he knew quite a bit about poison and even had access to some. The group selected a target to expend their murderous energy-an Interrogation Center of the Joint Allied Control Center outside Nuremberg. The facility intrigued them, for it contained more than 8,000 Waffen-SS prisoners of war.
Not even a small segment of this massive contingent of prisoners ever served in either the Einsatzgruppen or the camps. They learned which German bakery supplied bread to the camp, using flour allocated by the American army. The group insinuated their agents into the bakery, and there infused the bread destined for the prisoners with lethal poison. Berger himself had supplied the poison. A watchman was murdered so the criminals could carry on the working of basting the bread with lethal doses of poison. A dog was also killed to quiet its barking. A third man strangled to death on a gag which had shoved down his throat by Hannah Baum. They commandeered a truck and delivered the poisoned loaves to the camp. Once the bread was distributed, they fled into Czechoslovakia, and from there, into Israel. Their poison had worked rather well.
More than 700 German veterans had died, most of them young men and boys, none of whom had anything to do with the deportation and incarceration of Jews.
Over a thousand more were seriously ill, and a good number of them were expected to die as well.
Fate caught up with Avraham Becker, who was eventually killed in the Negev desert. Judah Klein eventually lost a leg to Arab armor. But in 1952-DIN was reformed by Malachi Wald to embark upon a new task of destruction. Most of the old gang was alive and still propelled by the same hate which motivated all their dastardly murders in previous years. New faces were brought into the Brotherhood of Murder-primarily by Victor Berger.
Former SS Captain Fritz Hartjenstein was the first to fall victim to their blood lust. He was run down in a street in Paris.
Undoubtedly they were also responsible for the murder of SS officer Jochen Peiper, who was gunned down outside his country home in France, but not before putting up one hell of a fire-fight, in which one or more of the assassins may have been injured.
This group was also undoubtedly responsible for the mail bomb which was sent to Alois Brunner, Eichmanns aide, which cost him his hand.
In fact, DINs criminal activities now encompassed the globe. Whenever and wherever it was possible, deaths were arranged to appear "accidental" or made to appear as "suicides."
Thus, SS Lieutenant Hans Groetner was found dead in a roadside ditch.
Hans Stuckart, once in charge of Jewish Affairs in Berlin, met a similar fate.
Otto Abetz burned to death in a car when something went wrong with his steering wheel on a busy highway.
Theo Dannecker "hanged himself" in his home, as did SS Lieutenant Kurt Mussfeld.
Other alleged suicides were former Gauleiter Jacob Sprenger and Georg Puetz, a former Gestapo officer, who curiously was alleged to have committed suicide by injecting kerosene into his blood-stream while awaiting a minor operation in the hospital!
The bloodied hands of DIN even may have reached into the German prison system, where accomplices could have been bribed or otherwise solicited in furthering the criminal plans of the assassins.
Thus, Franz Stangl and Richard Baer both perished while in prison under mysterious circumstances.
In short, every officer who might have been able to shed light on the Jewish policy of the Third Reich mysteriously perished-with the exception of two-
Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele.
Mengele, of course, died a natural death, but not for want of DINs repeated attempt to locate him.
However, even Rudolf Hess perished under suspicious circumstances. However, Eichmann's case was special-he was wanted alive for a show trial in Israel, and for this purpose DIN which had actually LOCATED Eichmann in Buenos Aires, proposed a deal to the Israeli government. Instead of killing him, they would hand him over to Israel for a show trial.
Wald went to Isser Harel-former chief of Israels Security Service-"SS," if you will-and put an "if" to him. "IF" we could lead you to Eichmann, could you take him to Israel; and would you then hand him over to us for our purposes?" Wald received no direct comment from Harel, but Ben Gurion agreed to his proposal.
In fact, DINs original plan was to torture Eichmann and his entire family to DEATH.
In fact, knowing what we know today, is it any wonder that Eichmann agreed to whatever his captors wanted him to say at the trial? Curiously, Eichmann's youngest son, who was still an infant at the time his father was illegally abducted, recently met with his fathers captor and swallowed the line of his fathers alleged guilt hook, line, and sinker, which caused his eldest brothers to reprimand him, which was reported in an article in PEOPLE Magazine not long ago.
Undoubtedly, he had no idea what DIN had in store for his mother, brothers, and himself had his father not made his own ultimate sacrifice to save the lives of his family.
In fact, the incessant harping and whining of certain alarmist Jewish groups, such as the Wiesenthal Center and the Jewish run offices of the OSI, concerning the subject of bringing accused Nazi "war criminals to justice, appears to be more than a bit hypocritical in light of the fact that the murderers of DIN and Stalin's Slave Labour Kapos are still living foot-loose and fancy free under the protection of the Israeli Government today.
Postscript; After completing this article, I received a mailed copy of an article by Michael Freedland, a writer for the English Newspaper, The Observer.
In this article, which appeared on March 15, 1998, and which bears the caption, "The Jewish Executioner," the journalist interviews former DIN assassin Joseph Harmatz. Harmatz has now decided to break his decades long self-imposed silence and has just written a book about his experiences as an assassin. Harmatz is proud and unabashed concerning his role in countless murders.
After discussing his role as chief bread poisoner, he gloats with satisfaction, "I felt very good." Though he makes a number of interesting revelations, a number of facts appear to have been purposely downplayed by both the author of the article and Harmatz himself.
Lets examine what this writer believes to be the most relevant portions of the article: Harmatz reveals that the original plan conceived by DIN actually encompassed the idea of poisoning six million German civilians in retaliation for the six million Jews allegedly killed by the Nazis.
According to Freedland: Joseph Harmatz has kept silent about these events for 50 years; now he has spoken for the first time. And hes done so without the slightest suggestion of regret at the mass killing he planned and administered. Yet Harmatz DOES speak of regrets.
For instance, he remarks: We were the Avengers. Unfortunately, we did not do more. Our ultimate intention was to kill six million Germans, one for every Jew slaughtered by the Germans.
Indeed, Freedland observes: 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."
Freedland discloses that Harmatz was much more open in his interview than he was in his soon to be published book, "From the Wings."
In fact, Harmatz feels comfortable and at ease in his apartment in the fashionable suburb of Ramat Aviv, a block away from the home of the assassinated Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin. It seems that bloody assassinations still follow him around to this day.
Briefly recounting Harmatz life story, he was born and raised in Vilna, once known as the "Jerusalem of Lithuania." Like so many young, idealistic Jews of his generation, Harmatz, an atheist, was a member of the Young Communist organization in his native country, a fact which could not have endeared either him or his associates to the National Socialists or Lithuanian population in general.
When the war broke out, Harmatz and his accomplices, all fellow Jews, were give arms by the Soviets.
Harmatz was denounced to the Gestapo by a native Lithuanian who had had enough of the new "Socialist experiment."
Fortunately for Harmatz, he was able to escape the clutches of the Gestapo and submerge himself into the mass of Lithuanian Jews living in the Ghettoes. It was then that Harmatz made contact with Jewish partisan groups, supplied with guns and materials from the Soviet Union.
According to Harmatz: Many of our people had come from camps of armed forces where they would work. Through our connections with the Communist party-we would buy guns. (Other sources such as Isaac Kowalski claim that guns, ammunition, and supplies were all distributed by the Soviets free of charge to their agents behind the lines.)
Seemingly confirming the oft expressed suspicion of the Gestapo that the ghettoes served as bases for all types of illegal activities, Harmatz admits: I would let people who had guns 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 the guns under his clothes.
We were instructed in the use of arms, pistols, and grenades. Hounded by the Gestapo, the partisan groups fled to the forests 40 kilometers south of Vilna. There he met up with the likes of Abba Kovner. Harmatz states that after the war, it was the Jewish ghetto Police who became the first victims of assassination, yet, curiously, he also states that he and his fellow assassins knew "nothing about concentration camps" and had "assumed" that the Jewish population of Vilna had been taken to the nearby town of Polnar and shot!
Apparently, this baseless charge was also repeated by Kowalski. The Jewish police, who assisted in the deportation measures, were also "assumed" to have been guilty of collaboration with the Nazis. In a rare moment of pure candidness, Harmatz expands upon the role of the so- called "Jewish Brigade."
He says, 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.
Curiously, it was also members of this same "Jewish Brigade" who captured SS General Hans Pruetzmann and Heinrich Himmler, who were later officially classified as "suicides."
Even more astounding is the fact that Harmatz next claims to have heard about the horrors of the concentration camps after the war. Astonishingly, his own mother, who was one of those deported from the Vilna Ghetto, and who was assumed to be among the "dead" at Polnar, SURVIVED and was reunited with her son!
Yet, Harmatz found nothing incongruous about all of this, for his two brothers perished during the war. How they perished is unknown and for all we know they, too, could have died while fighting with partisan groups.
However, the very fact that Harmatzs mother survived should serve as a clarion call to exterminationists, for Isaac Kowalski writes in his three volume work on Jewish Resistance to the Nazis that it was precisely people like Harmatz mother who were slated to be immediately killed by the Nazis!
However, these facts were of little concern to Harmatz for they would have interfered with his plans of revenge against all Germans who dominated his murderous fantasies based upon real and imagined persecution under the Nazis. This being his objective, he immediately sojourned to Israel after the war to enlist support for his cause.
There, he discovered, were two schools of thought-one school, dominated by David Ben Gurion, wished to exact revenge against the Germans by economic means-through reparations- the other, by killing. In fact, both means were apparently decided upon.
Now, at this point, both the Jewish journalist, Freedland, and Harmatz, discuss the role of Chaim Weizmann in the plan to murder over one million German civilians-and both seek to downplay the role of the elder Jewish Statesman and leading Zionist of his time. They claim that Weizmann was not told in detail about the plan to murder millions of human beings in Germany; they claim he was told only about the plot to poison the bread of SS men, but this contradicts what the leader of the plot, Abba Kovner had to say on this issue.
According to the author of "Forged in Fury," he writes: "Wald asked him then, "They who did this to these, and to the thousands and the millions, they who did it, who applauded it or allowed it, shall they not now pay?
That which they have sowed, shall they not reap?" According to Freedland, "Harmatz says he has no idea why Weizmann agreed to cooperate." All we do know is that enough poison was hidden in cans of condensed milk to thoroughly wipe out the populations of whole cities.
END of PART TWO
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