- 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.
|
