Nakam

War History Online has an article about a long-forgotten plan for revenge:

In the aftermath of World War Two, as the extent of Nazi atrocities became known, many Jews wanted revenge. While most were content to leave it up to the justice system, at best, and others wanted a lynching, at worst, a few wanted far more. The most radical of these wanted to kill off six million Germans, and they nearly pulled it off, too.
Not all Jews went to the concentration camps peacefully. Some fought back and, while most were independent groups, others worked with local resistance movements. Still others worked with the Allies, such as the United Partisan Organization (UPO) which operated in Lithuania with Soviet support.
In British Palestine, a number of Jews petitioned the British government for an exclusively Jewish militia. Their request was granted, resulting in the Jewish Brigade, which operated in the Middle East and throughout the Mediterranean.
Then the war ended. Though the Nuremberg Trials saw the execution of several prominent Nazis, the vast majority got off lightly or were set free. After years of conflict, much of Europe was in shambles; the focus was on rebuilding. With so many dead, every able-bodied worker was needed for reconstruction, so the Allies were willing to look the other way when it came to a large number of Nazis.
There just wasn’t enough resources or political will to track down every single one. More importantly, the Allies just wanted to put the whole sorry business behind them.
Many Jews, however, couldn’t do the same. Most had lost everything they had. Some returned to homes that were occupied by strangers. Still others couldn’t forget how neighbors, friends, and associates had turned against them.
A part of Europe had always been anti-Semitic, and pogroms were nothing new, but after the Holocaust, many Jews were too traumatized to stay there. So a diaspora began, but America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and British Palestine all had a quota system in place.
Unfortunately for the Palestinians, the British kept changing their minds on the issue of a Jewish state. Taking advantage of this, an underground network was set up to bring millions of Jewish survivors into Palestine.
Abba Kovner (ahoto above, in Jerusalem, testifying at the trial of Nazi criminal Adolph Eichman, 5 April 1961) was among those who were active in sneaking Jews out of Europe and into what would eventually become Israel. Born in Russia, Kovner immigrated as a child to Vilnius in Lithuania. Sadly, Vilnius was ground zero for the Holocaust, and Kovner was among those who realized that it was only just the beginning.
While many Jews and Gentiles couldn’t believe that genocide was what the Nazis had in mind, Kovner had no such illusions, so he began a resistance movement called the Nokmim (the Avengers in Hebrew). Nokmim engaged in guerrilla attacks on Germans and their collaborators and later joined up with the UPO.
After the war, he co-founded Berihah (escape/flight in Heberew), an underground movement which helped Jews escape from Eastern Europe. Then as details of the concentration camps came to light, he founded Nakam (Revenge in Hebrew). Nakam was made up of Holocaust survivors and Jewish militia groups, including former members of the Jewish Brigade.
The Nakam targeted Nazis and Nazi sympathizers for execution, not just in Germany, but throughout the rest of Europe and the Americas. These operations continued throughout the 1960s, but for Kovner, it wasn’t enough. He formulated two ways to get back at Germany. The first called for killing six million of them by poisoning the water supplies of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Nuremberg, and Weimar. He traveled to Israel to get help from Chaim Weizmann (the future president of Israel) and other members of the Zionist movement. Some thought it a good idea, but others opposed the plan, fearing it would hurt their chances of creating a separate Jewish state.
But Kovner argued that it was the only way to prevent future pogroms against the Jews. Such retaliation would prove that Jews were not to be messed with without serious consequences.
The plan was approved, so the Nakam sailed back to Europe in different ships with canisters of poison. When Kovner arrived in France, however, the authorities noticed that his papers were forged and jailed him. Kovner aborted the mission and ordered the Nakam to fall back on Plan B.
After Germany had surrendered in May of 1945, Dachau was turned into a POW camp for SS officers. Nakam members got jobs there to check the place out, but they asked too many questions, arousing the suspicion of the American authorities. So they aborted the mission and turned to Plan C.
The Americans had another POW camp, called Stalag 13, in Langwasser near Nuremberg, which held some fifteen thousand POWs. Two Nakam operatives got jobs there and discovered that the Americans provided all the food, except for bread, which was made by a local bakery.
Liebke Distel, a survivor of the Vilnius ghetto and early Nakam member, got a job at the bakery. After much experimentation and help from Jewish chemists, they decided that the best way to kill off as many as possible was to coat loaves of bread with a paste of arsenic.
On the evening of 14 April 1946, they coated three thousand loaves of bread with the mixture. Each loaf of bread was big enough to feed four men with, so the Nakam hoped to kill off at least twelve thousand German POWs.
Distel later said that it was a windy night, and one of the bakery windows was broken. A guard ran over to see what had happened, so they arranged things to make it look like a theft had taken place. With the post-war food shortage, bread was valuable, so the guard simply secured the window and went on with his rounds, not bothering to enter the bakery.
The next morning, the loaves were delivered. The Nakam fled, most crossing over the border into Czechoslovakia to make their way back to Israel. On 23 April 1945, The New York Times claimed that over two thousand German POWs became ill, while 207 became hospitalized. Although the US military has never released figures, it’s believed that some three hundred to four hundred POWs died from the poisoned bread.
The public prosecutor’s office within the higher regional court at Nuremberg stopped the preliminary investigation of attempted murder in May of 2000 against two Nakam activists who professed to have involvement in the incident. The public prosecutor’s office cited statute-of-limitations laws “due to unusual circumstances” as the reason for suspending the investigation.

Rico says looks like they got away with it; a couple of million shy of their goal, but a nice try, nonetheless...