HolocaustObituaryJoseph Harmatz obituary
Wartime partisan who plotted revenge on the Nazis as part of the Jewish Avengers group
Joseph Harmatz, who has died aged 91, lived two lives, one dedicated to killing, the other to giving life a purpose. He would probably have said that in both existences, his aim was the same: the first an attempt at a kind of revenge for the Holocaust, the second to make sure such a thing could never happen again. As an “Avenger”, seeking justice for the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews, he was personally responsible for poisoning a large group of captured SS officers in the aftermath of the second world war. Harmatz believed that many of the prisoners died, though a recently declassified US military document reported no fatalities.
As a survivor, in his second life, he supervised an international agency, World ORT, which worked with governments from China to Africa to France, training young people for their future – one denied to millions of young people of his own generation.
His life was coloured by his role as a partisan working in Nazi-occupied Lithuania, one of a tiny group of Jews who managed to evade capture when their towns and villages were overrun by the Germans. They survived to blow up trains, destroy military centres and kill soldiers. The fact that Harmatz had seen his family members carted off to the death camps only strengthened his resolve not to be perceived to go himself like a lamb to the slaughter. He remained silent about his underground activities with the Avengers, only revealing his involvement in retirement, with the publication of a memoir, From the Wings, in 1998.
Son of Avraham and Devora Harmatz, he was born in Rokiškis, Lithuania, where his father was a wealthy wholesaler. His father, mother and younger brother were taken away when Rokiškis was overwhelmed by the Nazis, soon after the 1941 invasion. Virtually the entire Jewish population was rounded up – all except the local doctor, who poisoned his wife and children before taking a dose himself; it was an image Harmatz carried with him for the rest of his life. His elder brother had joined the Soviet army and died in battle.
Harmatz managed to keep one step ahead of his tormentors. He made his way to Kovna (now Kaunus) and then to the capital, Vilna (now Vilnius). He was incarcerated in the Jewish ghetto in the city, which in the pre-war years had been the centre of rabbinical learning in eastern Europe, known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania. He managed to find work there.
He also joined the Communist youth movement, which in turn led him to the FPO, the ghetto’s underground resistance movement. When the ghetto was liquidated in September 1943, he escaped with a few other members into the forests around the city – and they remained there until Lithuania was liberated by the Russians, living off stolen livestock and grain from farms, and striving to kill as many Germans as possible.
In his memoir, Harmatz describes how, when the war was over, he went back to Rokiškis “in uniform” – Russian army boots, the khaki jacket of a Lithuanian officer and German army trousers held up by the belt of a Nazi officer, complete with its eagle buckle inscribed with the words “Gott mit uns” (“God with us”). Miraculously, he found his mother still alive, although she was to die later that year.
After the war ended, a section of the partisans, led by the charismatic young poet Abba Kovner, decided to try to find a way of avenging the fate of their people. There were plans to poison the entire water supply of the city of Nuremberg, but this idea collapsed when Kovner, with a consignment of poison hidden in his cabin, was arrested by British military police on board a steamer sailing from Egypt to France. Kovner was said to have had at least the partial blessing of the scientist Chaim Weizmann, who had worked for the British government during the war and would soon become the first president of Israel.
But with that scheme no longer possible, other plans were put in place. One of them was ready to be implemented by Harmatz himself, targeting the imprisoned SS officers at Stalag 13, outside Nuremberg. He and his colleagues had an arsenic mixture prepared; they knew it would work after testing it on a cat.
One night in April 1946, he led a group that broke into the bakery supplying the prisoner of war camp. They painted loaves of black bread with the deadly substance; 3,000 loaves intended for 12,000 inmates were contaminated. Hundreds had to have their stomachs pumped. When the story was finally revealed in 1998, the German government considered asking Israel, where Harmatz now lived, to extradite him for murder, though this never happened.
Harmatz had gone to Palestine just before the state of Israel was established. He worked at first for the Palestine Electric Company and then for the Jewish Agency for Palestine, a kind of quasi-government in waiting, which took over when the state of Israel was declared by the head of the agency, David Ben-Gurion, in 1948.
In 1951 Harmatz married Gina Kirschenfeld, another survivor, in Tel Aviv, but he would spend the next four years in Europe working for the agency. In 1957, he was appointed director general of ORT Israel – an organisation that had been originally set up in Tsarist Russia to help train young people in industry.
In 1980, he moved to London to become director general of World ORT, which worked among Jewish children and young people, and set up vocational schools all over the world. World ORT had arrangements with governments in practically every non-Arab country. In west Africa, it initiated roadbuilding schemes. In China, it set up computer training operations.
Harmatz worked with the retailer Stanley Kalms (now Lord Kalms) and the then secretary for trade and industry, Lord Young of Graffham, in setting up the first city colleges in Britain. As a result of Harmatz’s work, ORT became the first western concern of its kind to operate in the old Soviet Union, at one stage with the help of Mikhail Gorbachev. In France, Charles de Gaulle presented him with the national order of merit. He retired in 1993 and returned to Israel, where he wrote his memoirs.
Gina died in 1987. He is survived by his two sons, Ronel and Zvi.
Joseph Harmatz, wartime partisan and charity worker, born 23 January 1925; died 26 September 2016
- This article was amended on 14 December 2016 to clarify a reference to Chaim Weizmann.
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