T112 DETROIT JEWISH 1MWS
12--FrIday, Mawr/ 12, 1971
DIN — the Revenge Seekers — New Facet of Holocaust Data
It's difficult to get. through
Michael Elkins' little paperback
without developing a king-sized
hate.
Even as a hard-nosed reporter,
with the virtue of objectivity. Elk-
ins could not emerge emotionally
unscathed from covering the Eich-
mann Trial. Eight years later, he
put his own fury into writing, in a
book appropriately titled, "Forged
in Fury," published by Ballantine.
(It is available this week on all
newstands, through Curtis Circula-
tion Co.)
To describe it on the cover as
" a book about Jews" is to do an
injustice to this 312-page documen-
tary. It is more than a book about
Jews; it is a book about mankind,
and its betrayal of humanity.
Recent history, writes Elkins,
"piled on the centuries of preju-
dice and persecution and pogrom,
has planted deep in every Jew a
kernel of knowledge — instinctive,
unwelcome, bitter as gall. And
within the root issues of justice
and of survival, the Jew will not
trust the Gentile; for the Gentile
world has done little — and that
little, late — to soften the bitter
heritage of oppression that the Jew
Is born to. The people of the Book
will henceforth await evidence
more firm than now exists before
they will again embrace the costly
and uncertain hypothesis that the
ethical teachings of the Bible
which the Jews gave to mankind
are more effective safeguards than
is the sword."
To the student of the Holo-
caust, much of what Elkins says
will be familiar — all too pain-
fully so. But much of what he
writes is new, and raises serious
moral questions.
Discussing at length the various
forms of Jewish resistance during
the war, he insists that those who
claim the Jews went like sheep to
the slaughter are denying irrevo-
cable fact. In truth, resistance by
Jews in concentration camp and
forest and ghetto was incredible,
considering the dearth of arms and
food, the knowledge of horrible
penalties should they be discovered
and, as horrible, the frequent be-
trayal by "countrymen," who
found the Nazi taskmasters to be
less odious than the Jewish "un-
termenschen."
Can those who were here exper-
ience the same searing hatred as
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tems of Munich and Nuremberg.
For such an operation, DIN would
need a special poison. And it
would need the moral approval of
a leader of the Jewish people.
For approval he went to Pales-
tine, and to Dr. Chaim Weizmann,
the prestigious statesman then
working at his scientific institute
at Rehovot.
In their conversation, Wald "took
Weizmann with him, all the bloody
road he had himself traveled, from
the Kovno ghetto and the mass
graves and the torture chambers
of the Ninth Forth, to the high
and dirty business of the resis-
(Continued on Page 13)
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those who were there? Those who,
surviving, vowed vengeance at any
cost?
It is at this point that Elkins,
having carefully documented every
fact, introduces a new element to
narrative:
arrative: the revenge seekers.
The first letters of Dahm Yie-
rael Nokeam — the blood of Israel
will take vengeance — also spells
a word: DIN, the Hebrew word for
Justice. And that is what they
called theniselvs — a handful of
partisan leaders formed into an
illegal underground pledged to
murder those who had murdered.
While the Hagana was criss-
crossing Europe, gathering in the
emaciated survivors for the "il-
legal" immigration to Palestine,
DIN was engaged in its own oper-
ation. In its "first hunting sea-
son" in mid-1945, DIN claims to
have killed more than 100 Nazis.
To do this, writes Elkins, the 50-
odd members had the assistance of
a network of 300 contacts — Jews
serving in the military occupation
forces, in war crimes offices, in
various goverment agencies who
had access to data on war crimin-
als. Additionally, there were Pales-
tinians, who had served with the
Jewish Brigade of the British
Army. All were united by one bond:
they were Jews.
At some point, DIN's personal
vendetta — committed against
known Nazi criminals — became a
general vendetta — against all Ger-
mans. Elkins' source of informa-
tion, Malachi Wald (pseudonym),
a DIN leader who lives in Israel,
disclosed to him a plot formed in
late 1945 to murder 1,000,000 Ger-
mans by poisoning the water sys-
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Wiesenthal Doubts
Many Will Ever Be
Brought to Justice
VIENNA (JTA)—Simon Wiesen-
thal, whose war crimes documen-
tation center here helps track
down wanted Nazi war criminals,
expressed doubt Monday that
many of them now in West Ger-
many will ever be brought to
justice.
Wiesenthal claimed that a num-
ber of known war criminals are
living in the Hamburg area but
are somehow protected by the
authorities and have not been tried
although they have supposedly
been under investigation for years.
He said one of them was Ludwig
Hahn, head of Nazi security serv-
ices in Warsaw who was later an
official at the Treblinka death
camp.
Hahn was supposed to have
been charged with the mass mur-
der of Jews in Poland in 1943.
Wiesenthal said he didn't think
the Nazi will ever face trial.
In Tel Aviv, Tuvia Friedman,
who has tracked down and
brought to trial more than ISIS
Nazi criminals, said in Haifa
that a South African man has
offered to turn, in Nazi doctor
Josef Mengele in return for
Friedman's $50,000 reward. The
man, Friedman said, also volun-
teered to testify against Mengele
in court. The Nazi is believed
to be hiding out in Paraguay.
Friedman is a 49-year-old journ-
alist who heads the Haifa Docu-
mentation Institute and the World
Union of Jewish Nazi Victims.
Wiesenthal told newsmen he not
only knows the exact whereabouts
of the Auschwitz "selection doc-
tor" but has the number of the
Panamanian passport Mengele is
holding. Wiesenthal, who partici-
pated in a special television
broadcast on "Nazi hunting," dis-
closed that Mengele is living in a
closed military district known as
"Tuarto Vincente" over which the
police have no jurisdiction.
Wiesenthal also revealed that
his Nazi war crimes documenta-
1 tion center in Vienna knows all 11
pseudonyms Mengele has used.
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