10 Must Brutal Acts Of Revenge In History

7. The Jewish Nakam Poisoned 400 Nazi War Criminals With Bread Containing Arsenic

It is perhaps understandable that, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, some Jewish groups could not simply accept the justice handed out during the Nuremberg Show Trials - and instead wanted to exact their own vengeance.

One infamous group were named the "Nakam" - also known as "The Jewish Avengers" - and they were formed by Abba Kovner and the survivors of the United Partisan Organisation, a Zionist paramilitary liberation group who operated in Lithuania under Soviet orders. Their name derives from the Jewish phrase "Dam Yehudi Nakam" - which literally means "Jewish Blood Will Be Avenged".

Also joined by the veterans of the Jewish brigade in British Palestine, the members of Nakam - which literally means "revenge" in Hebrew - set about assassinating Nazi war criminals as retribution for the Holocaust.

About 60 members of the group arrived in Germany in the aftermath of World War II, and they allegedly poisoned 3,000 loaves of bread which were to be sent to former SS guards in the American PoW camp in "Stalag XIII". Some 1,900 prisoners became ill with arsenic poisoning, with up to 400 dying as a result.

However, Nakam admitted "this was nothing compared with what we really wanted to do. More brutally they intended to kill 6million Germans by poisoning the water supplies of Berlin, Munich Weimar, Nuremberg and Hamburg - in order to murder as many civilians as Jews were slaughtered during the Holocaust.