True story of Nazi hunters behind new Tarantino thriller

A NEW blockbuster Quentin Tarantino movie tells the story of the Nazi hunters - bands of Jewish soldiers and Holocaust survivors who roamed the planet after World War Two taking their brutal unofficial revenge on the monsters who murdered six million men, women and children.

But as our extracts from a gripping new book reveal today, Inglourious Basterds - starring Brad Pitt - could never match the chilling reality of what REALLY happened when the Revenge Squads found their prey ...

FUGITIVE Nazi mass murderer Aleksander Laak stretched out in his leather armchair and grinned to himself. Life was good.

It was just over 20 years since he had slaughtered 100,000 Jews - men, women and children - in his death camp during a three-year wartime reign of terror.

He used women who caught his eye as sex slaves - and killed them if they resisted. His loved watching his guards at play . . . tossing Jewish babies into the air and shooting them. And when World War II was over, Laak escaped with his life to Canada. No Nuremberg trial for him. The past was safely buried.

But in the next second a knock at the door changed everything. For outside was Death in the shape of burly Arnie Berg - a member of a secret Jewish Revenge Squad combing the world to bring the likes of Laak, the commander of Jagala concentration camp in Estonia, to justice.

Two hours later, the Nazi's wife returned home from a trip to the cinema to find her husband dangling from a rope in the garage - a look of terror on his face.

One more dead among the hundreds tracked down.

In Quentin Tarantino's new epic, out this month, the oddly- spelled Inglourious Basterds, Brad Pitt stars as leader of a crack team of Jewish-Americans hell-bent on revenge.

But the movie can only skim the surface of what really happened in a fight for justice that spread across the globe.

The real-life Jewish revenge squads killed 1,500 high-ranking Nazis, starting in 1944 and not giving up for 16 years. And their methods were chilling.

"First we put a bullet through their heads," says Meir Zorea, a second lieutenant in one of the bands of assassins. "Then we strangled them with our bare hands. We killed them like you would kill a bug."

Strangled

Another comrade, Zeer Keren, says: "We were quite happy to do to the Nazis what they did to Jews. I strangled them myself once we got them into a forest. It took three to four minutes.

"We weighted the bodies with heavy chains and threw them into lakes, rivers, streams. We left no trace of our activities." Their stories are told in a gripping new book, The Jewish Brigade, tracing the avengers' post-war adventures. Also known as 'Din' - the Hebrew word for judgement - the squads of three or four members were made up of Jewish Allied soldiers, and, later, Holocaust survivors.

Some were in the Brigade - a unit set up by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1944, made up of more than 6,000 volunteers. He said: "It seems to me indeed appropriate that a special unit of the race which has suffered indescribable treatment from the Nazis should be represented in a distinct formation among the forces gathered for their final overthrow."

The following year, the Brigade was in the front line for the Allies' final push against the Nazi menace and worked with the rest of the British Army in the immediate aftermath of the war.

Official orders dictated that any Nazis captured should be interrogated, not executed. But the revenge squads within Brigade ranks had other ideas.

Officer Israel Carmi was one of three fighters who obtained a hit list of SS top brass from a Nazi party member. He recalls: "We had a tip-off about a house in Austria. When we got there we were amazed at the treasure trove of clothes and jewellery we found.

Execute

"The woman there was brazen. She said it had all belonged to Jews. We told them that we would execute them there and then for crimes against humanity."

But her husband begged for a deal. Next morning, he handed Carmi a list of SS NCOs and officers - complete with names, ranks, home addresses, dates of birth and their roles in the Holocaust.

"We passed the names over to British intelligence," said Carmi. "But we kept back the highest-ranking SS because we wanted to deal with them ourselves."

Carmi revealed the revenge squads would sometimes use disguises to fool their Nazi prey.

"We would put on British Military Police helmets," he said. "Then we would enter the home and take the suspects, saying we wanted them for interrogation. Once in the car we told them who we were. Some admitted guilt. Others kept silent. We did the job."

In the Tarantino film, the Basterds scalp their victims, carve swastikas into their foreheads and execute them, either at gunpoint or by beating them to death with baseball bats.

Gruesome

For the real-life revenge squads, retribution was every bit as gruesome. Shmuel Givon describes the moment he hurled two SS men off the top of a cliff in the Austrian Alps and watched their bodies splinter on the jagged rocks below.

"They admitted they had done terrible things to Jews," he said. "We pushed them over the edge. They must still be there."

Others were hanged, like Aleksander Laak, in their own garage. Revenge squad members would force a Nazi to stand on the roof of his car while a noose tied to the ceiling was slung round his neck. Then they would drive the car away.

The revenge squads soon realised their Nazi enemies were stricken with fear at the thought of falling into their hands.

"When the bastards realised we were Jews, you could almost smell their funk," says one Brigade member who was born in Berlin's Jewish ghetto.

"I did take great pleasure in making them kneel and pointing my gun at them. I made more than one member of the master race mess his pants with fright."

Some Holocaust survivors formed revenge squads of their own. One such group took bloody revenge on the SS slavedrivers at a munitions factory in Saxony, southeast Germany.

Jewish captives there were forced to make ammo for the Nazis. They were fed starvation rations and slept crammed into kennels three feet tall. Many committed suicide. Escapees were torn apart by the SS officers' dogs.

Abandoned

At the end of the war the factory was abandoned - but the swaggering SS officers soon returned to the remote nearby village, planning a life of rural bliss.

One chill morning, ten Jewish men went into the village to ask for food, water and milk for a group of refugees camped nearby. About ten SS men killed six of them, chasing the others into the hills. The former factory chief called a meeting in the village hall, where around 36 SS argued what to do about the rest of their visitors. Little did they know, the remaining Jews were already outside - 20 of them, armed to the teeth with grenades, rifles and machine pistols.

At a signal, the avengers flung open the doors, hurled in grenades and opened fire - raking the lines of Nazis. When the refugees left the village, their trucks were loaded with cheese, milk, bread, meat, butter, eggs and wine.

"The Jews, particularly the young, had changed," says author Morris Beckman. "The elderly had no chance of escape, but the young had witnessed death and were not afraid of it. Now they lived only for the chance to kill Germans."

The revenge squads' numbers swelled and ever-grander schemes were concocted in the final days of the war.

Between 300 and 400 Germans died when a five-strong squad broke into a bakery outside Nuremberg in April 1945 and poisoned 3,000 loaves of bread.

A senior Gestapo officer was waiting for a minor operation in hospital when he suddenly died. Somehow, paraffin oil had found its way into his bloodstream.

However far the Nazis fled, the revenge squads followed. Some travelled as far as Spain, South America and Canada until at least 1960, when Aleksander Laak met his grisly fate.

Among the 1,500 killed there were some major Nazi scalps.

Dr Ernst-Robert Grawitz was the demonic chief medical officer of Hitler's SS. It was his vile suggestion, in 1941, that gas chambers would be ideal for exterminating the Jewish race.

Experiments

He carried out diabolical experiments on camp inmates, testing their resistance to freezing, various diseases and drinking sea water.

Nazi records say Grawitz commited suicide on April 24, 1945, by bizarrely exploding two grenades while he ate supper with his wife and two children.

But the revenge squads claimed responsibility for Grawitz's death - along with other Nazi 'suicide' cases including Paul Giesler, the Nazis' boss in Munich, SS Colonel Dr Hans Geschke and SS Lieutenant Kurt Mussfeld, who supervised the ovens of Auschwitz.

The revenge squads never had any regrets. Brigade member Moshe Tavor shrugs: "I knew that my uncles and my grandparents and other relatives had been annihilated in the camps.

"To say I feel guilty at what I did to them is wrong. I feel guilty for what we DIDN'T do to them."

Words that could have come straight out of the script of a Tarantino movie. But with an impact no Hollywood actor could match.

THE Jewish Brigade by Morris Beckman, published by Spellmount, is out now. For more information visit the Jewish Military Museum online: www.ajex.org.uk .

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