Three of History’s Unmerciful & Lesser-Known Revenge Stories
Some of history’s greatest revenge stories you skipped.
We all love revenge stories. Why? They simply own a dramatic curve which we all are hungry for. They teach us, aware us, and most importantly, entertain us.
These stories will take you on the roller coaster ride of fascinating tales from history, which impresses us with the audacity people possess.
Revenge is taken when people have nothing to lose — even their own life. Let’s dig into fascination, where bold ones denied their suffering and simply acted:
What made her “The Huntress”?
You might have heard of the history of horrors in Mexico for women — the femicide.
It’s alarming to know the statistics of women murdered every day. New reports surface how abduction and murders are aided by transit officers, local officials, and city bus drivers.
The horrific trend has been brought to attention by women’s rights activists several times, but it didn’t help control the worsening situation.
In 2003, such conditions forced women like Diana to take matters into their own hand.
Titled as “Bus Driver Hunter,” Diana, as a disguised vigilante, targeted Ciudad Juárez bus drivers, who abducted more than 800 girls. She suspected two bus drivers, Jose Roberto Flores Carrera and Fredy Zarate Morales, being accomplices and shot them both.
Pop culture vigilantes take a safer route of targeting criminals in dark alleys, but Diana took a different turn and, in 2013, walked on to two city busses. She applied the same strategy in both crowded buses, where she sat calmly for 15 minutes then walked up to each driver’s bus, shooting the male drivers. Both the murders took place a day apart.
Her justification letter to the local news outlet was:
Interestingly, Diana, the huntress, has her name from a Roman goddess, who is well known in Juarez, Mexico, because the city has La Diana Cazadora’s statue.
She was the goddess of the hunt, so it makes sense from where the inspiration sprouted.
Diana had a disguised identity, like any vigilante of pop culture. Instead of bothering with masks and capes, she settled for a blonde wig — a reason she has been hard to track down.
Twenty people witnessed Diana’s act, helping to formulate her sketch; they told the police she had dark-skinned and was in her fifties. It is interesting how even having 20 close-range witnesses didn’t help to find Diana.
Her extreme actions had a conspiratorial effect on men, especially the bus drivers — many became terrified to go to work.
Sadly, Diana’s step didn’t help much with the rising numbers of victims, but it did provide comfort to some women.
Owing to the mixed public responses, the morality of her action remains unambiguous.
What made this woman sell all her belongings for buying her “fighting girlfriend”?
The history is littered with prime examples of revenge incidents from the world war. Flashing back to the second world war, nearly eight hundred thousand women served in the Red Army — one of such women was Mariya Oktyabrskaya, who had her reasons.
Overshadowing the motivation of patriotism, revenge was Mariya Oktyabrskaya’s calling — she had to avenge her husbands’ death at the nazi’s hand.
Hailing from the Crimea peasant family, Mariya Oktyabrskaya already penned a more significant loyalty for the USSR. A supporter of communism, she married an army officer Oktyabrskaya, who further deepened the sense of duty.
Her husband was killed in Kiev when fighting against Nazis, giving her the coping mechanism of revenge.
Throwing the grief coat, she verged on a new journey, which began by selling all her belongings for buying a T-34 tank. She named it “fighting girlfriend,” with which she planned to attack Nazi invaders.
The girl was smart. To ensure she’ll control the wheel, Mariya Oktyabrskaya wrote to dictator Joseph Stalin himself.
Her letter to the Soviet dictator read:
My husband was killed in action defending the motherland. I want revenge on the fascist dogs for his death and the death of Soviet people tortured by the fascist barbarians.
No doubt, Stalin was intelligent. He knew the request would earn a superb propaganda value thus approved her plea.
Mariya Oktyabrskaya got full support from the leader, the training of five-months, but despite her efforts, the countryman had little to no faith in her abilities. They were judging her abilities, forgetting her emotional drive surpassed the skill level they expected.
Maria manifested her anger in October 1943. The first tank battle for Fighting Girlfriend successfully breached enemy lines and crushed many under the treads.
She continued facing the German troops fearlessly. In one incident, the courageous woman, under heavy fire, hopped out of the T-34 tank to make the necessary repairs and then jumped back in to continue the fight.
The horrors she witnessed eased her. A line from an emotional letter to her sister says, “I’ve had my baptism by fire. I beat the bastards. Sometimes I’m so angry I can’t even breathe.”
In January 1944, during the Red Army’s Leningrad–Novgorod Offensive, the great woman died fighting the Nazis.
Her revenge killed her. But she killed many.
The Jewish Vigilantes & Their Attempts To Poison Six Million Germans
Several revenge stories against Nazis — one of them springs up of Abba Kovner, who chaired Nakam, translates to “avengers,” a Jewish vigilante group. Their mission statement: finish off Germans, as many as possible.
Nakam needed fair reparation — the lives of six million Germans. One for every Jew killed by the Nazis. They needed justice, thus following the old testament style for planning their large-scale killing.
Plan A: poison the water supply in five West German cities — Nuremberg, Weimar, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich.
Disguising as engineers, the group of 50 people unfiltered the water departments. For mass targeting, Abba Kovner needed moral permission from one of his friends and the future president of Israel — Chaim Weizmann.
Weizmann thought plan A was a smaller revenge plan, only targeting Nazi prisoners. The moment he was illuminated by the more extensive destruction, which threatened millions of Germans’ lives, Weizmann made Kovner shift his plan.
Kovner moved to plan B, targeting Stalag 13, an Allied POW camp in Nuremberg, where 12,000 former SS officers were held captive. The SS was the paramilitary organization that administered the Holocaust.
On April 13, 1946, Joseph Harmatz led plan B, where the injected glue and arsenic mixture onto 3,000 loaves of bread prepared for the Nazi prisoners. As the day fell, more than 2,000 Nazi prisoners were hospitalized.
Mass hospitalization didn’t result in any death — the reason being low potent poison.
No causality meant no charges against any Nakam member. Decades later, the case was investigated but owing to “extraordinary circumstances,” prosecutors didn’t file any charges.
All those acts of revenge took so much planning, time, effort, and resources but fewer results — mostly, their own life.
It’s easy to write about what they lose but impossible to decipher the level of inner satisfaction they might have achieved.
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