Venge

Venge (pronounced venj)

To avenge; to punish; to revenge (archaic).

1250–1300: From the Middle English vengen, from the Old French venger & vengier (take revenge, avenge, punish) from the Latin vindicāre (assert a claim, claim as one's own; avenge, punish; vindicate). Also archaic were the related forms were vengefully, vengefulness venged & venging whereas the adjective vengeful, although rare, endured.  The noun vengeance, from the same era as venge, flourished.  Vengeance was from the Anglo-French vengeaunce, from twelfth century Old French vengeance & venjance (revenge, retribution).  Venge & avenge are verbs, revenge is a noun & verb, vengeance & vengefulness are nouns, vengeful is an adjective and vengefully is an adverb; the most common noun plural is vengeances. 

Venge long ago became archaic and is now extinct except when used in a historical context or for literary effect.  Venge is the verb transitive, venges the third-person singular simple present, venging the present participle and venged the simple past and past participle.  Synonyms include vindicate, avenge, chasten, punish, chastise, revenge, repay, redress, requite, square, return, get, fix, retort, reciprocate, score, defend, match, justify and payback.  Venge is one of the unusual words in English which went extinct while various derived forms (vengeance; vengeful; avenge) flourished and the translations of the Bible probably encouraged use; God being vengeful, there’s much vengeance in the Bible: Paul to the Romans; Romans 12:19–21, King James Version, (KJV, 1611):

19 Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.

20 Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.

21 Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

The vengeance weapons

The V-weapons deployed by Germany late in the World War II (1939-1945) all began as conventional projects of the military or the armaments industry but became known as the Vergeltungswaffen ("retaliatory weapons" or "reprisal weapons") after the label was in 1944 applied by Dr Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945; Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda 1933-1945) who used the word as a propaganda device, seeking to give civilians some hope there might be retaliation against (and perhaps even relief from) the area-bombing campaigns being conducted against cities all over the Reich.  The Allies generally translated Vergeltungswaffen as “vengeance weapons”, the best-known of the devices the V-1 & V-2. 

The terminology can be confusing, the vengeance weapons often conflated with the so-called Wunderwaffen (super-weapons, or wonder-weapons) of which there were literally dozens on drawing boards, in development or (occasionally) in use but the Vergeltungswaffen were just a highly-visible sub-set, although, being so well-publicized and relatively numerous, they do tend more to figure in the popular imagination.  Goebbels had been talking of the Wunderwaffen since 1943 and Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader), German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) had hinted at their existence since 1939 although there’s still debate about just what it was he was referencing.  Confusingly, historians writing in English also use the term “miracle weapons”, perhaps because Hitler, once he realized the war was lost (and the timing of this is debated, a vague consensus being he probably understood it couldn’t be won after the strategic failure of Unternehmen Zitadelle (Operation Citadel or the Kursk offensive) in mid-1943 and that it was lost when the Ardennes counter-offensive (Battle of the Bulge) was abandoned early in January 1945) began increasingly to refer to the “Miracle of the House of Brandenburg”, a term coined by Frederick the Great (Frederick II, 1712–1786; King of Prussia 1740-1786) to describe the fortuitous series of political and military events that saved Prussia from defeat during the Seven Years' War (1756–1763).  By the latter stages of the war, in the remarkably frank reports compiled by the SD (the Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS (Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS), the internal intelligence agency of the SS and Nazi Party), German civilians were noted  as being increasingly sceptical about the Wunderwaffen, using words like “wonder” and “miracle” with ill-disguised irony.  Despite the opinion of some today, Dr Goebbels understood the limits of propaganda and had by 1945 already toned-down the emphasis on the weapons and had switched focus to matters at least slightly less implausible.  In the post-war German language, Wunderwaffe has survived as a (usually derisive) reference to any universal solution said to be something said (improbably) able to solve many or especially difficult problems.

The actual history of the Vergeltungswaffen became murky almost as soon as the war ended.  What are well documented are the V-1, V-2 & V-3 and there’s some evidence to suggest the V-4 label was, at least in some documents, applied to one or more weapon before the end of hostilities.  The confusion is thought to have been engendered by the normal military & industrial practice of using the "V" designation (denoting Versuchs (attempt, experimental)) plus a number to keep track of all the prototype or version numbers which had to be documented.  Although not mentioned in his dairies or elsewhere, Goebbels seemed just to have hijacked Versuchs (V) and done a rebrand, the word vengeance well-suited to the time and place to which the gangster Nazi state had delivered Germany.  He spoke in public only ever of the V-1 & V-2 and the V-3 is documented in the German military archive but for the V-4 and beyond, the application of the V-n nomenclature is speculative, V-4 having (after the war) been applied variously to a Nazi atomic bomb, the manned version of the V-1, a number of radiological devices and the A9/A10 rocket combination.

The Pase Rock: Lindsay Lohan's Revenge.

After the war, there was a great profusion of often duplicated records spread all over the Reich and it was almost all on paper.  Project codes weren’t standardized even within industries or branches of the military but what was adhered to was the universal allocation of a system of version identifiers, usually as numbers.  A "V" to designate Versuchsmuster (prototypes) was almost always used, usually in conjunction with whatever was the current model designation (eg Ta 189 v1, Me 210 v2 etc) but within project teams, a lot of working documents circulated with just a version number listed; that being all that was required by the team focusing on the one model.  It’s that, at least in part, that’s thought to account for so many different things being described as V-4, V-5, V-6 etc, misinformation the expansion of the internet appears to have made more prevalent.  Ironically, the dozens of Wunderwaffen to which so many resources were allocated ultimately achieved more for the Allies than the Germans.  After the war, the British, the Americans and the Russians all took whatever they could grab of the German military and scientific research establishment (equipment and personnel), carted it off, reassembled what they had and put the scientists to work.  In ballistics, rocketry and advanced aviation, the victorious powers of the late 1940s essentially had in their hands what represented probably decades of peace-time research.  It’s not that developments like trans-Atlantic airliners, the ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) or the moon landing wouldn’t have been possible without the windfall of the German research but these things almost certainly would have taken longer to achieve, presumably decades, such was the pace of advancement during the war.

V-1.

The Vergeltungswaffen eins (V-1) was the world’s first cruise missile.  One of the rare machines to use a pulse-jet, it emitted such a distinctive sound that those at whom it was aimed nicknamed it the “buzz-bomb” although it attracted other names including doodlebug.  In Germany, before Goebbels decided it was the V-1, the official military code name was Fi 103 (The Fi stood for Fieseler, the original builder of the airframe and most famous for their Storch (Stork) STOL (short take-off & landing) aircraft that was one of the minor classics of the era but there were also the code-names Maikäfer (maybug) & Kirschkern (cherry stone).  Although not fast enough to be invulnerable either to air or ground-fire and insufficiently accurate to be used in precision attacks, it was nevertheless an outstandingly economical delivery system, able to carry a warhead of 850 kg (1,870 lb) to London at a tiny fraction of the cost of using manned aircraft for the same task with the priceless additional benefit of not risking the loss of aircrew.  While the Allied defenses against the V-1 did improve over time, it was only the destruction of the launch sites and the occupation of territory within launch range that ceased the attacks.  Until then, the V-1 remained a highly effective terror weapon but, like the V-2 and so much of the German armaments effort, bureaucratic empire-building and political intrigue compromised the efficiency of the project. 

V-2.

The Vergeltungswaffen zwei (V-2) was developed first by the German military with the code name Aggregat 4 (A4) and was the first guided, long-range ballistic missile.  With a range of around 320 km (200 miles), it briefly entered the stratosphere (technically the mesosphere) on its trajectory towards the target and once in flight, there was no effective defense; falling to earth faster than the speed of sound, nor was there any warning.  Technologically, it was an extraordinary advance in delivery systems but it was a very expensive way (inaccurately) to deliver a relatively small payload of 725 kg (1,600 lb) of high explosive.  When nuclear warheads were developed, the economics of ballistic missiles were realized.  Deployed simultaneously too early in its development to be successful and too late in the war to realise its strategic purpose, the V-2 was influential in the history of both ballistics and space exploration.  It (1) cost more to develop than the atom-bomb (although there remains the suspicion the accounting of the Anglo-US Manhattan Project deliberately was understated), (2) caused fewer casualties when deployed than died during its development and production (most of whom were slave-workers), (3) was the ancestor of the ICBMs and (4), saved the US one or two decades the of research required to produce both the ICBMs and the big Saturn rockets which powered the Apollo programme.  It’s a myth the V-2 had no strategic effect.  From the time the Allies were convinced the programme was a threat (and it took actual physical evidence to convince the British scientific establishment the V-2 was even theoretically possible), much attention was paid, even to the extent of diverting bomber command from their plans to instead concentrate some resources on the V-2.  As a terror weapon, the effectiveness was then unparalleled, the British government forced to react to the effect on public morale and some historians still under-estimate just how many resources the Allies had to divert to deal with the V-2s.

V-3.

The Vergeltungswaffen drei (V-3) was a modern take on a very old-fashioned idea, the big-bore gun.  Essentially, the principle was of one barrel with the projectile launched with multiple charges, each successive propellant charge adding to the velocity and therefore the range.  The concept is something like that used in electronics whereby a signal transmitted along a wire is boosted at intervals by line-drivers to compensate for loses over distance.  To preserve secrecy during development, the project was known as the Hochdruckpumpe (High Pressure Pump or HDP) and, among engineers, it gained the nickname Fleißiges Lieschen (Busy Lizzie).  The idea in ballistics actually dates from the late nineteenth century and was conceived as a way of achieving a high-velocity, large calibre weapon while not requiting an excessively (and probably impossibly) large barrel.  Some of the V-3s were fired in a brief operational life before the sites had to be abandoned because of the Allied advance and the two aimed at London were disabled in air attacks on their bunkers using 5,400-kilogram (11,900 lb) "Tallboy" deep-penetration “earthquake” bombs.  A number of claims have been made that certain weapons are the true Vergeltungswaffen vier (V-4) including a variety of missiles, nuclear devices and jet bombers but there’s no conclusive evidence any was ever labeled as such by either the German military or armaments industry.

Mr Sarközy (left) and his third wife (Italian supermodel Carla Bruni, b 1967, right) arrive at La Santé Prison, November 2025.

One for whom vengeance was much on the mind was Nicolas Sarközy (b 1955; President of France 2007-2012) and his thoughts were not only an inner torment.  When, in October 2025, entering La Santé Prison in Montparnasse to begin a five-year sentence imposed for “criminal association” related to campaign financing (it was a conspiracy charge), as well as comfortable shoes and some nice warm jumpers, the former Le Président took a novel and made sure the assemble press pack knew it was a copy of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-1946) by Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870)), one of literature’s great “tales of revenge”.  Although there have previously been crooked presidents of France (some of whom even were convicted including in 2021 Mr Sarközy for corruption, bribery and related matters) the sentence handed down in 2025 was the first occasion the head of state of the Fifth Republic (1958-) had ended up behind bars, something which surprised most of the country as well as the soon-to-be inmate who had expected again to be permitted to “do his time” in not unpleasant home detention, limited by nothing more tiresome than one of the ankle-bracelet monitors made fashionable by Lindsay Lohan during her “troubled Hollywood starlet” phase.

Mr Sarközy signing copies of A Prisoner's Diary at the famous Librairie Lamartine [Lamartine bookshop], 118 rue de la Pompe, Paris 16e.  In the book, he recorded having for 20 days to endure the “…hell of soggy baguettes…”

Being France, Mr Sarközy of course served only three weeks in jail before in November 2025 lawyers secured his release under judicial supervision pending an appeal hearing; that was conducted in March 2026 with a verdict expected in June.  Even by the standards of political corruption, the facts (proven, alleged & disputed) brought before the court were extraordinary and over some 20 years involved variously (1) a terrorist act in the planting of a bomb which caused an airliner to crash in the Sahara with the loss of 170 lives, (2) the source of funding for Mr Sarközy’s campaign in the 2007 “Sarkö vs Ségo” presidential election (against the Socialist Party’s Ségolène Royal (b 1953)), (3) the Bedouin tent of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi (circa 1942–2011; ruler of Libya 1969-2011) being pitched in the gardens of the Élysée Palace, (4) suitcases full of undeclared banknotes of unknown provenance, (5) secret meetings between aides to Mr Sarközy and figures convicted (in absentia) by French courts of terrorism, (6) allegations of bribery and (7) a suicide which may have been a murder.  As might be imagined, many are looking forward to what the appeal court’s hands down.  If the lower court’s verdict is over-turned it may be expected Sarközy will begin to visit revenge upon those who wronged him but if sent back to his cell, he’ll at least have time to complete a second volume of Le journal d'un prisonnier (A Prisoner's Diary (2025)), his 216 page record of 20 days behind bars.