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Joel Brand

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Historical figures

   Joel Brand (April 25 1906–July 13, 1964) was a Hungarian Jew who played
   a prominent role in trying to save the Hungarian Jewish community
   during the Holocaust from deportation to the German death camp at
   Auschwitz.

   Described by historian Yehuda Bauer as a brave adventurer who felt at
   home in "underground conspiracies and card-playing circles," Brand
   teamed up with fellow Zionists in Hungary, in or around 1942, to form
   the Aid and Rescue Committee, a small group dedicated to helping Jewish
   refugees in Nazi-occupied Europe escape to the relative safety of
   Hungary, before the German invasion of that country in March 1944.

   Shortly after the invasion, Brand was asked by SS officer Adolf
   Eichmann to help broker a deal between the SS and the United States or
   Britain. Eichmann told Brand that he was prepared to release up to one
   million Hungarian Jews, who were otherwise destined for Auschwitz, if
   the Western Allies would supply Germany with 10,000 trucks, and large
   quantities of soap, tea, and coffee. The proposed deal, later described
   by The Times as one of the "most loathsome" stories of the war, became
   known as the "blood for goods," "blood for trucks," or "Blood and
   Cargo" proposal. It came to nothing and so historians can only
   speculate as to whether Eichmann's offer was genuine. There are
   theories that it was a trick intended to pacify the Jewish community to
   prevent an uprising, so that they would quietly board the trains to
   Auschwitz thinking they were being resettled, or that it was a cover
   for high-ranking SS officials, probably including Heinrich Himmler, to
   make contact with the U.S and Britain to negotiate a secret peace deal
   that did not involve the Soviet Union, and possibly one that also
   excluded Adolf Hitler.

   Whatever its purpose, the deal was thwarted by a suspicious British
   government and the Jewish Agency, to Brand's great distress. Their
   reasons for scuppering the proposal, and the consequences of doing so,
   have been the subject of bitter debate ever since, particularly among
   Hungarian Holocaust survivors, some of whom have said that it was an
   unforgivable betrayal. Brand himself said: "Rightly or wrongly, for
   better or for worse, I have cursed Jewry's official leaders ever since.
   All these things shall haunt me until my dying day. It is much more
   than a man can bear."

Background

   Brand was born in Năsăud, Transylvania, now Romania, moving in 1910
   with his family to Erfurt in Germany, where he was raised and educated.
   He became a communist and worked for the Comintern as a sailor and
   odd-job man, spending time in the Philippines, Japan, China, and South
   America before returning to Germany, where he became a middle-ranking
   communist functionary. His position led to his arrest after the
   Reichstag fire in 1933, when the Nazis began rounding up socialists and
   communists. When he was released in 1934, he left Germany and settled
   in Budapest, Hungary, where he got a job with the Budapest Telephone
   Company and became a Zionist, joining the Mapai (Israel Labour Party)
   youth movement.

   In 1935, he married another member of the Zionist movement in Budapest,
   Hansi Hartmann, who owned a factory that produced gloves, socks, and
   sweaters. In July 1941, Hansi's sister got caught up in the so-called
   Kamenets Podolskiy deportations, when the Hungarian government decided
   to deport between 18,000 and 25,000 Jews to German-occupied Ukraine,
   because they could not prove they had Hungarian citizenship. Between
   14,000 and 16,000 of the deportees were gunned down by the SS on August
   27 and 28, 1941, but Brand paid Josezf Krem, a Hungarian espionage
   agent, to get Hansi's sister back safely. That incident was the
   beginning of Brand's involvement in smuggling Jewish refugees from
   Poland and Slovakia to the relative safety of Hungary.

   Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University
   of Jerusalem, writes of Brand that he was a man who enjoyed easy living
   and adventure, who felt at home in cafés and bars, in "underground
   conspiracies and card-playing circles," and whose truthfulness was "not
   always impeccable," but he was also a brave and intelligent operator
   who genuinely wanted to help Jews escape death.

   As the situation for Jewish communities in Europe worsened, Brand
   teamed up in his rescue activities with Rudolf Kastner, a Zionist
   lawyer and journalist from Cluj, and Samuel Springmann, a Polish Jew
   and centre-left Zionist who owned a jewellery store, and who began to
   function as the treasurer of their fledgling rescue committee.

   In early 1943, the group was joined by Otto Komoly, a Budapest
   engineer, reserve officer, war veteran, and member of the Liberal
   Zionist Party, who was known and highly respected among the Jewish
   community in Budapest. Komoly's membership gave the group the
   credibility it needed. He became their chairman, and with that, the
   Va'adat Ezrah Vehatzalah (Vaada) — the Aid and Rescue Committee — was
   born, consisting of Komoly, Kastner, Joel and Hansi Brand, Moshe Krausz
   and Eugen Frankl (both Orthodox Jews and Zionists), and Ernst Szilagyi
   from the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair. Operating outside the structure of
   the formal Jewish institutions, the committee embodied a "daring and
   activist ethos," according to historian Ronald Zweig, that the
   Judenrat, the official Jewish Council set up at the instruction of the
   Nazis, lacked entirely.

Meeting with Eichmann

   Brand told his story as a prosecution witness at the trial of Adolf
   Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961
   Enlarge
   Brand told his story as a prosecution witness at the trial of Adolf
   Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961

   On Sunday, March 19, 1944, the Germans invaded Hungary with relatively
   weak forces which met no resistance. Brand was abducted and hidden in a
   safehouse by Josef Winninger, a courier for the German Abwehr (military
   intelligence), who had been taking money from Brand in exchange for
   information about Jewish refugees, and whom Brand paid between $8,000
   and $20,000 for a place to hide.

   According to testimony Brand gave in 1954 to the District Court in
   Jerusalem during a libel case — and which he repeated during the trial
   of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 — on April 16 or 25, 1944, he
   was told by one of the German agents in Budapest, probably Winninger,
   that he was to wait at a certain street corner at an appointed time,
   and would be taken to meet Eichmann.

   Brand was taken to a luxury hotel that Eichmann was using as his
   headquarters. He told the court in German that "[t]he words which then
   passed between us have imprinted themselves on my memory till I die."
   Brand later told the court during Eichmann's trial that
   Untersturmbannführer Kurt A. Becher, an SS officer and emissary of
   Heinrich Himmler, was standing behind Eichmann during the meeting.

   If this is correct, it means the meeting was of extraordinary
   importance, according to historian Yehuda Bauer, because Brand also
   testified that Gerhard Clages, the chief of Himmler's Security Service
   in Budapest, and a rival of Eichmann's, was present at a later meeting,
   again with Becher and Eichmann. This means that Himmler had involved
   three of his men of the same rank to negotiate with Brand: Eichmann,
   whose job it was to kill Jews; Clages, whose task for Himmler was to
   reach out to forge a positive relationship with the West, because
   Germany knew it was losing the war; and Becher, who Bauer writes was
   meant to ensure the SS did not lose any money or goods.

   Brand said that Eichmann asked him "Do you know who I am?" and
   continued:

     I have carried out the Aktionen in the Reich — in Poland — in
     Czechoslovakia. Now it is Hungary's turn. I let you come here to
     talk business with you. Before that I investigated you — and your
     people. Those from the Joint and those from the Agency. And I have
     come to the conclusion that you still have resources. So I am ready
     to sell you — a million Jews. All of them I wouldn't sell you. That
     much money and goods you don't have. But a million — that will go.
     Goods for blood — blood for goods. You can gather up this million in
     countries which still have Jews. You can take it from Hungary. From
     Poland. From Austria. From Theresienstadt. From Auschwitz. From
     wherever you want. What do you want to save. Virile men? Grown
     women? Old people? Children? Sit down — and talk.

   Brand told Eichmann that he was not empowered to make that decision and
   asked where they were supposed to obtain the cargo from, given that the
   Germans had confiscated Jewish property. Eichmann suggested he go
   abroad and negotiate directly with the Allies. Eichmann told him they
   wanted any kind of cargo, but particularly trucks. "Ten thousand trucks
   are worth a million Jews to me," Brand quoted him as saying. Eichmann
   also asked for one thousand tons of tea and coffee, and soap. According
   to Bauer, Hermann Krumey, an assistant of Eichmann's, also asked for
   machine tools, leather and other goods, but the proposal soon settled
   into 10,000 trucks and various consumer items. Figures that were
   mentioned according to later testimony from Rudolf Kastner were 200
   tons of tea, 200 tons of coffee, 2,000,000 cases of soap, 10,000 trucks
   for the Waffen-SS to be used on the eastern front, and unspecified
   quantities of tungsten and other war materials.

   Eichmann said he was willing to offer one thousand Jews in advance, and
   on receiving the first payment, a further ten per cent. He told Brand:
   "Pick them anywhere you want. Hungary, Auschwitz, Slovakia — anywhere
   you want and anyone you want." Brand was asked where he wanted to go to
   make the offer to the Jews and the Allies. He chose Istanbul. "The
   Jews, in the meantime, would be sent to Auschwitz to be gassed until
   such time as a favorable reply was received," according to historian
   Raul Hilberg.

   Brand asked what assurance Eichmann could offer the Allies that the
   Jews really would be released. Eichmann responded:

     You think we are all crooks. You hold us for what you are. Now I am
     going to prove to you that I trust you more than you trust me. When
     you come back from Istanbul and tell me that the offer has been
     accepted, I will dissolve Auschwitz and move 10 percent of the
     promised million to the border. You take over the 100,000 Jews and
     deliver for them afterwards one thousand trucks. And then the deal
     with proceed step by step. For every hundred thousand Jews, a
     thousand trucks. You are getting away cheap.

   Brand told the court: "On leaving the building, I felt like a stark
   madman." It was the first time anyone from the Aid and Rescue Committee
   had met Eichmann. Brand testified: "What were we to do with this
   monster's offer? ... I had gotten to know the Germans and their cruel
   lies exceedingly well. But the thought of 100,000 Jews 'in advance'
   tortured my mind and gave me no respite. I had no right to think of
   anything but this advance payment." He believed that if he could only
   return from Istanbul with a promise, at least those 100,000 lives might
   be saved.

   He met with Eichmann again, the last meeting taking place on May 14,
   1944. Eichmann told him the deportations to Auschwitz were about to
   begin at a rate of 12,000 Jews a day, but that they would not be
   exterminated while negotiations were ongoing. According to Brand's
   testimony, Gerhard Clages, chief of Himmler's Security Service in
   Budapest, and Eichmann's rival, was present, and handed Brand $50,000
   and SFR 270,000. Brand told U.S. emissary Ira Hirschmann during an
   interview on June 22, 1944 that Eichmann had offered to blow up
   Auschwitz — "dann sprenge ich Auschwitz in die Luft" — and free the
   first "ten, twenty, fifty thousand Jews" as soon as he received word
   from Istanbul that an agreement had been reached in principle.

   Eichmann told Brand he was free to travel but that he should return to
   Budapest soon. According to Yehuda Bauer, Brand was not consistent in
   his testimony regarding how long Eichmann had given him, but said at
   various points that it was within one or two weeks, within two or three
   weeks, and that he could "take [his] time." A report prepared by
   Kastner and entered as evidence during Eichman's trial states that
   Eichmann expected Brand to return within two weeks.

   Hansi Brand testified during Eichmann's trial that she and her husband
   met with Eichmann on the day before Joel left for Istanbul, and that
   she was given to understand that she and her children would effectively
   be held hostage in Budapest until Joel returned. "It was very obvious,
   although it was not actually said in so many words, 'you will remain
   behind as hostages.' I cannot recall that precisely. But I was told
   that I was not allowed to leave Budapest with the children, and that I
   had to report every day. By then we had had so much experience with our
   illegal work that it was not necessary to give any further
   explanations. What it means is obvious, if someone is told that he may
   not leave Budapest, and I have to report every day."

Bandi Grosz peace mission

   "Blood for goods"
   proposal
       Background
   Auschwitz
   The Holocaust
   Hungary: WWII
   Jews in Hungary
    People and events
   Kurt Becher
   Joel Brand
   Adolf Eichmann
   Heinrich Himmler
   Rudolf Kastner
   Kastner train
   Vaada
   Chaim D. Weissmandl
         Others
   Malchiel Gruenwald
   Joel Teitelbaum
   Rudolf Vrba
   Vrba-Wetzler report
   Alfréd Wetzler
         Sources
   Yehuda Bauer
   John Conway
   Ben Hecht
   Raul Hilberg
   Miroslav Karny
   Ruth Linn

   The day after his last meeting with Eichmann, Brand secured "full
   powers" from the Zentralrat der Ungarischen Juden (the main Hungarian
   Jewish council) and was told he had a traveling companion, Bandi Grosz,
   a Hungarian Jew alleged by various sources to have been a spy for the
   Germans, Hungarians, British, and Americans, who was traveling under
   cover of being the director of a Hungarian transport company engaged in
   talks with the Turkish state transport corporation.

   The men left Budapest on May 17, 1944 and were driven by the SS to
   Vienna, where they stayed the night in a hotel reserved for SS
   personnel. In fact, Brand's trip is now believed by many historians to
   have been a cover for Grosz's mission. Grosz, who was low level enough
   to provide plausible deniability for the Germans in case anything went
   wrong, later testified that he had been told by Clages, on behalf of
   Himmler, to arrange a meeting in a neutral country between two or three
   senior German security officers and two or three American officers of
   equal rank, or British officers as a last resort, in order to negotiate
   a separate peace between the German Sicherheitsdienst (SD) (part of the
   SS) and the Allies.

   Slovak historian Miroslav Karny writes that: "From British documents
   published in the seventies as well as from the memoirs of Joel Brand,
   it is obvious that Grosz carried not only an offer that Hungary would
   change over to the side of the Allies on condition the Soviet offensive
   stopped at the Hungarian border, but in particular a proposal from the
   chief of Himmler's Security Service in Budapest, Gerhard Clages, that
   two or three higher German intelligence officers should meet with their
   American counterparts to discuss a separate peace. In case of failure,
   Grosz was to organize a meeting with British officers via officials of
   the Jewish Agency in Istanbul. Grosz stressed to Brand that the
   intelligence service mission was the main thing and Brand's mission was
   intended just as a cover. Referring to his talks with Clages, Grosz
   explained: 'The Nazis know that they have lost the war. They know that
   peace cannot be reached with Hitler. Himmler wants to use all possible
   contacts to get down to negotiations with the Allies.' He added: 'Your
   Jewish affair was only an auxiliary question'."

Meeting with the Jewish Agency

   In Vienna, Brand was given a German passport in the name of Eugen Band.
   Brand cabled ahead to the Jewish Agency in Istanbul (then
   Constantinople) to say he was about to arrive, then flew first to
   Sofia, then on to Istanbul, by German diplomatic plane, arriving on May
   19. He had been told by the Jewish Agency by return cable that "Chaim"
   would be in Istanbul to meet him. Excited by his mission, and believing
   that others would understand its importance, he believed "Chaim"
   referred to Chaim Weizmann, then president of the World Zionist
   Organization who later became the first president of Israel, but in
   fact they meant Chaim Barlas, head of the Istanbul group of Zionist
   emissaries.

   Brand was further confused when, arriving in Istanbul, he found that,
   not only was no one waiting to meet him at the airport and no entry
   visa had been arranged, but that he was threatened with arrest and
   deportation, which he later took as the first sign of what he came to
   see as his betrayal by the Jewish Agency. In fact, when he landed,
   Chaim Barlas was at that very moment driving around the city trying to
   obtain Brand's visa.

   Yehuda Bauer argues that Brand, then and later, never understood the
   actual powerlessness of the Jewish Agency. The fact that his passport
   was in the name of Eugen Band, and not Joel Brand, would in itself have
   been enough to cause the confusion. The visa situation was eventually
   sorted out by Bandi Grosz, who had intelligence connections in Istanbul
   and who made a few calls, and the men were taken to a hotel, where the
   Jewish Agency emissaries were waiting.

   Raul Hilberg writes that Brand was angry and excited. He quotes Brand
   as saying: "Comrades, do you realize what is involved? ... We have to
   negotiate ... With whom can I negotiate? Do you have the power to make
   agreements ... Twelve thousand people are hauled away every day ...
   that is five hundred an hour ... Do they have to die because no one
   from the Executive is here? I want to telegraph tomorrow that I have
   secured agreement ... Do you know what is involved, comrades?"

   For the Jewish Agency, matters were not so simple, Hilberg writes. They
   could not be sure that their telegrams to Jerusalem would not be
   intercepted and changed, or held up. No one had the influence to obtain
   a plane. No one from the War Refugee Board was available. The American
   Ambassador was in Ankara and no plane seat could be obtained for a trip
   there.

   They told Brand that Moshe Sharett, head of the Jewish Agency's
   political department, and the Zionist movement's chief ambassador and
   negotiator with the British in the British Mandate of Palestine (and
   later the second prime minister of Israel), would be arriving in
   Istanbul to meet him, which gave Brand hope that the situation was
   being taken seriously. He passed them an accurate plan of the Auschwitz
   complex (possibly the Vrba-Weztler report) and demanded that the gas
   chambers and railways lines be bombed. He later said that he got the
   impression that the Agency officials were not quite taking it all in.
   "They did not, as we did in Budapest, look daily at death."

   In the meantime, the Agency gave Brand a piece of paper purporting to
   be a written agreement that it would accept Eichmann's offer in
   principle. The document promised the Germans $4,000 for each 1,000
   Jewish emigrants to Palestine and SFR one million for each 1,000 Jewish
   emigrants to Spain. In return for allowing the Allies to supply goods
   to the Jews in the concentration camps, the Germans would receive
   equivalent supplies for themselves. Brand took the document to deliver
   to Eichmann, hoping it might be enough to halt the deportations, at
   least temporarily.

Arrested by British intelligence

   After a few days in Istanbul, it became clear that Sharett was not
   going to arrive, and Brand was told he had been refused a visa and that
   the British were actively preventing him from traveling to Turkey.
   Brand was asked instead to travel to Aleppo on the Syrian-Turkish
   border to meet Sharett there. He was reluctant to do this because the
   area was under British control and he was afraid that the British would
   interfere with his travel plans and would want to question him.
   However, he was persuaded to go, and left by train, accompanied by two
   members of the Jewish Agency.

   On the train, Brand became even more nervous after being approached by
   men who said they were agents of Zeev Jabotinsky's Alliance of
   Zionists-Revisionists Party and the World Agudath Israel Orthodox
   religious party. They told him that the British were going to arrest
   him in Aleppo. "Die Engländer sind in dieser Frage nicht unsere
   Verbündeten", they told him. ("The British are not our allies in this
   matter.") If he continued on his journey, he would not be allowed to
   return, they said.

   Brand told the court that he was terrified when he heard this, because
   not returning to Budapest within the timeframe specified by Eichmann
   meant "the failure of my mission and the extermination of my family and
   a million other Jews in Hungary." However, he was assured by one of his
   traveling companions from the Jewish Agency that nothing was going to
   happen to him in Aleppo, and he wanted to believe this: "I could not
   believe that England — this land which alone fought on while all other
   countries of Europe surrendered to despotism — that this England which
   we had admired as the inflexible fighter for freedom wanted simply to
   sacrifice us, the poorest and weakest of all the oppressed."
   British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden rejected the blood-for-trucks
   proposal, arguing that the Allies could not do anything that "looked
   like negotiating with the enemy." Enlarge
   British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden rejected the blood-for-trucks
   proposal, arguing that the Allies could not do anything that "looked
   like negotiating with the enemy."

   After arriving in Ankara, the men continued by train to Aleppo.
   According to Ben Hecht, just before arriving the Jewish Agency official
   who had assured Brand he would not be arrested told him that, should he
   indeed be picked up by the British, he was not to speak to them without
   a member of the Jewish Agency being present. Hecht argues that this was
   the ultimate betrayal. Not only had the Agency effectively handed Brand
   over to the British, Hecht says, but they then acted to ensure he
   remained silent unless the Agency itself gave him permission to speak.

   As soon as he arrived in Aleppo on June 7, 1944, Brand was arrested by
   two men in plain clothes who blocked his way then pushed him into a
   Jeep waiting with its engine running. He discovered later they were
   British intelligence.

   According to Raul Hilberg, details of Brand's business in Istanbul had
   been passed to London and Washington. The Cabinet Committee on Refugees
   in London, which included British Foreign Secretary (later Prime
   Minister) Anthony Eden and Colonial Secretary Oliver Stanley,
   considered the bloods-for-truck proposal and decided against pursuing
   it. If the suggestion had indeed come from the SS, it was a clear case
   of blackmail, and in any event, supplying extra trucks would simply
   strengthen the enemy's hand, writes Hilberg. In addition, to leave the
   selection of refugees to be saved up to the Nazis, without considering
   the interests of Allied prisoners, would leave the British government
   opened to domestic criticism.

   Yehuda Bauer stresses other factors for the British decision not to
   consider the proposal. The British were convinced they were dealing
   with a Himmler trick of some kind, he writes, possibly an attempt via
   Bandi Grosz to strike up a separate peace deal with the West in order
   to cause a rift between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. Bauer
   also writes that, if the trucks-for-blood deal had gone through and
   large numbers of Jews had been released from Nazi-held territories, a
   consequence of them being gathered together and transported through
   Central Europe would have been to halt Allied airborne military
   operations, and possibly also land-based ones, turning the Jews, in
   effect, into human shields. Bauer believes the British feared this may
   have been Himmler's primary motive in proposing the deal, because the
   suspension of Allied attacks would have allowed the Germans to
   concentrate more of their forces against the East.

   Brand's failure to return to Budapest within the two weeks expected by
   Eichmann was regarded as a disaster by other members of the Aid and
   Rescue Committee. A report written by Kastner states that Eichmann
   started demanding that Brand return, and wanted a "clear-cut answer" as
   to whether the blood-for-trucks proposal had been accepted. The report
   says: "We had to explain to him every day that discussions on this
   matter between London, Washington and Moscow could be protracted. There
   were enough reasons for delay. Apparently the Allies could not easily
   be brought to a common denominator about such a delicate matter. The
   continuation of the deportations of Hungarian Jews was complicating the
   negotiations." On page 48 of the report, Kastner wrote "... on 9 June
   Eichmann said, 'If I do not receive a positive reply within three days,
   I shall operate the mill at Auschwitz'." (Ich lasse die Muehle laufen.
   )

Meeting with Moshe Sharett and hunger strike

   Brand testified that he was taken to an elegant Arab villa where some
   high-ranking British officers were staying, and on June 11 was
   introduced to Moshe Sharett with whom he spoke for a whole day, during
   two sessions of six hours each. Sharett wrote in his report of June 27,
   1944: "I must have looked a little incredulous, for he said: 'Please
   believe me: they have killed six million Jews; there are only two
   million left alive'."

   After the second session, Sharett spoke to British officials and turned
   again to Brand, telling him: "Dear Joel, I have to tell you something
   bitter now." He told Brand he would have to "go south," not back to
   Budapest, because "[t]he British demand it." Brand started screaming:

     Do you know what you are doing? This is simply murder! That is mass
     murder. If I don't return our best people will be slaughtered! My
     wife! My mother! My children will be first! ... I have come here
     under a flag of truce. I have brought you a message. You can accept
     or reject, but you have no right to hold the messenger ...

   Despite his protests, Brand was taken to Cairo, where he was questioned
   by the British for ten or twelve hours every day. On the tenth day, he
   went on hunger strike, writing in a letter to the Jewish Agency
   Executive that: "It is apparent to me now that an enemy of our people
   is holding me and does not intend to release me in the near future. I
   have decided to go on a hunger strike again and will do my utmost to
   break through the bayonets guarding me." On the seventeenth day, he was
   handed a note from one of the Jewish Agency men he had traveled to
   Aleppo with, urging him not to be difficult.

   Brand later testified that Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident in
   the Middle East and a close friend of Prime Minister Winston Churchill,
   was present during one of the interrogations and is alleged to have
   said: "What can I do with this million Jews? Where can I put them?"
   Lord Moyne was assassinated in Cairo a few months later on November 6,
   1944 by Eliyahu Bet-Zuri and Eliyahu Hakim of the Lehi (Stern Gang).
   Ben Hecht writes that Ehud Avriel, the Jewish Agency official who had
   accompanied Brand to Aleppo and had assured him the British would not
   arrest him, insisted that it was not Lord Moyne who had said this, and
   asked Brand not to repeat Moyne's name in Brand's autobiography,
   Advocate for the Dead. However, Brand repeated under oath during
   Eichmann's trial that it was Lord Moyne who had said it.

   During a meeting with Moshe Sharett on July 6, 1944, Anthony Eden
   expressed his "profound sympathy" regarding the decision to block the
   negotiations with Eichmann, but said he had to act in unison with the
   United States and the Soviet Union. There could not be "anything that
   looked like negotiating with the enemy."

The leak to the press and the end of the proposal

   British intelligence leaked details of the Brand mission to the press.
   On July 19, 1944, BBC Radio broadcast a story that two emissaries of
   the Hungarian government had appeared in Turkey proposing that all Jews
   still in Hungary would be allowed to leave if England and America would
   supply a certain amount of pharmaceuticals and transport, including
   trucks, with a promise that the equipment would not be used on the
   Western front. The proposal, which the BBC called "humanitarian
   blackmail" was reported as a crude attempt to set the Allies against
   each other, and the report added that it was not clear whether the plan
   had the approval of the German and Hungarian authorities. Documents
   released during Eichmann's trial show that, after the broadcast,
   Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, asked to be
   informed about the facts of the matter. The New York Herald Tribune
   carried the same story and The Times of London called it one of the
   "most loathsome" stories of the war.

   The leaks killed whatever might have remained of the initiative,
   although the mass deportations of Jews from Hungary had already been
   stopped by the Hungarian government on July 7, fearful that government
   ministers might be held personally responsible by the Allies.

   The British released Brand in October 1944 but, according to Ben Hecht,
   would not allow him to travel to Hungary, compelling him instead to
   travel to Palestine. Yehuda Bauer disputes this, arguing that the story
   of Brand being forced to travel to Palestine was spread around Israel
   at the time of the trial of Malchiel Greenwald, a freelance writer who
   accused Kastner, by then a government spokesman, of having collaborated
   with the Nazis. The story was repeated by Amos Elon in his Timetable:
   The Story of Joel Brand in 1981. In fact, writes Bauer, by that time
   Brand himself was terrified of returning to Budapest, convinced the
   Germans would murder him.

   In Palestine, Brand tried to contact Chaim Weizmann, the president of
   the World Zionist Organization. Weizmann responded to Brand's letter,
   saying that his secretary would arrange an appointment for the men to
   meet. Brand alleges that the appointment was never made. The last lines
   of Brand's testimony to the District Court in Jerusalem during the
   libel trial were: "Rightly or wrongly, for better or for worse, I have
   cursed Jewry's official leaders ever since. All these things shall
   haunt me until my dying day. It is much more than a man can bear."

Himmler's involvement in the proposal

   Heinrich Himmler in 1945. It is obvious, argues Yehuda Bauer, that
   Adolf Eichmann was Himmler's reluctant messenger during the meetings
   with Brand.
   Enlarge
   Heinrich Himmler in 1945. It is obvious, argues Yehuda Bauer, that
   Adolf Eichmann was Himmler's reluctant messenger during the meetings
   with Brand.

   Bauer writes that we know the deal originated with Heinrich Himmler
   because a cable from Edmund Veesenmayer of the SS to the German Foreign
   Office on July 22, 1944 stated that Brand and Grosz had been sent to
   Turkey on the orders of Himmler. Kurt Becher also indicated that his
   orders came direct from Himmler: "So I came into contact with Joel
   Brand ... Trucks were a big problem. So trucks were discussed, 10,000
   trucks that is. There were many discussions. Himmler said to me: 'Take
   whatever you can from the Jews. Promise them whatever you want. What we
   will keep is another matter'."

   Eichmann himself later testified that the order came from Himmler, and
   a report from Kastner shows that Eichmann did not seem happy about
   having to deal with Brand. Kastner wrote that when Brand failed to
   return from Istanbul, Eichmann said: "Yes. I saw all of this in
   advance. I warned Becher countless times not to allow himself to be led
   by the nose. If I do not receive a positive answer within forty-eight
   hours, I will have all this Jewish bag of filth from Budapest laid
   low." (Werde ich das ganze juedische Dreckpack von Budapest umlegen
   lassen.)

   Bauer writes that the "clumsiness of the approach has been a wonderment
   to all observers." He argues that it is obvious that Eichmann was
   Himmler's reluctant messenger, and that Eichmann's own inclination was
   clearly to continue murdering Jews, not to sell them. On the day that
   Brand left for Vienna and Istanbul, Eichmann traveled to Auschwitz to
   make sure that Rudolf Hoess, the commander of the camp, would be ready
   to receive the first arrivals due to leave Hungary on May 14. Hoess
   told him there would be problems processing such large numbers,
   whereupon Eichmann ordered that there should be no selections but that
   all the new arrivals should be gassed immediately, which does not
   indicate that he was willing to delay the exterminations until Brand
   returned from Istanbul, as Brand seemed to believe.

   Bauer argues that the presence of Clages at the meetings signals that
   Himmler had changed the emphasis from trucks-for-blood to the hidden
   agenda of secret talks aimed at peace. Bauer writes that there is no
   indication of what exactly Himmler wanted to achieve, because he did
   not commit his thoughts to paper, but Bauer points out that Brand and
   Grosz arrived in Istanbul just two months before the July 20, 1944
   assassination attempt on Hitler, and that Himmler knew there was a
   plot, though did not know where and when it would be carried out. It is
   possible that Himmler wanted to open negotiations for peace in the
   event that Hitler did not survive, using two low-level agents, a Jew
   and a spy, in case he had to distance himself from their mission; and
   if Hitler did survive, Himmler could offer him the chance to conclude a
   separate peace deal with the West, excluding the Soviet Union.

   Brand himself eventually adopted such a theory. Two months before his
   death he testified at the trial in Germany of Eichmann's deputies
   Hermann Krumey and Otto Hunsche. He told the court that "though the
   deal was suggested by Eichmann" it must have originated in the mind of
   Himmler as one of his desperate attempts at driving a wedge between the
   Allies. "I made a terrible mistake in passing this on to the British.
   ... It is now clear to me that Himmler sought to sow suspicion among
   the Allies as a preparation for his much desired Nazi-Western coalition
   against Moscow."

Aftermath

   In Budapest, the Vaada had waited anxiously for Brand's return and for
   some news that the Allies would help. Hilberg writes that the committee
   did not expect the Allies actually to supply goods to Eichmann, but it
   hoped for some gesture that would allow protracted negotiations with
   the Nazis to begin while the Jews waited for the arrival of the Red
   Army. Brand's failure to return to Budapest meant the Vaada was thrown
   back on its own resources, bitter about the lack of help from the
   outside world, and in particular from Jews living in safe countries.

   Bauer argues that the mistake the Vaada made was to adopt the almost
   anti-Semitic belief in unlimited Jewish power. The committee believed
   that Jewish leaders could move freely during the war and could persuade
   the Allies to do whatever needed to be done to save the Jews of
   Hungary. They had similar trust in the goodwill and power of the Allied
   leadership, but the Allies were gearing up for the Normandy invasion
   just as Brand set out on his mission, and "[a]t that crucial moment,"
   writes Bauer, "to antagonize the Soviets because of some hare-brained
   Gestapo plan to ransom Jews was totally out of the question." Bauer
   writes: "Perhaps, in their hopeless situation, [the Aid and Rescue
   Committee] had to believe these things in order to survive, but when
   their beliefs had to be tested against the cold realities of a world
   war, they proved to be so many illusions."

   Kastner later wrote that the Vaada had no choice but to believe in the
   possibility of rescue. Of Jewish communities living in countries
   unaffected by the Holocaust, he wrote: "They were outside, we were
   inside. They moralized, we feared death. They had sympathy for us and
   believed themselves to be powerless; we wanted to live and believed
   rescue had to be possible."

   On May 27, 1944, Hansi Brand was arrested and beaten, though she
   testified at Eichmann's trial that she withstood it and gave the
   Hungarians no information about the deal that Eichmann had told her was
   a "state secret" (Reichsgeheimnis). Brand was a bitter man when
   released by the British; he joined the Lehi (Stern Gang) who were
   fighting to remove the British from the land that became the State of
   Israel in 1948. The Istanbul mission created a rift between him and his
   wife, who for many years wondered what the truth was behind her
   husband's inability to return to Budapest.

   Bauer concludes that, despite the haphazard nature of the mission and
   its ultimate failure, Brand was an extremely courageous man who had
   passionately wanted to help the Jewish people, and yet whose life was
   thereafter plagued by the suspicion of family and friends, part of a
   serious misunderstanding, according to Bauer, of "all the Jewish actors
   in the situation."

   Brand died in Israel in 1964, probably of liver disease brought on by
   alcoholism.

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