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Joel Brand (1907 – 1964) was a Hungarian Jew who played a prominent role, during the Nazi occupation of Hungary, in an attempt by the Jewish Aid and Rescue Committee to save Jews by making a deal with Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of the deportation of the Hungarian Jewish community to the German death camp at Auschwitz. During a meeting with Brand in April 1944, Eichmann offered to release up to one million Jews in exchange for trucks, soap, tea, and coffee from the Allies. The deal, which failed, became known as the "blood for trucks" or "Blood and Cargo" proposal.

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. When Hansi's sister was deported in 1941, Brand paid Josezf Krem, a Hungarian espionage agent, to get her back, and from that point on, Brand became involved in smuggling Jewish refugees from Poland and Slovakia to the relative safety of Hungary.

As the situation of Jews in Europe worsened, Brand teamed up with Rudolf Kastner, a Zionist lawyer and journalist from Cluj, and Samuel Springmann, a Polish Jew and center-left Zionist who owned a jewellery store, and who began to function as the treasurer of their fledgling rescue committee. In 1941 and 1943, Kastner tried to interest the Hungarian Social Democrats in joining forces with the committee to undertake the large-scale rescue of Jews, but the non-Jews among them were allegedly not willing to endanger themselves for the sake of Jews, and the proposal came to nothing.

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. He became their chairman, and with that, the Va'adat Ezrah Vehatzalah (Vaada), or 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.

Meeting with Eichmann

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 who took between $8,000 and $20,000 from Brand for providing him with a place to hide.

According to testimony Brand gave in 1954 to a court in Israel , and which he repeated during the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, in the middle of April 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 "he words which then passed between us have imprinted themselves on my memory till I die." He said that Eichmann asked him "Do you know who I am?" and continued:

I am the man who carried out all the actions in Germany, Austria, Poland, and Slovakia. My next task is Hungary. I have checked up as to whether you and the Joint Distribution Committee are capable of getting things done, and I want to make a deal with you. Blood for Cargo and Cargo for Blood. Now tell me, what is it that you want to salvage — women who can bear children? Men in their prime? The aged? The young? Speak up!

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. Brand suggested that perhaps friends abroad could send money or cargo. 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. He 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 told the court that "n 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 met Eichmann again, with the last meeting taking place on May 15, 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. Eichmann told Brand he was free to travel but that he should return to Budapest within a week or two.

Negotiations and arrest

Brand left Budapest on May 18 and flew by German diplomatic plane to Constantinople (now Istanbul), arriving on May 19, where he was expected by the Turkish Jewish Agency and had been told that Chaim Weizmann, then president of the World Zionist Organization and who later became the first president of Israel, would deal with him personally. Brand told the court that he was surprised to find no one waiting to meet him at the airport and that no entry visa had been arranged for him. The confusion was eventually sorted out and he was taken to meet the Jewish Agency, who told him that Moshe Sharett, 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 Constantinople to meet him, which gave Brand hope that Eichmann's deal was being taken seriously. In the meantime, the Agency gave him a written agreement saying that the Agency agreed in principle on the basic points of Eichmann's offer. Brand intended to deliver this to Eichmann in order to halt the deportations.

After a few days, 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. Brand was reluctant to do this because the area was under British control at the time. He was afraid that the British would interfere with his travel plans and would want to interrogate him, in part because they were at war with Germany, and in part because they were restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine and might be concerned by any proposal that would involve the large-scale immigration into the area of the Jews from Hungary if the blood for trucks deal went ahead. However, he was persuaded to go, and left by train accompanied by two members of the Jewish Agency.

On the train, Brand was approached by agents of Zeev Jabotinsky's Alliance of Zionists-Revisionists Party and the World Agudath Israel Orthodox religious party, who told him that the British were going to arrest him in Aleppo. Brand told the court that he was terrified when he heard that, because it meant he would not be able to return to Budapest within the two weeks specified by Eichmann. "It meant the failure of my mission and the extermination of my family and a million other Jews in Hungary."

Notes

1. The Va'adat Ezrah Vehatzalah is known as the Aid and Rescue Committee, the Rescue and Relief Committee, and the Budapest Rescue Committee.
2. "Yehuda Bauer: Teaching about the Holocaust (Part 2)", Online Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies, Volume 18, No. 2, Winter 2005
3. ^ Hecht, Ben. Perfidy, Milah Press, 1999, p. 221
4. >"Devil's Poker: A True Story", a screenplay by Leo Zahn
5. ^ Bauer, Yehuda. Jews for Sale: Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945, Yale University Press, 1994, p. 152
6. Hansi Brand's testimony", The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Session 58, part 2 of 5, The Nizkor Project
7. Bauer, Yehuda. Jews for Sale: Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945, Yale University Press, 1994, p. 152. Sources differ on whether it was Hansi Brand's sister or brother who was deported. Online Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies published in its Volume 18, No. 2 issue that it was her brother, but according to Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, it was her sister.
8. Bauer, Yehuda. Jews for Sale: Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945, Yale University Press, 1994, p. 153
9. Bauer, Yehuda. Jews for Sale: Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945, Yale University Press, 1994, p. 154
10. The court case was the 1953-5 trial of Malchiel Greenwald, a freelance writer who had accused Rudolf Kastner, Brand's colleague on the Aid and Rescue Committee, and by then a government minister in the new State of Israel, of having collaborated with the Nazis. The government sued Greenwald for libel on Kastner's behalf. The judge ruled against Kastner, a verdict that was overturned in part by the Supreme Court of Israel in January 1958. Kastner himself was assassinated in March 1957 in connection with the allegations.
11. ^ Hecht, Ben. Perfidy, Milah Press, 1999, p. 219
12. ^ Hecht, Ben. Perfidy, Milah Press, 1999, p. 220
13. ^ Hecht, Ben. Perfidy, Milah Press, 1999, p. 222
14. Hecht, Ben. Perfidy, Milah Press, 1999, p. 224
15. ^ Hecht, Ben. Perfidy, Milah Press, 1999, p. 225

References

• "Yehuda Bauer: Teaching about the Holocaust (Part 2)", Online Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies, Volume 18, No. 2, Winter 2005, retrieved May 7, 2006
• "Devil's Poker: A True Story", a screenplay by Leo Zahn, retrieved May 7, 2006
• Hansi Brand's testimony", The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Session 58, part 2 of 5, The Nizkor Project, retrieved May 7, 2006
• Bauer, Yehuda. Jews for Sale: Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945, Yale University Press, 1994. ISBN 0300068522
• Hecht, Ben. Perfidy, Milah Press, first published in 1961; this edition 1999. ISBN 0964688638