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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,"[1] 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,[2][3] 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,"[2] "blood for trucks,"[4] or "Blood and Cargo"[5] 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.[6]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.[7] 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."[8]
Topic: Joel Brand (Read 2702 times)