Joel Brand (Hungarian: Brand Jenő; 25 April 1906 – 13 July 1964) was a member of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee (Va'adat ha-Ezra ve-ha-Hatzala be-Budapest or Va'ada), an underground Zionist group in Budapest, Hungary, that smuggled Jews out of German-occupied Europe to the relative safety of Hungary, during the Holocaust. When Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944, Brand became known for his efforts to save the Jewish community from deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland and the gas chambers there.
In April 1944 Brand was approached by SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, head of the German Reich Security Head Office department IV B4 (Jewish affairs), who had arrived in Budapest to organize the deportations. Eichmann proposed that Brand broker a deal between the SS and the United States or Britain, in which the Nazis would exchange one million Jews for 10,000 trucks for the Eastern front and large quantities of tea and other goods. It was the most ambitious of a series of proposals between the SS and Jewish leaders. Eichmann called it "Blut gegen Waren" ("blood for goods").
Nothing came of the idea, which The Times of London called one of the most loathsome stories of the war. Historians have suggested that the SS, including its commander, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, intended the negotiations as cover for peace talks with the Western Allies that would have excluded the Soviet Union and perhaps even Adolf Hitler. Whatever its purpose, the proposal was thwarted by the British government. They arrested Brand in Aleppo (then under British control), where he had gone to propose Eichmann's offer to the Jewish Agency, and put an end to it by leaking details to the media.
The failure of the proposal, and the wider issue of why the Allies were unable to save the 437,000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz between May and July 1944, became the subject of bitter debate for many years. In 1961 Life magazine called Brand "a man who lives in the shadows with a broken heart". He told an interviewer shortly before his death in 1964: "An accident of life placed the fate of one million human beings on my shoulders. I eat and sleep and think only of them."
One of seven children, Brand was born to a Jewish family in Naszód, Transylvania, Austria-Hungary (today Năsăud, Romania). His father was the founder of the Budapest telephone company, and his paternal grandfather, also Joel Brand, had owned the post office in Munkács (now Mukachevo, Ukraine).
The family moved to Erfurt in Germany when Brand was four. When he was 19 he went to stay with an uncle in New York, then worked his way across the United States, washing dishes and working on roads and in mines. He joined the Communist Party, worked for the Comintern as a sailor, and sailed to Hawaii, the Philippines, South America, China, and Japan.
In or around 1930 Brand returned to Erfurt, where he worked for another telephone company his father had founded and became a functionary with the Thuringian KPD (Communist Party of Germany). He was still living in Germany when Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor on 30 January 1933, and on 27 February that year he was arrested, as a communist, just before the Reichstag fire. Released in 1934, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, where he worked again for his father's company. He joined the Poale Zion, a Marxist-Zionist party, became a vice-president of the Budapest Palestine Office, which organized Jewish emigration to Palestine, and sat on the governing body of the Jewish National Fund.
In 1935 Brand married Haynalka "Hansi" Hartmann and together they opened a knitwear and glove factory on Rozsa Street, Budapest, which after a few years had a staff of over 100. The couple had met as members of a hachscharah, a group of Jews preparing to move to Palestine to work on a kibbutz, but Brand's plans changed when his mother and three sisters fled to Budapest from Germany and he had to support them.
Brand's involvement in smuggling Jews into Hungary began in July 1941, when Hansi Brand's sister and brother-in-law, Lajos Stern, were caught up in the Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre. Because of the situation in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, 15,000–35,000 Jews had fled to Hungary, registering with the National Central Alien Control Office. The Hungarian government expelled 18,000 of this group to German-occupied Ukraine, where on 27–28 August 1941, the SS and Ukrainian collaborators shot 14,000–16,000 of them. About 2,000 survived. Brand paid a Hungarian counter-espionage officer to bring his wife's relatives back safely. The Hungarian Interior Minister was reportedly shocked when he learned about the massacre, and the deportations were halted.
Through the Poale Zion party, the Brands joined other Zionists engaged in rescue work, including Rezső Kasztner, a lawyer and journalist from Kolozsvár (Cluj, Transylvania), and Ottó Komoly, an engineer. In January 1943 the group set up the Aid and Rescue Committee, known as the Va'adat Ha-Ezrah ve'Hatzalah or Va'ada, with Komoly as chair. Other members included Andreas Biss (Brand's cousin), Samuel Springmann (a Polish jeweller whose family were in the Łódź Ghetto), Sandor Offenbach, Dr. Miklos Schweiziger, Moshe Krausz, Eugen Frankel, and Ernő Szilágyi from the Hashomer Hatzair party. The Va'ada raised money, forged documents, maintained contacts with intelligence agencies, and ran safe houses. Brand testified during Adolf Eichmann's trial that, between 1941 and the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944, he and the committee had helped 22,000–25,000 Jews reach Hungary.
Oskar Schindler became one of the committee's contacts, smuggling letters and money into the Kraków Ghetto on their behalf. During a visit by Schindler to Budapest in November 1943, they learned that Schindler had been bribing Nazi officers to let him bring Jewish refugees into his factory in Poland, which he ran as a safe haven. This further encouraged the committee, after the invasion of Hungary, to try negotiating with the SS.
When the Germans invaded Hungary on Sunday, 19 March 1944, they were accompanied by a Sonderkommando led by SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, head of the Reich Security Head Office department IV B4 (Jewish affairs). Eichmann's arrival in Budapest signalled the Germans' intention to "solve" Hungary's Jewish question. Following Hungary's annexation in 1941 of parts of Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, there were 725,000 Jews in the country, as well as over 60,000 Jewish converts to Christianity and others the Nazis counted as Jews, according to Yehuda Bauer. Most were liberal Jews and fully assimilated, nearly 30 percent were Orthodox, and a small minority were Zionists.
Randolph Braham writes that Jews were viewed with suspicion in Hungary as advocates for democracy, liberalism, socialism and communism. Restrictions had been in place before the invasion, including a prohibition on marrying Christians; according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Hungarian Parliament passed 22 antisemitic laws between May 1938 and March 1944. The Jewish leadership in Hungary was aware of the mass murder of Jews in occupied Europe, but the rest of the Jewish community was not, in Braham's view; he writes that the leadership's failure to inform the community and to plan for Hungary's occupation is "one of the great tragedies of the era".
After the invasion, the Hungarian government began isolating Jews from the rest of the community. From 5 April 1944 Jews over the age of six had to wear a 10-by-10-centimetre (4 in × 4 in) yellow badge. Jews were forbidden from using telephones, owning cars or radios, travelling or moving home, and had to declare the value of their property. Jewish civil servants, journalists and lawyers were sacked, and non-Jews could not work in Jewish households. Books by Jews or Christians with Jewish heritage were removed from libraries, and Jewish authors could no longer be published.
On the day of the invasion, Kasztner and Szilágyi hid in the apartment of Andreas Biss, a chemical engineer, in Semsey Street, Budapest. They were later joined by Komoly and his wife, and the Brands and their two children. Wanting to establish contact with the Germans, the committee offered a go-between $20,000 to arrange a meeting with SS Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny, one of Eichmann's assistants.