Joel Brand

Joel Brand was a member of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee. He smuggled Jews out of German-occupied Europe to the relative safety of Hungary during the Holocaust. Brand became known for his efforts to save the Jewish community from deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland and the gas chamber.

About Joel Brand in brief

Joel Brand was a member of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee. He smuggled Jews out of German-occupied Europe to the relative safety of Hungary during the Holocaust. Brand became known for his efforts to save the Jewish community from deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland and the gas chamber. In April 1944 Brand was approached by SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, head of the German Reich Security Head Office department IV B4. He 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. Nothing came of the idea, which The Times of London called one of the most loathsome stories of the war. The failure of the proposal, and the wider issue of why the Allies were unable tosave 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, Siebenbürgen, then part of Austria-Hungary, later Năsăud, Romania.

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. 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. 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. Because of Brand’s involvement in smuggling Jews into Hungary began July 1941, Brand’s sister and brother-inlaw, Lajos Sterni Brand, were caught up in the Kamianetsi massacre. The Hungarian Interior Minister reportedly paid a counter-espionage officer to bring his wife’s relatives back safely. The Poale Zion, a Marxist-Zionist party, organized Jewish emigration to Palestine, and sat on the governing body of the Jewish National Fund.

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