Arrows in the Dark (Volumes 1 and 2): David Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv Leadership, and Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust

8. "A One-in-a-Million Chance": Attempts to Rescue Hungarian Jewry and Negotiations toward the End of the War

3 On 19 May 1944 a German plane landed in Istanbul. Two men disembarked. The first was a small-time industrialist named Joel Brand, a daredevil rescue activist and member of the Aid and Rescue Committee in Budapest, founded by a group of Hungary’s Jews. The second was our rather dubious friend Bandi Grosz, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, a thief and smuggler of goods and foreign currency, and a partner in various straw companies. He worked for both the Abwehr and the Hungarian military intelligence services, was one of the agents handled by Kollek and Avriel, and was an agent in the Dogwood web. Without a doubt, he was a multifaceted character.1 Brand and Grosz each bore messages from the Germans. Brand had known Grosz in Hungary , but he was only to learn the purpose of his present journey sometime later.2 The arrival of Brand and Grosz opened a second act in a painful and multifaceted drama lasting exactly two months (until 19 July 1944), ending in a bitter fashion when Brand’s ransom proposal3 was leaked to the Western press. The drama had its good and bad guys, high and low spots, moments of hope and despair, trust and suspicion, and a dramatic plot that stretched across four continents . In the final analysis, the Brand plan did not materialize. The Jews of Hungary, the largest group still remaining in Europe, were led at breakneck speed to Auschwitz, where some 437,000 were slaughtered by the end of the occupation . Some of those who remained died during the infamous “death march” of November 1944. Notwithstanding all the research into this subject, there is still no clear answer to the question of how substantial Brand’s proposal really was. However, documentation of the affair clearly shows Ben-Gurion’s deep involvement in decision making, initiation and direction of the operation, devising general policies, and grasping the minutest details. The various problems involved in efforts to rescue Jews seemed to have been reached a peak during the weeks following Brand’s arrival from Hungary. Since Brand’s ransom plan was the third of its kind, the JAE behaved and reacted in accordance with previously created patterns. Among the active groups, the American JDC and the War Refugee Board played a prominent role. The JDC, a non-Zionist philanthropic society , was willing to participate secretly in activities that violated American law. The War Refugee Board, on the other hand, entered the campaign with a display of courage, but its involvement ended within a relatively short time with a show of weakness. For about a year prior to Brand’s arrival in Istanbul in May 1944, the Yishuv emissaries had been experiencing unfortunate results while operating a dubious courier network in collaboration with the Americans and the British in Istanbul . By late 1943 Avriel was called for a review following the discovery that Germans had infiltrated the web. Structural faults in the secret collaboration with the Allies were also apparent by the time Brand’s proposal was discussed. A mysterious invitation sent to Menahem Bader to visit Berlin was another important sign of this tortuous affair, which was linked to similar contacts made in the Iberian peninsula and Sweden. In studying this labyrinth of events, I shall examine the JAE’s policies in order to determine if it did indeed shoot “an arrow in the dark,” as Kaplan put it, so long as there was even a one in a million chance of rescuing Jews. Much has been written about this ransom plan, in the form of newspaper articles, memoirs 8 “A One-in-a-Million Chance” Attempts to Rescue Hungarian Jewry and Negotiations at War’s End and eyewitness testimonies, a documentary-style book, and stage plays.4 Many unsolved riddles remain despite state-of-the art research, which only adds to the enigma. In this respect, one must carefully distinguish between what we know today in hindsight and what the heroes and decision makers knew at the time about the situation in Hungary and the motives and plans of the Nazis. This methodological distinction is also valid with regard to shorter time periods, including weeks or even days. One should be guided by this fact when analyzing the various stages of what was known to the story’s participants. Thus, the information at Brand’s disposal upon his arrival in Istanbul differed from that at his departure for Syria. What he knew in Aleppo...