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.

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.

[a] 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.

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.

[6] 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.

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 Mukacheve, Ukraine).

[8] 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).

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.

[13] 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.

[14] 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.

[21] 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.

[26] 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.

[27] David Crowe writes that the SS had become an economic force in its own right by 1944, as a result its plundering of Jewish businesses and its ownership of factories relying on slave labour from concentration camps.

[30] In fact, the deportations had been halted for other reasons: Slovakian officials had been bribed; many Jews were protected by government documents showing they were, for example, essential workers; and there had been an intervention from the Vatican in June 1942.

He said there would be no deportations and no harm to the Jewish community while negotiations continued, and arranged for Aid and Rescue Committee exemptions from anti-Jewish laws to allow its members to travel and use cars and telephones.

"[40] In a tone that Brand compared to the "clatter of a machine gun", Eichmann offered to sell him one million Jews, not for money, but for goods from overseas:[38] I have already made investigations about you and your people and I have verified your ability to make a deal.

[59] The Jewish Agency agreed to arrange for Moshe Sharett, head of its political department and later second prime minister of Israel, to travel to Istanbul to meet him.

He wrote that the delegates lacked any sense of urgency and were focused more on internal politics and Jewish emigration to Palestine, rather than the slaughter in Europe: "[They] were undoubtedly worthy men ...

[66] As soon as he arrived at the Aleppo train station on 7 June, he was stopped by a British man in plain clothes and pushed into a Jeep that was waiting with its engine running.

Sharett "fought a battle of telephones and cables," Bauer writes, and on 11 June he and the Jewish Agency intelligence group were finally introduced to Brand.

[74] If the deal had gone ahead and large numbers of Jews had been released in central Europe, Allied airborne and possibly land-based military operations might have had to stop.

Bauer believes the British feared this was Himmler's motive—to turn the Jews into human shields—because it would have allowed the Germans to devote their forces to fighting the Red Army.

[77] On 11 July Prime Minister Winston Churchill put an end to the idea when he told Eden that the murder of the Jews was "probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed", and that there should be "no negotiations of any kind on this subject".

Following publication in mid-June of parts of the Vrba-Wetzler report, which described in detail the use of gas chambers inside Auschwitz, the Jewish Agency in Geneva had cabled London asking that Hungarian ministers be held personally responsible for the killings.

[88] Kasztner wrote that on 9 June Eichmann told him: "If I do not receive a positive reply within three days, I shall operate the mill at Auschwitz"[89] ("die Muehle laufen lasse").

The order from Berlin had said: "Deportations will continue in the meanwhile and will not be stopped until Joel Brand returns with a statement to the effect that these matters have been accepted by the Jewish organizations abroad.

"[92] Despite the setbacks, Kasztner, Hansi Brand and the rest of the committee secured the release of around 1,684 Jews, including 273 children, who were allowed to leave Budapest for Switzerland by train on 30 June 1944.

The committee paid SS officer Kurt Becher $1000 per person in foreign currency, shares, jewellery and gold, raised from the wealthier passengers to cover the cost of the rest.

[94] Bauer concludes that Brand was a courageous man who had passionately wanted to help the Jewish people, but his life was plagued after the mission by suspicion, including from other members of the Aid and Rescue Committee, because of his failure to return to Budapest.

[97] Brand testified for Kasztner, but instead of defending him took the opportunity to accuse the Jewish Agency, whose officials became the first Israeli government, of having helped the British scupper the blood-for-goods proposal.