ABSTRACT
The story of the Brand Mission is the record of how Joel Brand's news of the mass extermination and Bandi Grosz's warning about the perils of negotiations were disregarded by the rescue activists even though they were wholly accurate. As the ghettos in Hungary were being emptied at maximum speed and with utmost cruelty, the Zionist leaders in Palestine became the naive victims of a calculated deception by the killers. In this deception, the head of the Jewish rescue committee in Budapest played a key part. Brand's departure from Budapest was an opportunity for his ambitious colleague to seize exclusive control of political relations between Hungarian Jewry and the Nazis. Reviewing the Jewish Agency's immediate reaction to the news of Adolf Eichmann's offer to Brand, it is hard not to notice the multitude of illogical statements.
