[UD]

Frayed emotions, conspiracy mongering, endless feuding, and flights into counter-factual history characterize much of the literature concerning negotiations with the Nazis for Jewish lives.

The world has recently learned of Oskar Schindler's efforts to save the lives of Jewish workers in his factory in Poland by bribing Nazi officials. Adolf Eichmann's famous "trucks for blood" proposal to exchange one million Jews for trucks to use against the Soviets failed because of Western reluctance.

The United States and Great Britain refused to relax immigration quotas at home or in Palestine and would not ease currency transfers. Both rejected "paying ransom" to the enemy or in any way strengthening Germany's ability to carry on the war. Both were leery of offending the always suspicious Soviets by engaging in separate negotiations with the Nazis.

Whether a great many more Jews could have been saved from death at certain junctures of the Holocaust remains moot.

Official Zionist version

The “Blood for Goods” Deal

Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust and Yad Vashem.

MAY 1944

Himmler's secret agents proposed to the Allies to trade Jews for trucks, other commodities, or money. Jewish Agency Receives Offer to Trade Jews for Trucks (May 26, 1944).

On April 25, 1944, as a desperate measure to increase the supply of goods into the country, the Nazis offered to permit one million Jews to leave Hungary in exchange for goods obtained outside of Hungary. Included in this deal was a request for 10,000 trucks for civilian use or for use along the eastern front.

Adolf Eichmann and the upper echelons of the SS, including Heinrich Himmler approved this proposal which would allow the Jews to leave Hungary for any Allied occupied country, with the exception of Palestine. (The Nazis had promised the Grand Muflti Hajj Amin Al-Husseini that he would prevent Jewish immigration to Palestine).

The Nazis chose Joel Brand, a member of the Relief and Rescue Committee of Budapest (also known as the Va'ada) to assist them in negotiations with world Jewish leaders and the Allied governments. Also chosen to manage negotiations with the Allies was Andor Grosz, a minor intelligence agent and employee of both the Va'ada and the SS at different times. Grosz was supposed to lead a different set of discussions: A separate German truce with the Western allies. Brand was a decoy to distract the allies from Grosz's more important mission.

The offer was not seriously considered because the Allies believed it to be a trick and did not want to negotiate with the Nazis. The British press stirred up opposition to the proposal, calling the "monstrous offer" to exchange goods for Jews blackmail.


Jews For Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945 by Yehuda Bauer.

New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1994.

The Transfer Agreement (1933-40), the Evian Conference (July 1938), negotiations in Slovakia (1942-43), and the "trucks for blood" parleys in Hungary (1944) are the best known examples of efforts to save Jews from Nazi persecution.

The pre-Final Solution relations between the Jews and their tormentors as the product of a temporarily shared community of interests. Until 1942, the Nazi solution to the Jewish question was emigration with extensive expropriation or outright expulsion. The desperation of many German Jews to emigrate created the basis for the complex Transfer Agreement. But negotiations between Nazis and Jews also continued after the solution of the Jewish question had evolved into systematic extermination.

The results of these efforts, most notably in Slovakia and Hungary, were not inconsiderable. Nonetheless, actors in these events and a number of later historians were convinced that many more lives could have been saved, and even that under the right conditions, the Nazis would have been willing to stop the Final Solution. They have cast the blame for failure far and wide, charging other participants, the Zionists, the Red Cross, and the West with callous betrayal.

Jewish motives for dealing with the Nazis were obvious. They attempted to stave off catastrophe and to save what could be saved. Nazi motives were more puzzling. At most, Heinrich Himmler was willing to exchange some Jews if palpable advantages for the Third Reich were the result. This tactic, for which Himmler had the oral backing of Hitler, came into greater play as Germany's military fortunes began to decline.

Excerpt from interview with Professor Yehuda Bauer

Director of the International Center for Holocaust Studies of Yad Vashem

January 18, 1998, Yad Vashem Jerusalem

Q- Were there chances of rescuing Jews by negotiations that were missed
because of this attitude?

B - The question of negotiating with the Nazis to rescue Jews is an extremely complicated issue. The Jews were caught in a trap. The Allies couldn't accept the German demands, because the Germans wanted a separate peace with the Western Allies, and this was out of the question. The Allies couldn't have supplied the Nazis in 1944 with thousands of trucks to help them fight against the Soviet Allies of the West. In other words, these were impossible situations.

What they could have done was to drag out the negotiations more than they did, to promise the Nazis to talk on condition that the Nazis stopped the murder. They didn't do that; had they done so, they might have had trouble with their Soviet Allies. The Soviets were completely oblivious of any Jewish issue whatsoever, and completely refused to negotiate with the Germans, although they did maintain some kind of contact with the Germans behind the West's back.

This fear was quite strong, especially among the Americans. In such a situation, the only thing that might have helped was what Moshe Shertok (later Sharett), at that time the head of the political department in the Jewish Agency, had suggested to the Western Allies: Talk to them, promise them whatever they want, but don't give it to them; drag it out until the war is over.That was very wise advice, but they didn't listen. Yes, possibilities may have been missed, but in a situation where the trap was almost completely closed.


Q- Why wasn't that done?

B- There were a number of reasons. There was an element of antisemitism, especially of course in the foreign offices of the two Western powers. I don't think that this element was really crucial, even though it certainly contributed.

What was crucial was the fact that the Allies were afraid that if their struggle were in some way identified with the rescue of Jewish people, they would be accused by their own home constituency of fighting for the Jews and not for themselves. This may have been true for the United States, where antisemitism increased during the Second World War. But I don't think it was true for Britain, where antisemitism decreased during the war.

This was the perception of the leaders of the Western Allies. The Jews were an unpopular minority who were pestering them to help, and the Allies decided that their purpose was to win the war, and anything that diverted them from that was bad. They completely ignored the fact that there was no contradiction between pursuing the war and helping the few thousands that could have been helped (or the tens of thousands that could have been helped by the steps that I outlined before).

The Western Allies themselves said that they were fighting against the most inhumane regime that had ever disfigured the face of this earth. By not helping the Jews, they ignored their own purposes. So in the end, it is a moral issue. And on the moral front, I think the Western Allies failed as far as the Jews were concerned.

Joel Brand, a member of the Relief and Rescue Committee of Budapest of the Nazi-Jewish Negotiations offered to the Refugee Section Chief Randall in London a plea about “an offer to meet the Germans.” Mr. Randall asked “where they would be if the Germans were to offer to dump a million Jews on them” . This infamous phrase, later quoted by Brand as if it was offered to him by Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident in Cairo, which provided much of the public rationale behind the 6 November 1944 Cairo assassination of Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne, Churchill’s Minister Resident in the Middle East by Jewish underground.


Holocaust revisionist, David Irving on Jews for Trucks Deal in 1944

June 17, 2003 (Tuesday)
London (UK)

ALL DAY at the Public Records Office until seven p.m. I spend the hours, without a break, reading and digesting a British Intelligence file on the Hungarian Jewish leader Joel Brand (and typing 6,500 words of notes from it). Brand was sent by Adolf Eichmann to Istanbul on May 19, 1944 on a top-secret mission to negotiate the notorious "trucks-for-Jews deal" with the British and was promptly arrested by Britain's SIME [Security Intelligence, Middle East] and held incarcerated in Cairo until it was too late.

I already knew of Eichmann's side of the story from his papers, which one of his family friends gave to me in Buenos Aires in October 1991 (and which I donated to the German Federal Archives).

The British Intelligence authorities had no interest in saving the Jews of Hungary or anywhere else; and even less in unleashing such an unwholesome torrent into Palestine. Brand was subjected to several leisurely interrogations from June 15, 1944 and throughout July, and finally released to Palestine on August 5, 1944 after Moscow objected to his being returned to Budapest (where his wife and children were held hostage by the Nazis).

http://www.fpp.co.uk/docs/Irving/RadDi/2003/170603.html