Joel Brand
The Story of a Deal

In Budapest in 1944, Adolf Eichmann offers the Jewish organization Waada an exchange of one million Jews against a shipment of 100,000 heavy trucks. On Eichmann's orders, Joel Brand travels to Syria, where he is apprehended and detained by the British Secret Service. The Allies respond to the cynical Nazi offer with either disbelief or rejection. Political considerations (can one negotiate with Hitler?) as well as military and technical reasoning (heavy trucks are essential to warfare) prevent a closing of the deal. In this geopolitical context, Brand - envisioning the cruel destruction of Budapest's Jews - appears like a naive Don Quixote... A terrifying part of Nazi history, expanded by Kipphardt to become a symbol and embodiment of a system which judges human beings strictly by their material value, and where fascism shows itself as a "specific degeneration of the civil society". (Kipphardt)