© 1999 by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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Nazi-Jewish Negotiations in Istanbul in Mid-1944*
Ben-Gurion Research Center
This article focuses on David Ben-Gurion's reactions to Nazi suggestions in mid-1944 that the lives of Hungarian Jews might be spared if the West supplied certain goods to Germany. The most famous offer, brought via Budapest to Istanbul by Hungarian Jewish activist Joel Brand, was allegedly one million Jewish lives for ten thousand trucks. The leadership of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, headed by Ben-Gurion, however, sought to induce Britain and the United States to avoid open rejection of this unrealistic Nazi proposal and subsequent feelers, and Jewish officials simultaneously and secretly prepared to engage Nazi officials in independent negotiations based on payment of money, not goods. Although intensive Jewish efforts led to very limited results, the episodes and maneuvers in and around Istanbul during the summer of 1944 demonstrate Ben-Gurion's interest in grasping any possibility for saving Jews from the Holocaust.
* This article is adapted from my book, Arrow in the Dark: David Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv Leadership and Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust (The Ben-Gurion Research Center, Sede Boker Campus, Avraham Harman Institute for Contemporary Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Ben-Gurion University Press, 1998) vol. 2, chapter 8, pp. 657–750 [Hebrew]. For a previous version of my treatment of this episode, see "Istanbul, June 1944: The Mysterious Offer Received by Menahem Bader and What Surrounded It," ‘Iyunim be-Tequmat Yisra'el 4 (1991), pp. 229–78.