Wikipedia:Today's featured article/requests/Joel Brand

Joel Brand

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of the TFAR nomination of the article below. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/requests). Please do not modify this page unless you are renominating the article at TFAR. For renominations, please add   to the top of the discussion and   at the bottom, then complete a new TFAR nom underneath.

The result was: scheduled for Today's featured article/July 13, 2014 by BencherliteTalk 19:16, 29 June 2014 (UTC)



Joel Brand (1906–1964) was a rescue worker, born in Transylvania but raised in Germany, who became known during the Holocaust for his efforts to save Hungary's Jews from deportation to Auschwitz. A leading member of Budapest's Aid and Rescue Committee, which smuggled Jews out of occupied Europe, Brand was approached in April 1944 by Adolf Eichmann, the German SS officer in charge of the deportations, who 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. It was the most ambitious of a series of such deals between Nazi and Jewish leaders; the Nazis called it "Blut gegen Waren" ("blood for goods"). Nothing came of the proposal, which The Times called one of the most loathsome stories of the war. The proposal was thwarted by the British government. The British arrested Brand in June 1944 in Turkey, where he had gone to propose Eichmann's offer. Brand told an interviewer shortly before his death: "An accident of life placed the fate of one million human beings on my shoulders. I eat and sleep and think only of them.
 * Most recent similar article(s): don't recall any similar person
 * Main editors: Slim Virgin
 * Promoted: 13 July (!) 2006
 * Reasons for nomination: 13 July - 50th anniversary of death. An article is already scheduled for that day, let's discuss. Thinking further: perhaps this would be a good article for 28 July, with a World War II connection.
 * Support as nominator. Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:10, 28 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Wrong war... WWI 100th anniversary, not WWII, so 13th July it is. BencherliteTalk 19:16, 29 June 2014 (UTC)