Desperate Mission: Joel Brand's Story

by Alex Weissberg, Constantine FitzGibbon (Translator)

Overview

This book is the story of the former Hungarian Zionist leader, Joel Brand, as told to Alex Weissberg, author of The Accused, which told of his experiences as a prisoner of the Soviet secret police.

Most of Desperate Mission: Joel Brand’s Story (1958) is devoted to an account of how Brand came to be in a position to negotiate with the Nazis for the lives of a million human beings and what he did to carry out his incredible mission.

Written with all the passion of a man who was entrusted with an almost hopeless mission and had to sit by impotently watching the horrible consequences of its failure, Brand believed that goods and promises which would not have prolonged the fighting ability of the Wehrmacht by a single day might have prevented the slaughter of the 400,000 Jews from Hungary and the untold number from other countries who were put to death in the last year of Hitler’s regime.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781787206359
Publisher:	Borodino Books
Publication date:	07/11/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	221
Sales rank:	810,998
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

ALEXANDER WEISSBERG (8 October 1901 - 4 April 1964) was a Polish-Austrian physicist, book author and businessman of Jewish descent.

His testimony in the trial David Rousset vs. Les Lettres françaises and his book The Accused contributed significantly to spreading knowledge about Stalinist terror and show trials in Western Europe.

Born Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski in Kraków in 1901, he emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1931 to work as a physicist and founded the Soviet Journal of Physics, which resulted in him coming to know Bukharin—a relationship that was later to become central to the regime’s attempt to frame Weissberg as part of a conspiracy to assassinate Stalin.

In 1939 Weissberg was handed over to the Gestapo by Stalin as part of the prisoner exchange in the Nazi-Soviet pact (also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). The advocacy of fellow physicist Albert Einstein was instrumental in securing the Nazi release of Weissberg.

He died in Paris in 1964 at the age of 62.

ROBERT LOUIS CONSTANTINE LEE-DILLON FITZGIBBON (8 June 1919 - 25 March 1983) was an English historian, translator and novelist. He was born and raised in the USA and France before moving to England with his mother, where he was educated at Wellington College, Berkshire. He won a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford to read modern languages in 1937, but left in May 1940, after the fall of France, to join the army. An officer with the British Army from 1940-1942, he rose to rank of Major within the U.S. Army during WWII. He turned to writing full-time after war, authoring more than 30 books, including nine novels, and translating numerous works from German and French. He moved to Ireland in 1967 and died in Dublin in 1983, aged 63.