Book excerpt: 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.