Deception: How the Nazis Tricked the Last Jews of Europe

‘Over the years I learned which hooks to use to catch which fish … Hungary really offered the Jews to us like sour beer, and Hungary was the only country where we could not work fast enough.’ - ADOLF EICHMANNIn the spring of 1944, Adolf Hitler ordered German troops to occupy Hungary.A special SS unit led by Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest. Its purpose? To deport hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. They had already murdered millions of European Jews in occupied Poland.On the eve of this destruction, a group of Hungarian Zionists known as the ‘Va’ada’, led by Joel Brand and Rezsö Kasztner, began negotiating with the SS to save lives. Then Eichmann made an astonishing offer: to ransom ‘a million Jews for 10,000 trucks … Blood for trucks’. Brand was flown to Istanbul to negotiate with the Allies. But Brand’s mission failed, and he was imprisoned as a ‘German agent’ by the British in Cairo. Meanwhile, in Brand’s homeland, Eichmann and his Hungarian collaborators got to work. Every day, 12,000 men, women and children were herded into cattle trucks and dispatched to their terrible fate.But was Eichmann’s perplexing offer made in good faith? What was his real motivation? Deception explores the murky reasons behind Eichmann’s plot and unveils a dastardly scheme of murderous deceit.

CHRISTOPHER HALE is a non-fiction author and film maker who has worked all over the world, making documentaries for most of the major broadcasters including the BBC and National Geographic. His first book Himmler’s Crusade (Bantam, 2004), won the prestigious Gambrinus ‘Giuseppe Mazzotti’ award in 2003.