Joel Brand Eugen Band. He cabled the Jewish Agency in Istanbul to say he was on his way, and arrived by German diplomatic plane on 19 May. Paul Rose writes that Brand had no idea at this point that the deportations to Auschwitz had already begun. Brand had been told by the Jewish Agency by return cable that "Chaim" would meet him in Istanbul. Convinced of the importance of his mission, he believed this was Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, later the first president of Israel. In fact the man who had arranged to meet him was Chaim Barlas,
Chaim Weizmann Nobel Prize laureate Fritz Haber, but took over the directorship himself after Haber's death en route to Palestine. During World War II, he was an honorary adviser to the British Ministry of Supply and did research on synthetic rubber and high-octane gasoline. After the Second World War, a Jewish group called Nakam formulated several plans to kill Germans in revenge for the Holocaust. Nakam's leader Abba Kovner, a former Lithuanian partisan, testified that he had approached Weizmann (at that time, President of the World Zionist Organization) with plans for a mass poisoning and that Wiezmann had put him in touch