Alois Brunner

Alois Brunner

Alois Brunner in 1940
Born (1912-04-08)8 April 1912
Nádkút, Vas, Austria-Hungary (now Rohrbrunn, Burgenland, Austria)
Died c. 2010 (aged 97 or 98)
Damascus, Syria (likely)
Allegiance  Nazi Germany
 Syria
Years of service 1932–1945
Rank SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain)
Unit Schutzstaffel
Commands held Drancy internment camp
Battles/wars World War II
Other work Advisor to the Syrian government; arms dealer in Egypt

Alois Brunner (8 April 1912 – c. 2010) was an Austrian Schutzstaffel (SS) officer who worked as Adolf Eichmann's assistant. Eichmann referred to Brunner as his "best man." Brunner is held responsible for sending over 100,000 European Jews to the gas chambers. He was commander of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris from June 1943 to August 1944, from which nearly 24,000 people were deported.

After some narrow escapes from the Allies in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Brunner fled West Germany in 1954, first for Egypt, then Syria, where he remained until his death. He was the object of many manhunts and investigations over the years by different groups, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Klarsfelds and others. He was condemned to death in absentia in France in 1954 for crimes against humanity. He lost an eye and then the fingers of his left hand as a result of letter bombs sent to him in 1961 and 1980, possibly by the Israeli Mossad. The government of Syria under Hafez el-Assad came close to extraditing him to East Germany, before this plan was halted by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Brunner survived all the attempts to detain him, unrepentant about his activities to the end.

During his long residence in Syria, Brunner was reportedly given asylum, a generous salary and protection by the ruling Baath Party in exchange for his advice on effective torture and interrogation techniques used by the Germans in World War II.[1]

Starting in the 1990s and continuing for two decades, there was periodic media speculation about Brunner's exact whereabouts and his possible demise. Finally in November 2014, the Simon Wiesenthal Center reported that Brunner had died in Syria in 2010, and that he was buried somewhere in Damascus. The exact date of death and place of burial remain unknown.

Until 1945

The internment camp at Drancy, outside Paris, where Jews were confined until they were deported to the death camps.

Born in Nádkút, Vas, Austria-Hungary (now Rohrbrunn, Burgenland, Austria), he was the son of Joseph Brunner and Ann Kruise. He joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and the Sturmabteilung (SA) in 1932. After joining the SS in 1938, he was assigned to the staff of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Austria and became its director in 1939. He worked closely with Eichmann on the Nisko Plan, a failed attempt to set up a Jewish reservation in Nisko, Poland, later that same year.[2]

Brunner was a trouble-shooter for the SS and held the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) when he organized deportations to Nazi concentration camps from Vichy France and Slovakia. He was commander of a train of Jews deported from Vienna to Riga in February 1942. En route, Brunner shot and killed the well-known financier Siegmund Bosel, who, although ill, had been hauled out of a Vienna hospital and placed on the train. According to historian Gertrude Schneider, who as a young girl was deported to Riga on the same train, but survived the Holocaust:

Alois Brunner chained Bosel, still in his pajamas, to the platform of the first car — our car — and berated him for having been a profiteer. The old man repeatedly asked for mercy; he was very ill, and it was bitterly cold. Finally Brunner wearied of the game and shot him. Afterward, he walked into the car and asked whether anyone had heard anything. After being assured that no one had, he seemed satisfied and left.[3]

Before being named commander of Drancy internment camp near Paris in June 1943, Brunner deported 43,000 Jews from Vienna and 46,000 from Salonika.[4] He was personally sent by Eichmann in 1944 to Slovakia to oversee the deportation of Jews. In the last days of the Third Reich he managed to deport another 13,500 from Slovakia[4] to Theresienstadt, Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen, and Stutthof of whom a few survived; the remainder, including all the children, were sent to Auschwitz, where none survived.[5]

After the war and escape to Syria

In an interview with the German magazine Bunte, in 1985, Brunner described how he escaped capture by the Allies immediately after World War II. The identity of Brunner was apparently mixed up with that of another SS member, Anton Brunner, who was executed for war crimes, instead of Alois, who, like Josef Mengele, lacked the SS blood type tattoo, which prevented him from being detected in an Allied prison camp. Anton Brunner, who also worked in Vienna deporting Jews, was confused after the war with Alois Brunner, even by historians such as Gerald Reitlinger.[6]

Claiming that he "received official documents under a false name from American authorities", Brunner professed he found work as a driver for the United States Army in the period after the war.[7][8][9][10] It has been alleged that Brunner found a working relationship after World War II with the Gehlen Organization.[11][12][13]

He fled West Germany only in 1954, on a fake Red Cross passport, first to Rome, then Egypt, where he worked as a weapons dealer, and then to Syria, where he took the pseudonym of Dr. Georg Fischer. In Syria, he was hired as a government advisor. The exact nature of his work is unknown, but it is believed he advised the Syrian government on torture and repression techniques, some dating from his time as an SS torturer. Syria had long refused entry to French investigators as well as to Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld who spent nearly 15 years bringing the case to court in France. Simon Wiesenthal tried unsuccessfully to trace Brunner's whereabouts. However, communist East Germany led by Erich Honecker negotiated with Syria in the late 1980s to have Alois Brunner extradited and arrested in Berlin.[14] The government of Syria under Hafez el-Assad was close to extraditing Brunner to East Germany, but the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 severed contacts between the two regimes and halted the extradition plan.[14]

In the Bunte interview, Brunner declared that his sole regret was not having murdered more Jews. According to a US State Department document [15] (which cites a 1987 telephone interview with the Chicago Sun Times), he is quoted as saying:

All of [the Jews] deserved to die because they were the Devil's agents and human garbage. I have no regrets and would do it again.

He was reported to be living in Damascus under the alias of "Dr. Georg Fischer".[15][16] Up to the early 1990s, he lived in an apartment building on 7 Rue Haddad in Damascus, meeting with foreigners and occasionally being photographed.[17] In the 1990s, the French Embassy received reports that Brunner was meeting regularly and having tea with former East German nationals.[18] According to The Guardian, he was last seen alive by reliable witnesses in 1992.[17]

In December 1999, unconfirmed reports surfaced, stating that Brunner had died in 1996, and had been buried in a Damascus cemetery. However, he was reportedly sighted at the Meridian Hotel in Damascus by German journalists that same year, where he was said to be living under police protection.[19] The last reported sighting of him was at the Meridian Hotel in late 2001 by German journalists.[13]

In 2011, the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that the German intelligence service Bundesnachrichtendienst had destroyed its file on Brunner in the 1990s, and that remarks in remaining files contain conflicting statements as to whether Brunner had worked for the BND at some point.[20]

Letter bombs

In 1961 and 1980, letter bombs were sent to Brunner while he was resident in Syria. As a result of the letter bomb he received in 1961, he lost an eye, and in 1980 he lost the fingers on his left hand when the parcel blew up in his hands. The senders of the letter bombs were unknown parties[21] although some believe it was the work of the Israeli Mossad.[22]

Convictions in absentia

Germany and other countries unsuccessfully requested his extradition. He was twice sentenced to death in absentia in the 1950s; one of those convictions was in France in 1954. In August 1987 an Interpol "red notice" was issued for him. In 1995, German State prosecutors in Cologne and Frankfurt posted a $330,000 reward, for information leading to his arrest.[23]

On 2 March 2001, he was found guilty in absentia by a French court for crimes against humanity,[24] including the arrest and deportation of 345 orphans from the Paris region (which had not been judged in the earlier trials) and was sentenced to life imprisonment. According to Serge Klarsfeld, the trial was largely symbolic — an effort to honour the memories of victims. Klarsfeld's own father, arrested in 1943, was reportedly one of Brunner's victims.[25]

Later attempts to locate

In 2003, British newspaper The Guardian described him as "the world's highest-ranking Nazi fugitive believed still alive." Brunner was last reported to be living in 2001 in Syria, whose government had long rebuffed international efforts to locate or apprehend him, but was presumed dead as of 2012.[26]

In 2004, for an episode titled "Hunting Nazis", the television series Unsolved History used facial recognition software to compare Alois Brunner's official SS photograph with a recent photo of "Georg Fischer", and came up with a match of 8.1 points out of 10, which they claimed was, despite the elapse of over 50 years in aging, equivalent to a match with 95% certainty. Brazilian police are said to be investigating whether a suspect living in the country under an assumed name is actually Alois Brunner. Deputy Commander Asher Ben-Artzi, the head of Israel's Interpol and Foreign Liaison Section, passed on a Brazilian request for Brunner's fingerprints to Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, but Zuroff could not find any.[27]

In July 2007, the Austrian Justice Ministry declared that they would pay €50,000 for information leading to his arrest and extradition to Austria.[28]

In March 2009, the Simon Wiesenthal Center admitted that the possibility of Brunner still being alive was "slim".[29] Despite this awareness, Brunner resurfaced in media reports in 2011 as being one of the most wanted men globally who many insist could still be alive.[30][31]

Brunner was removed from the Simon Wiesenthal Center's List of Most Wanted Nazi War Criminals in 2014.[32]

Death

On November 30, 2014, the Simon Wiesenthal Center reported receiving credible information[33] that Brunner had died in Syria in 2010. He would have been 97 or 98. Partly due to the ongoing Syrian Civil War, the exact date of his death and place of burial are unknown at present.[32][34][35]

According to the director of the Wiesenthal Center, Dr Efraim Zuroff, the information came from a "reliable" former German secret service agent who had served in the Middle East. The information was also widely reported in the press. The new evidence revealed that Brunner was buried in an unknown location in Damascus around 2010, unrepentant of his crimes to the end. Zuroff said that, owing to the civil war in Syria, the exact location of Brunner's grave is impossible to know.[36]

Notes

  1. ↑ The Atlantic Magazine, December 1, 2014 reported by Adam Chandler Eichmann's Best Man Lived and Died in Syria http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/12/eichmanns-best-man-lived-and-died-in-syria/383296/
  2. ↑ Cesarani 2005, p. 128.
  3. ↑ Schneider, Gertrude, Journey Into Terror: The Story of the Riga Ghetto, p. 25, Westport, Connecticut, USA, Praeger, 2001; ISBN 0-275-97050-7
  4. 1 2 Henley, Jon (2003-03-03). "French court strikes blow against fugitive Nazi". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 2007-07-30.
  5. ↑ Porter, Anna (26 May 2009) [2007]. "23. The End of Summer". Kasztner's Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust. New York: Walker Publishing. p. 246. ISBN 978-0-8027-1596-8. OCLC 236340976. Retrieved 11 January 2016. In mid-October, Captain Alois Brunner began to empty the Sered camp of its almost twenty thousand Slovak jews, even as the Slovak insurrection was defeated by four German SS divisions. Some of those who were sent to Theresienstadt survived the war. A few survived at the Sachsenhausen camp in Germany, Stutthof in Poland, and Bergen-Belsen. The rest, including all the children, were murdered in Auschwitz. Brunner had always taken great pleasure in the murder of children.
  6. ↑ Schneider, Gertrude, Journey into terror: story of the Riga Ghetto (2nd abbr. edition), Westport, Connecticut, Praeger, 2001, p. 54, 167; ISBN 0-275-97050-7
  7. ↑ "Most-Wanted Nazi Ready to Surrender, Report Says". Los Angeles Times. 1985-10-28.
  8. ↑ Markham, James M. (1985-11-29). "In Syria, a Long-Hunted Nazi Talks". The New York Times.
  9. ↑ "Nazi Criminal Says Mixup Aided His Escape". The New York Times. 1985-11-07.
  10. ↑ George J. Annas (1991). "Mengele's Birthmark: The Nuremberg Code in United States Courts". The Journal of Contemporary Health Law and Policy 7: 17–46.
  11. ↑ Peter Wyden (2001). The Hitler Virus: The Insidious Legacy of Adolf Hitler. Arcade Publishing.
  12. ↑ Hafner, Georg; Schapira, Esther (2000). Die Akte Alois Brunner (in German). Campus Verlag.
  13. 1 2 "Alois Brunner: The Nazi War Criminal Who Found a Home in Syria". Ibtimes.com. 2012-07-18. Retrieved 2014-03-04.
  14. 1 2 "Fall of Berlin Wall halted extradition of key Nazi: report". Expatica.com. Retrieved 2012-11-09.
  15. 1 2 US Department of State. "Nazi War Criminal Alois Brunner's Presence in Damascus Hits the Papers Again" (PDF). The National Security Archive. Retrieved 4 March 2016.
  16. ↑ "Biography, at the Jewish Virtual Library". Jewishvirtuallibrary.org. 2005-12-31. Retrieved 2012-11-09.
  17. 1 2 Jon Henley in Paris (2001-03-03). "French court strikes blow against fugitive Nazi | World news". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 2014-03-04.
  18. ↑ Par Georges Malbrunot le 21 juillet 2011 17h55. "Aloïs Brunner : les Allemands ont détruit les notes de renseignements — De Bagdad à Jérusalem : L'Orient indiscret". Blog.lefigaro.fr. Retrieved 2014-03-04.
  19. ↑ Jo Glanville (1999-11-28). "He's the last Nazi criminal still at large. But where is he? | From the Observer | The Observer". London: Guardian. Retrieved 2014-03-04.
  20. ↑ "BND vernichtete Akten zu SS-Verbrecher Brunner" (in German). Der Spiegel. 20 July 2001.
  21. ↑ Searches: The Nazi of Damascus Time Magazine, Monday, Nov. 11, 1985
  22. ↑ Alois Brunner — La haine irréductible, by Didier Epelbaum, preface by Serge Klarsfeld, published by Calmann-Lévy, January 1990.
  23. ↑ Donald M. McKale (2011). Nazis after Hitler: How Perpetrators of the Holocaust Cheated Justice and Truth. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p. 290. ISBN 1442213183.
  24. ↑ "Most Wanted Nazis", by Bridget Johnson, for About.com
  25. ↑ "French court strikes blow against fugitive Nazi", The Guardian, 3 March 2001
  26. ↑ "Who are the most wanted Nazis?". Euronews. July 16, 2012. Retrieved July 24, 2014.
  27. ↑ Int'l hunt on for top Nazi fugitive, The Jerusalem Post, 28 December 2005
  28. ↑ Warrant of Apprehension, Austrian Justice Ministry
  29. ↑ ""The hunt for the last Nazis", BBC, 23 March 2009". BBC News. 2009-03-23. Retrieved 2012-11-09.
  30. ↑ "World's Most Wanted: Who's Left on the List?", Ben Forer. ABC News. 26 May 2011
  31. ↑ "Die meistgesuchten Kriegsverbrecher", 20 Minuten. 26 May 2011; accessed 10 June 2011
  32. 1 2 Simon Wiesenthal Center 2014 Annual Report on the Status of Nazi War Criminals (PDF). Los Angeles: Simon Wiesenthal Center. 2014.
  33. ↑ "timesofisrael.com"
  34. ↑ Time Magazine, December 2, 2014 A Notorious Nazi War Criminal Died in Syria Four Years Ago http://time.com/3613248/alois-brunner-nazi-officer-syria-death/
  35. ↑ Simon Weisenthal Centre statement by Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of Israel branch of The Weisenthal Centre
  36. ↑ ""Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner 'died in Syria'", BBC, 1 December 2014". BBC News. 2014-12-01. Retrieved 2014-12-01.

Sources

External links

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