Alois Brunner

Alois Brunner
Brunner in 1940
Born (1912-04-08)8 April 1912
Nádkút, Austria-Hungary
Died 2001[1] (aged 88 or 89) or 2010 (aged 97 or 98)
Damascus, Syria (likely)
Allegiance  Nazi Germany
 Syria
Service/branch Schutzstaffel
Years of service 1932–1945
Rank Hauptsturmführer
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 – 2001[2] or 2010[3]) was an Austrian Schutzstaffel (SS) officer who worked as Adolf Eichmann's assistant. Brunner is held responsible for sending over 100,000 European Jews to ghettos and internment camps in eastern Europe. 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, reportedly by Israeli intelligence.[4] 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 and was unrepentant about his activities to the end. During his long residence in Syria, Brunner was reportedly granted asylum, a generous salary and protection by the ruling Ba'ath Party in exchange for his advice on effective torture and interrogation techniques used by the Germans in World War II.[5]

Starting in the 1990s and continuing for two decades, there was periodic media speculation about Brunner's exact whereabouts and his possible demise. 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 death are unknown, with recent information pointing to 2001 as the year of his death.

Second World War

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.[6]

Brunner 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 Jewish 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.[7]

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.[8] 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[8] to Theresienstadt, Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen, and Stutthof of whom a few survived; the remainder, including all the children, were sent to Auschwitz, where none are known to have survived.[9]

Postwar flight 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 with the same surname, Anton Brunner, who was executed for war crimes. Alois, like Josef Mengele, did not have the SS blood type tattoo, which prevented his identity from detection in an Allied prison camp. Anton Brunner, who had worked in Vienna deporting Jews, was confused after the war with Alois due to the shared surname, including by historians such as Gerald Reitlinger.[10]

Claiming he had "received official documents under a false name from American authorities", Brunner claimed he had found work as a driver for the United States Army in the period after the war.[11][12][13]

It has been alleged that Brunner found a working relationship after World War II with the Gehlen Organization.[14][15][16]

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 adviser. The exact nature of his work is unknown. 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 Brunner extradited and arrested in Berlin.[17] 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.[17]

In the Bunte interview, Brunner was quoted as saying he regrets nothing and that all of the Jews deserved their fate. According to a widely quoted 1987 telephone interview with the Chicago Sun Times, he was reported to have said: "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."[18] But Brunner denied ever saying such a thing and the reliability of the journalist quoting him has been questioned.[19]

He was reported to be living in Damascus under the alias of "Dr. Georg Fischer".[18][20]

Until the early 1990s, he lived in an apartment building on 7 Rue Haddad in Damascus, meeting with foreigners and occasionally being photographed.[21] In the 1990s, the French Embassy received reports that Brunner was meeting regularly and having tea with former East German nationals.[22] According to The Guardian, he was last seen alive by reliable witnesses in 1992.[21]

In December 1999, unconfirmed reports surfaced that Brunner had died in 1996 and 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.[23] The last reported sighting of him was at the Meridian Hotel in late 2001 by German journalists.[16]

In 2011, 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.[24]

Assassination attempts

In 1961 and 1980, letter bombs were sent to Brunner while he was a 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 not known.[25][26]

A 2018 article in Newsweek by journalist Ronen Bergman disclosed that the 1961 bomb was sent by Military Intelligence Unit 188, a branch of the Israel Defense Forces and was the first target of a new method of letter bomb that was developed for deployment against ex-Nazi scientists working for Gamal Abdel Nasser in developing missiles targeting Israel. The article, excerpted from Bergman's book Rise and Kill First, says that Brunner was located by Israeli spy Eli Cohen.[4] According to information released by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, it was behind the 1980 bomb.[27]

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.[28]

On 2 March 2001, he was found guilty in absentia by a French court for crimes against humanity,[29] 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.[30]

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.[31]

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 were reportedly 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.[32]

In July 2007, the Austrian Justice Ministry declared that they would pay €50,000 for information leading to his arrest and extradition to Austria.[33]

In March 2009, the Simon Wiesenthal Center acknowledged the "slim" possibility of Brunner still being alive.[34] In 2011, some media reports still insisted he could be alive.[35][36]

Brunner was removed from the Simon Wiesenthal Center's List of Most Wanted Nazi War Criminals in 2014.[37]

Death

On 30 November 2014, the Simon Wiesenthal Center reported receiving credible information that Brunner had died in Syria in 2010. He would have been 97 or 98 years old. Partly due to the ongoing Syrian Civil War, the exact date and place of death are unknown.[3][38]

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 also was 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.[39]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ "Nazi war criminal Brunner 'died in Syria basement in 2001'". Retrieved 2017-09-01.
  2. ↑ "Nazi war criminal Brunner 'died in Syria basement in 2001'". Retrieved 24 September 2017.
  3. 1 2 2014 Annual Report on the Status of Nazi War Criminals (PDF). Los Angeles, California: Simon Wiesenthal Center. 2014.
  4. 1 2 Bergman, Ronen (12 April 2018). "Israel's secret war against Hitler's scientists". Newsweek. Retrieved 25 May 2018.
  5. ↑ Adam Chandler, "Eichmann's Best Man Lived and Died in Syria", The Atlantic Magazine, 1 December 2014.
  6. ↑ Cesarani 2005, p. 128.
  7. ↑ Schneider, Gertrude, Journey Into Terror: The Story of the Riga Ghetto, p. 25, Westport, Connecticut, USA, Praeger, 2001; ISBN 0-275-97050-7
  8. 1 2 Henley, Jon (3 March 2003). "French court strikes blow against fugitive Nazi". London, UK: The Guardian. Retrieved 30 July 2007.
  9. ↑ 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.
  10. ↑ Schneider, Gertrude, Journey into terror: story of the Riga Ghetto (2nd abbr. edition), Westport, Connecticut, Praeger, 2001, pp. 54, 167; ISBN 0-275-97050-7
  11. ↑ Markham, James M. (29 October 1985). "In Syria, a Long-Hunted Nazi Talks". The New York Times.
  12. ↑ "Nazi Criminal Says Mixup Aided His Escape". The New York Times. 7 November 1985.
  13. ↑ 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.
  14. ↑ Peter Wyden (2001). The Hitler Virus: The Insidious Legacy of Adolf Hitler. Arcade Publishing.
  15. ↑ Hafner, Georg; Schapira, Esther (2000). Die Akte Alois Brunner (in German). Campus Verlag.
  16. 1 2 "Alois Brunner: The Nazi War Criminal Who Found a Home in Syria". Ibtimes.com. 18 July 2012. Retrieved 4 March 2014.
  17. 1 2 "Fall of Berlin Wall halted extradition of key Nazi: report". Expatica.com. Retrieved 9 November 2012.
  18. 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.
  19. ↑ "Alois Brunner and the "I Would Do It All Again" Statement was a Lie, Says Researcher". The New Observer. The New Observer. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  20. ↑ "Biography, at the Jewish Virtual Library". Jewishvirtuallibrary.org. 31 December 2005. Retrieved 9 November 2012.
  21. 1 2 Jon Henley in Paris (3 March 2001). "French court strikes blow against fugitive Nazi". London, UK: The Guardian. Retrieved 4 March 2014.
  22. ↑ Georges Malbrunot (21 July 2011). "Aloïs Brunner: les Allemands ont détruit les notes de renseignements". Blog.lefigaro.fr. Retrieved 4 March 2014.
  23. ↑ Jo Glanville (28 November 1999). "He's the last Nazi criminal still at large. But where is he?". London, UK: Guardian. Retrieved 4 March 2014.
  24. ↑ "BND vernichtete Akten zu SS-Verbrecher Brunner" (in German). Der Spiegel. 20 July 2001.
  25. ↑ "The Nazi of Damascus", Time Magazine, 11 November 1985.
  26. ↑ Alois Brunner – La haine irréductible, by Didier Epelbaum, preface by Serge Klarsfeld, published by Calmann-Lévy, January 1990.
  27. ↑ https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-the-mossads-botched-assassination-attempts-on-nazi-war-criminals-1.5449633
  28. ↑ Donald M. McKale, Nazis after Hitler: How Perpetrators of the Holocaust Cheated Justice and Truth. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2011. p. 290. ISBN 1442213183.
  29. ↑ Bridget Johnson,"Most Wanted Nazis", About.com; accessed 27 December 2016.
  30. ↑ "French court strikes blow against fugitive Nazi", The Guardian, 3 March 2001.
  31. ↑ "Who are the most wanted Nazis?". Euronews. 16 July 2012. Retrieved 24 July 2014.
  32. ↑ "Int'l hunt on for top Nazi fugitive", The Jerusalem Post, 28 December 2005.
  33. ↑ Warrant of Apprehension, Austrian Justice Ministry; accessed 27 December 2016.(in German)
  34. ↑ "The hunt for the last Nazis". BBC News. 23 March 2009. Retrieved 9 November 2012.
  35. ↑ Forer, Ben (26 May 2011). "World's Most Wanted: Who's Left on the List?". ABC News.
  36. ↑ "Die meistgesuchten Kriegsverbrecher". 20 Minuten (in German). 26 May 2011. Retrieved 10 June 2011.
  37. ↑ Simon Wiesenthal Center 2014 Annual Report on the Status of Nazi War Criminals (PDF). Los Angeles, California: Simon Wiesenthal Center. 2014.
  38. ↑ "A Notorious Nazi War Criminal Died in Syria Four Years Ago", time.com, 2 December 2014.
  39. ↑ "Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner 'died in Syria'work=BBC". 1 December 2014. Retrieved 27 December 2016.

Sources

  • Cesarani, David (2005) [2004]. Eichmann: His Life and Crimes. London, UK: Vintage. ISBN 978-0-09-944844-0.
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