Alois Brunner
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Alois Brunner
Nazi German officer Alois Brunner (born 1912) helped engineer the Nazi destruction of European Jews, sending over 125,000 people to death camps.
SS (Schutzstaffel) Captain Alois Brunner served Adolf Eichmann in organizing the Nazi destruction of European Jews. Eichmann called Brunner "one of my best men." Born in Rohrbrunn, Austria, on April 8, 1912, Brunner joined the Nazi Party at age 19 and the SS at 26 (1938). He worked with Eichmann in the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, which forced Jews to emigrate. Then, in October 1939, Brunner organized the first transports to Poland, a pilot project for mass deportation of Jews to ghettoes and death camps in the East. As director of the Vienna Central Office for Jewish Emigration (1940-1942), Brunner deported people that might have received exemptions, such as invalids and orphans. Brunner's personal torture of Jews exceeded the needs of Nazi policy. He knew the fate of those he deported, for he visited the ghettoes and camps. The combination of tactics Brunner used in Vienna - efficiency, deception, and terror - was noted by higher authorities and activated elsewhere.
Brunner proved his worth to Eichmann, who posted him next to Salonica, Greece, the center of Sephardic Jewish culture in Europe. Salonica Jews, whose ancestors fled the Inquisition, had retained the language and some of the customs of 15th century Spain. Brunner forced Salonica's Jews into a ghetto, while he settled into a mansion with luxury gardens outside and torture chambers below. Witnesses have called Brunner the "most ferocious" of all the torturers. He packed 2,000 Jewish prisoners into each transport of sealed boxcars, which after ten days arrived at the gas chambers of Auschwitz. In six weeks Brunner destroyed a community that had persisted for five centuries.
In his next assignment as deportation expert in France (June 1943-August 1944), Brunner took over the transit camp of Drancy, northeast of Paris. He ruled by torture, reprisal, and deception (for example, encouraging prisoners to take personal belongings on transports to a so-called labor colony in Poland). Before Brunner's arrival, only Jews born outside France were deported. But Brunner began sending French Jews to death camps as well. He specifically marked Jewish children as targets, calling them "future terrorists," raiding children's centers, deporting hundreds of unaccompanied infants. Of the 23,500 people Brunner deported from France, only 1,645 survived.
As Germany faced defeat in the West in August 1944, Brunner left France for Slovakia (part of Czechoslovakia). Here he instituted a brutal camp regime and continued to deport Jews until the German retreat before the Russian attack.
Brunner was imprisoned by the Allies, but, using a false name, he got released. After working in Germany, he escaped in 1954 to Damascus, Syria, where he lived for over 40 years under Syrian protection. Beginning in the 1960s, monitors of Nazi activities asserted Brunner's presence in Damascus (under the name Georg Fischer) and his services to the Syrian secret service. In a 1985 interview Brunner showed no remorse for his wartime activities.
Warrants for Brunner's arrest and requests to Syria for his extradition were on the books in Germany, Austria, and elsewhere for many years. In 1954 France sentenced him to death in absentia, and in 1984 West Germany renewed a request for Brunner's extradition. Syrian authorities gave no sign of willingness to comply with such requests. Shortly after the in absentia verdict Brunner had four fingers blown from his left hand and was left partially blind when he opened a powerful mail bomb postmarked from Vienna. Armed government guards were outside his third floor apartment for many years. He was reported to carry cyanide with him at all times to be ingested in the event of his capture.
Brunner's mastery of deportation prevented resistance from his victims and showed his superiors how far the "Final Solution" could go. By a conservative estimate, Brunner deported 47,000 from Austria, 44,000 from Greece, 23,500 from France, and 14,000 from Slovakia. Very few of Brunner's victims survived.
Further Reading
Little has been written about Alois Brunner, and sources often confuse him with a Nazi named Anton Brunner. Information can be found in Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961, 1985). Documents which mention Brunner are reproduced and translated in The Holocaust: Selected Documents, edited by John Mendelsohn (1982), Vol. 8; Trial of the Major War Criminals (Nuremberg, 1946-1951), Vol. 4; and Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (1946-1948), Vol. 8. A brief account of Brunner in Syria appeared in Newsweek (November 11, 1985). For more details, see Mary Felstiner, "Alois Brunner: 'Eichmann's Best Tool,"' Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual (1986).
Additional Sources
Reader's Digest June 1990.
U.S. News & World Report, November 25, 1991.
Josephs, Jeremy, Swastika Over Paris, Arcade Publishing Incorporated (1989).
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
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Alois Brunner
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This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in the German Wikipedia. (December 2009) Don't speak German? Click here to read a machine-translated version of the German article. Click [show] on the right to review important translation instructions before translating.
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| Alois Brunner | |
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| Born | 8 April 1912 Nádkút, Vas, Austria-Hungary (now Rohrbrunn, Burgenland, Austria) |
| Died | 1996 (reports of death contested) |
| Allegiance |  Nazi Germany |
| Rank | SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) |
| Unit |  Schutzstaffel |
| Commands held | Drancy internment camp |
| Other work | "Government advisor" to the Syrian government; arms dealer in Egypt |
| Part of a series on |
| The Holocaust |
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Camps
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Remembrance
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Alois Brunner (born 8 April 1912) was an Austrian Nazi war criminal. Brunner was Adolf Eichmann's assistant, and Eichmann referred to Brunner as his "best man."[1] As commander of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris from June 1943 to August 1944, Brunner is held responsible for sending some 140,000 European Jews to the gas chambers. Nearly 24,000 of them were deported from the Drancy camp. He was condemned to death in absentia in France in 1954 for crimes against humanity. In 1961 and in 1980, Brunner lost an eye and the fingers of his left hand, respectively, as a result of letter bombs sent to him by Mossad.[2]
In 2003, The Guardian described him as "the world's highest-ranking Nazi fugitive believed still alive."[3] Brunner was last reported to be living in Syria, whose government rebuffed international efforts to locate or apprehend him.[4]
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Until 1945
Born in Nádkút, Vas, Austria-Hungary (now Rohrbrunn, Burgenland, Austria). He is the son of Joseph Brunner and Ann Kruise. Brunner was a trouble-shooter for the Schutzstaffel (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.[5]
He was personally sent by Adolf Eichmann in 1944 to Slovakia to oversee the deportation of Jews. From early 1944 until January 1945, over one million Jews were transported to Auschwitz. Before being named commander of Drancy internment camp near Paris, Brunner deported 43,000 Jews from Vienna and 46,000 from Salonika. In the last days of the Third Reich he managed to deport another 13,500 from Slovakia.[3]
After the war and escape to Syria
In an interview with the German magazine Bunte, in 1985, Brunner describes how he escaped capture by the Allies immediately after the Second World War. 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 WWII with the Gehlen Organization.[11][12]
He then fled 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 allegedly hired as a "government advisor" — with some suggesting he was advising the Syrian dictatorship on torture and repression techniques, some dating from his time as an SS torturer. He also allegedly trained Kurdish rebels to operate against Turkey, and shipped arms to Algerian rebels during their war of independence with France. Syria has constantly 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.[citation needed]
In his 1980s interview by the German magazine Bunte, Brunner declared that his sole regret was not having murdered more Jews. In a 1987 telephone interview to the Chicago Sun Times, he stated: "The Jews deserved to die. They were garbage, I have no regrets. If I had the chance I would do it again..."[13] He was reported to be living in Damascus under the alias of Dr. Georg Fischer.[1] Although there were unconfirmed reports that Brunner may have died in 1996, he was reportedly sighted in 2001.[citation needed]
In 2011, the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that the German intelligence service BND 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.[14]
Letter bombs
Brunner lost an eye and fingers on his left hand from letter bombs sent to him in 1961 and in 1980 by Israel's intelligence service, Mossad.[2] In December 1999, rumours surfaced saying that he had died in 1996 and had been buried in a cemetery in Damascus. However, German journalists visiting Syria said Brunner was living at the Meridian Hotel in Damascus. According to The Guardian, he was last seen alive by reliable witnesses in 1992, and by journalists in 1996.
Convictions in absentia
Germany and other countries have 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 €333,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.[citation needed]
On 2 March 2001, he was found guilty in absentia by a French court for crimes against humanity,[4] 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 such as Celestine Ajzykowicz (11 years old), Jean Bender (4 years old) and Alain Blumberg, a two-week-old baby kicked to death by an SS guard. Klarsfeld's own father, arrested in 1943, was reportedly one of Brunner's victims.[3]
Recent attempts to locate
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. Dep.-Cmdr. 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.[15]
In July 2007, the Austrian Justice Ministry declared that they would pay €50,000 for information leading to his arrest and extradition to Austria.[16]
A self described "team of Israelis" who have "hunted down" Nazi war criminals all over the world list him as their second most wanted man, and since the first may have already died, he could very well be their most wanted Nazi war criminal, and if found alive by them, will be brought back to Israel to face charges of crimes against humanity, mass murder and membership of an illegal party. In March 2009, the Simon Wiesenthal Center admitted that the possibility of Brunner still being alive was "slim".[17] Despite this reality, he resurfaced in media reports in 2011 as being one of the most wanted men globally whom many insist could still be alive.[18][19]
See also
Notes
- ^ a b Biography at the Jewish Virtual Library
- ^ a b Alois Brunner : La Haine Irreductible by Didier Epelbaum, January 1990
- ^ a b c Henley, Jon (2003-03-03). "French court strikes blow against fugitive Nazi". London: The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/nazis/article/0,2763,445717,00.html. Retrieved 2007-07-30.
- ^ a b "Most Wanted Nazis" by Bridget Johnson for About.com
- ^ Schneider, Gertrude, Journey into terror: story of the Riga Ghetto, pg. 25, Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001; ISBN 0-275-97050-7
- ^ Schneider, Gertrude, Journey into terror: story of the Riga Ghetto, (2d Ed.) Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001, pgs. 54, 167; ISBN 0-275-97050-7
- ^ "Most-Wanted Nazi Ready to Surrender, Report Says". Los Angeles Times. 1985-10-28.
- ^ "In Syria, a Long-Hunted Nazi Talks". The New York Times. 1985-11-29.
- ^ "Nazi Criminal Says Mixup Aided His Escape". The New York Times. 1985-11-07.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Peter Wyden (2001). The Hitler Virus: The Insidious Legacy of Adolf Hitler. Arcade Publishing.
- ^ Georg Hafner; Esther Schapira (2000). Die Akte Alois Brunner. Campus Verlag.
- ^ GWU.edu
- ^ "BND vernichtete Akten zu SS-Verbrecher Brunner". Der Spiegel. 2001-07-20.
- ^ Int'l hunt on for top Nazi fugitive, The Jerusalem Post, 28 December 2005
- ^ Warrant of Apprehension, Austrian Justice Ministry
- ^ "The hunt for the last Nazis", BBC, 23 March 2009
- ^ "World's Most Wanted: Who's Left on the List?", Ben Forer. ABC News. 26 May 2011
- ^ "Die meistgesuchten Kriegsverbrecher", 20 Minuten. 26 May 2011; accessed 10 June 2011
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