Alois Brunner

Alois Brunner (8 April 1912 – c. December 2001 or c. 2010) was an Austrian officer who held the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) during World War II.

Brunner played a significant role in the implementation of the Holocaust through rounding up and deporting Jews in occupied Austria, Greece, Macedonia, France, and Slovakia.

He was known as Final Solution architect Adolf Eichmann's right-hand man.

Brunner was responsible for sending over 100,000 European Jews from Austria, Greece, France and Slovakia to ghettos and concentration camps in eastern Europe.

At the start of the war, he oversaw the deportation of 47,000 Austrian Jews to camps.

In Greece, 43,000 Jews were deported in two months while he was stationed in Thessaloniki.

Alois Brunner was born on 8 April 1912 in the town of Vas, Austria-Hungary (now Rohrbrunn, Burgenland, Austria), the son of Joseph Brunner and Ann Kruise.

He joined the Nazi Party at the age of sixteen and the Sturmabteilung (SA) a year later.

In 1933, Brunner moved to Germany where he joined the Nazi paramilitary group Austrian Legion.

After the annexation of Austria in 1938 he volunteered with the SS and was assigned to the staff of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna becoming its director in 1939.

Following the German occupation of the Czech lands on 15 March 1939 he was sent to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to accelerate the emigration of Czech Jews.

Brunner became known as Adolf Eichmann's right-hand man.

After the war started, Brunner worked closely with Eichmann on the Nisko Plan, a failed attempt to set up a Jewish reservation in Poland, Brunner managed by October 1939 to organise the deportation of more than 1,500 Viennese Jews to Nisko, Poland.

Over time Brunner supervised the deportation of 56,000 Austrian Jews.

In October 1942, he was transferred to Berlin to implement his method there.

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."

He then became commander of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris from June 1943 to August 1944, during which nearly 24,000 men, women and children were sent to the gas chambers.

His last assignment involved the destruction of the Jewish community of Slovakia.

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.

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 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.

According to some accounts, Brunner was responsible for the deportation of 129,000 people to death camps.

While serving as the commandant at Drancy, Brunner was remembered for his exceptional brutality.

He personally conducted interrogations of new prisoners, and survivors of the camp have claimed that his office was covered in bloodstains and bullet holes.

He instituted torture even for slight offences.

As he was personally responsible to Eichmann, he circumvented the typical chain of command that included Helmut Knochen, the Chief of the SS in Paris, and Heinz Rothke, the Jewish Affairs expert of the German police.

After some narrow escapes from the Allies in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Brunner managed to elude capture and fled West Germany in 1954, first for Egypt, then Syria, where he remained until his death.

He was the object of many manhunts, investigations, and assassination attempts over the years by different groups, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Klarsfelds and Mossad.

He was condemned to death in absentia in France in 1954 for crimes against humanity, later commuted to life imprisonment in absentia in 2001.

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.

The Syrian government under Hafez al-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 escaped all attempts to capture or kill him and was unrepentant about his activities.

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.

Starting in the 1990s and continuing for two decades, Brunner was one of the most-wanted Nazi war criminals.

In November 2014, the Simon Wiesenthal Center reported that Brunner had died in Syria in 2010, and that he was buried somewhere in Damascus.

Brunner's exact date and place of death remain unknown.

However, recent information based on new evidence uncovered during a 2017 investigation point to December 2001 as the time of his death in Damascus, Syria.