Alois Brunner

Alois Brunner (born 8 April 1912) was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer. Brunner is wanted for war crimes, and was Adolf Eichmann's assistant. Eichmann referred to Brunner as his "best man". Brunner is held responsible for sending at least 140,000 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. He was condemned to death in absentia in France in 1954 for crimes against humanity. In 1961 and in 1980, Brunner lost, respectively, an eye and the fingers of his left hand, as a result of letter bombs sent to him by the Israeli Mossad.

In 2003, The Guardian described him as "the world's highest-ranking Nazi fugitive believed still alive". Brunner was last reported to be living in Syria, whose government had long rebuffed international efforts to locate or apprehend him. The government of Syria under Hafez el-Assad was close to extraditing Alois Brunner to East Germany, before this plan was halted by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

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:

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.

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 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.

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. It has been alleged that Brunner found a working relationship after World War II with the Gehlen Organization.

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". The exact nature of his work is unknown, but it is believed he advised the Syrian dictatorship 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. 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.

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

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. The last reported sighting of him was at the Meridian Hotel in late 2001 by German journalists.

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.

Letter bombs
Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, had tried to assassinate Alois Brunner, but failed. In 1961, the Mossad sent a bomb package to Brunner. Two Damascus postal workers were killed, but Brunner was only injured. Brunner lost an eye and fingers on his left hand from letter bombs sent to him in 1961 and in 1980 by the Mossad.

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.

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

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. 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.

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

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