Alois Brunner was one of the most notorious Nazi war criminals never brought to justice. As a close deputy to Adolf Eichmann, he helped implement the Holocaust across Europe and personally oversaw the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to their deaths.
His cruelty was evident early. On the night of February 7, 1942, aboard a train carrying Austrian Jews from Vienna to the Riga ghetto, Brunner executed a prominent former Vienna citizen, Siegmund Bosel. Bosel, ill and dressed only in pajamas, had been chained to the floor of the railway carriage and berated for hours before Brunner shot him in the head.
Witnesses in the adjoining carriage heard the shot and fell silent. Brunner then stepped into their carriage, the smell of cordite and blood spatters on his greatcoat, and demanded to know whether anyone had heard anything. Assured that no one had, he left.
Brunner was a rabid anti-Semite, though witnesses noted he did not look particularly Aryan. Georges Dunand, a Red Cross official who met him in Slovakia, remarked on how non-Aryan the infamous SS officer appeared. His own deputy, testifying at Nuremberg, called him an extremely unscrupulous individual. Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal described him as the worst of all Third Reich criminals.
While Eichmann drew up the general plan for the extermination of the Jews, Brunner implemented it. Unlike many fugitive Nazis who claimed they were merely following orders, Brunner remained vocal about his work. In a 1987 telephone statement to the Chicago Sun-Times, he said the Jews he disposed of "all deserved to die because they were the devil's agents and human garbage," adding that he had no regrets and would do it again.
Brunner was born on April 8, 1912, in what was then Nagykutas in the German-speaking western part of Austria-Hungary, now Rohrbrunn, Austria. He joined the then-illegal Austrian Nazi Party in 1931 at the age of 19, and after the Anschluss he joined the SS.
His strong anti-Semitic views brought him to Eichmann's attention. Appointed personal secretary to the architect of the Holocaust, Brunner was sent to Vienna to head the Jewish affairs office before the war, where he led a campaign forcing many Jews to flee abroad.
From November 1939 until September 1944, Brunner was one of the busiest war criminals in Europe. He organized the deportation of 47,000 Jews from Vienna, organized mass roundups in Berlin, and deported the entire Jewish population of Salonika, Greece, a total of 43,000 people.
Between June 1943 and September 1944 he served as commandant of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris. There he deported 23,500 men, women and children to Auschwitz, where most perished. At the end of the war, he simply disappeared.
It has since been established that Brunner escaped Europe down a rat line bound for the Middle East. Many believed he remained alive for decades, protected by powerful friends in Syria.
Syria, ruled since independence from France by the al-Assad family, benefited from giving Brunner sanctuary. In 1998 a French judge stated that Brunner was definitely hiding in Syria under the protection of the Assad family. President Assad retorted sarcastically that he wondered how he, who was in Syria, did not know where Brunner was while the French judge did.
The problem for those seeking justice was never locating Brunner, but convincing Syrian authorities to extradite their guest. Brunner remained close to the Syrian intelligence community and the presidential family for decades, and was said to have been protected around the clock by armed Syrian secret service agents.
Israel's Nazi hunters and the Mossad found Syria extremely precarious to operate in. In desperation, the Israelis sent Brunner letter bombs. Two of them nearly succeeded in killing him, but he survived, losing an eye and some fingers of his left hand.
One of the most shameful aspects of the German occupation of France was the collaboration of French police in deporting the nation's Jewish population. A total of 75,721 Jews were deported from France to the camps in the east, and over 80 percent were arrested by French police.
Initially the Vichy government handed over foreign Jews with alacrity, hoping to stall the deportation of French Jews. Once Brunner arrived in June 1943 as Eichmann's efficiency expert, Vichy fell in with the overall Nazi plan and began arresting French nationals of the Jewish faith.
In total, 80 trains left France loaded with human fuel for Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Brunner was personally responsible for the deportation of 23,500 of the individuals aboard them. French police had few qualms about arresting Jewish children, and Vichy assisted in the deportation of over 11,000 children.
Vichy leader Admiral Pierre Laval volunteered to round up Jewish children within his zone, claiming he was acting out of humanity and did not want to separate families. In practice, police included children on transports to fill the numbers of Jews the SS demanded, avoiding the cost of dealing with orphans.
One horrific example occurred on July 16 and 17, 1942, at the Vélodrome d'Hiver sports stadium in Paris. Among the adults held there were 4,000 children, and French police insisted the SS include them in the roundup and deport them forthwith. The SS complied, and none of the children survived Auschwitz.
Brunner was appointed commandant at Drancy in June 1943. It was a vast holding center where the Jews of France were gathered before being shipped by train to Poland. Survivor Georges Appel recalled that Brunner beat elderly women and ordered inmates to prepare postcards saying all was well, which he then cynically mailed to relatives after the inmates were on the trains to Auschwitz.
Brunner's justification for targeting children was chilling. "I can't let children live," he remarked of the young Jews forced onto the trains with their parents. "They will be future terrorists," he said.
In a face-to-face interview in Damascus in 1987 with German journalist Gerd Heidemann of Stern magazine, Brunner claimed ignorance of the ultimate fate of the tens of thousands he shipped east. He said he learned about Auschwitz after the war from the newspapers. In Heidemann's opinion, Brunner was a bitter and temperamental old man, but unrepentant.
When Brunner arrived at Drancy, the camp was disorganized, dirty and badly run by French police. Inmates were starving and had been segregated by sex, meaning families had been forcibly split up.
Brunner ordered drastic changes that appeared humanitarian but masked a cynical drive for calm efficiency. He ordered the Union Générale des Israélites de France to provide provisions, had a large lawn planted with fresh vegetables, stairways whitewashed, rooms painted and showers installed. He also ended the practice of splitting up families.
The reason was brutally simple: happy prisoners were easier to deal with than starving and brutalized ones. He wanted Drancy calm and well ordered so that getting people onto transports east would meet as little resistance as possible. Jewish prisoners were ordered to police the camp instead of the SS.
Brunner engineered the fiction that inmates were being sent to labor camps, so most boarded evacuation trains to Auschwitz with minimal fuss. He told inmates to exchange their French francs for a receipt promising Polish currency on arrival. The money looted this way was sent to Berlin.
Make no mistake, Brunner remained a sadist who enjoyed torturing selected prisoners. He was not averse to personally executing people, as the case of Siegmund Bosel in Vienna showed. He was driven by a belief that rounding up and evacuating Jews fulfilled not only his duties to the SS but a higher duty to Germany.
Brunner was a very different figure from Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl, who saw himself as a policeman following orders, and even from Eichmann, who was essentially a bureaucrat once removed from personal murder. Brunner was an ideological Nazi to the core.
Even as the Allies approached Paris after the Normandy landings, Brunner made sure his Jews were sent east. When he and the SS evacuated Drancy on August 17, 1944, the train carrying his men, records and equipment also took along 51 of the remaining Jews. The camp was then abandoned to the International Red Cross, with several thousand internees still inside when the first American soldiers arrived.
René Airmann, a 29-year-old Parisian Jew arrested by the Gestapo in April 1943 and sent to Drancy, witnessed Brunner's sadistic behavior firsthand. He testified that he had seen Brunner beat, kick and throw stones at prisoners for no apparent reason apart from the fact that they were Jews. Two prisoners at whom Brunner threw stones died from their injuries, and it was not unusual to see persons severely wounded by his brutality.
Airmann was later sent to Auschwitz and finally to Bergen-Belsen, but survived the war to testify against many of her tormentors. While commandant of Drancy, Brunner was briefly seconded by Eichmann to the French Riviera to solve a new problem for the SS.
Brunner was extremely proactive in hunting down Jews and very successful. One who remembered his methods was the famous post-war French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, whose father was one of Brunner's victims. The Klarsfelds had taken refuge on the French Riviera, which until September 1943 was under Italian occupation. The Italians cared little about deporting Jews, and thousands felt safe.
All this changed when Mussolini was deposed and Italy changed sides in September 1943. The Germans moved swiftly to occupy territories under Italian control, and Brunner was ordered into the French Riviera by Eichmann to hunt down and deport all Jews hiding there.
Historian and witness Léon Poliakov described the campaign as a human hunt. Men were stopped in the street and forced to expose their genitals so the SS could see if they were circumcised. Anyone who even looked Jewish was arrested, and house-to-house searches were conducted. A huge number were imprisoned at Brunner's headquarters, the Hotel Excelsior in Nice, and some were tortured by him personally.
Serge Klarsfeld's father had hidden his wife, son and daughter behind a false panel in the back of a cupboard. The terrified eight-year-old Serge recalled listening to the approach of Brunner's SS, the sounds of jackboots kicking in doors, screamed orders, and men, women and children being beaten next door. When the SS hammered on the Klarsfeld door, his father answered. The apartment was roughly searched, but a soldier looking into the wardrobe saw only clothes. Serge never saw his father again; he was killed at Auschwitz.
Serge Klarsfeld would not forget who was responsible, and it was he who began the long process of trying to bring Alois Brunner to justice. The questions confronting Nazi hunters were how Brunner eluded justice at the war's end and how he remained at liberty for so long.
Brunner was tried in France in the 1950s, in absentia. He was inevitably found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death, but with no body to hang, the process was more a formality than justice. Unless he was foolish enough to step back onto French territory, he had little to worry about. By 1974, when Klarsfeld first became interested in his fate, the death sentence had lapsed and Brunner was effectively a free man.
Klarsfeld quickly found evidence that Brunner was living in Syria under official government protection, using the name of his cousin, Georg Fischer. He pressured the West German and French governments to ask Syria for Brunner's extradition. Klarsfeld needed a fresh charge not included in the original French trials.
His new charge concerned the emotive subject of children. In the summer of 1944, while commandant of Drancy, Brunner ordered the mass arrest of 250 Jewish children sheltering in a home run by the UGIF, the French organization that tried to keep children out of Drancy. A UGIF official virtually begged Brunner to reconsider, but Brunner replied that the children would only grow up to become terrorists. All were deported, including a newborn baby, and only 32 survived the war.
Brunner was convicted in absentia for the deportation of the French children by a court in France in March 2001 and sentenced yet again to life imprisonment. In the 1990s, the Germans offered a 500,000 Deutsche Mark reward for information about Brunner.
When documentary filmmaker Esther Shapira, who made a program about Brunner in 1998, contacted the state attorney handling the case in Cologne and offered new information about his whereabouts, she was met with a distinct lack of interest. In her opinion, the reward money was simply a public relations exercise by the German government. When she spoke to officials at the BND, the German intelligence agency, they said of course they could trace Brunner if they had the order to, but no German government had ever done so.
In 2010 there were still outstanding arrest warrants for Brunner issued by Germany, Austria, France, Slovakia, Greece and Poland. The Simon Wiesenthal Center admitted in March 2009 that the chances were slim he was still alive; he would have been 97 years old.
Brunner was last seen alive by reliable witnesses in 1992 and reported still alive by journalists in 1996. In 2004 the television series Unsolved History aired an episode called "Hunting Nazis," using facial recognition software to compare Brunner's official SS portrait with a recent photo of Georg Fischer from Damascus. The program gained a match of 8.1 points out of 10, which producers suggested equated to a 95 percent certainty that the Georg Fischer in Syria was a very alive Brunner.
More recently, Brazilian police began seriously investigating a story that Brunner had fled from Syria to their country. They contacted the Israeli police's Interpol and foreign liaison section and requested a set of Brunner's fingerprints. The request was passed to Dr. Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, but Zuroff could not find any prints to share.
In July 2007 the Austrian justice ministry declared it would offer a 50,000 euro reward for information leading to Brunner's arrest and extradition to Austria. Thus far the reward has remained unclaimed.
New evidence of Brunner's fate emerged in 2014, when the Simon Wiesenthal Center received a tip-off from a former German intelligence agent in the Middle East that Brunner had died in Syria in 2010, aged 97 or 98. The ongoing Syrian civil war means the information cannot be verified. We will probably never know the fate of Alois Brunner, the last concentration camp commandant.