Brunner, Alois

Alois Brunner (8 April 1912 – December 2001 or 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, 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. 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. 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. In 1954 he was convicted in absentia in France for crimes against humanity and sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment in 2001 (France had abolished the death penalty in 1981). In Syria, 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. 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. 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. The German intelligence agency Verfassungsschutz claims he died in 2010. Brunner's exact date and place of death remain unknown.