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Alois Brunner
Austrian SS officer and Holocaust perpetrator (1912-2001) · Austria · Politicians · Died at 89
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Something wrong?Eichmann's right-hand man in the machinery of the Final Solution. He sent over 100,000 Jews to camps across Austria, Greece, France, and Slovakia, then spent decades hidden in Damascus - training secret police, losing an eye and fingers to letter bombs, dying unaccounted for.
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Brunner held the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer and executed deportations with cold efficiency: 47,000 Austrian Jews at the war's start, 43,000 from Thessaloniki in two months, nearly 24,000 through Drancy camp outside Paris between June 1943 and August 1944. His final assignment was the destruction of Slovakia's Jewish community. After narrow escapes in 1945, he fled West Germany in 1954 for Egypt, then Syria, where the Ba'athist regime gave him asylum and he trained Hafez al-Assad's secret police in Nazi torture methods. Letter bombs in 1961 and 1980, reportedly from Israeli intelligence, cost him an eye and the fingers of his left hand. France convicted him in absentia in 1954 and sentenced him to death, later commuted to life. He remained one of the most-wanted Nazi war criminals through the 1990s and 2000s. Evidence suggests he died in Damascus in December 2001, though German intelligence claims 2010; his exact death and burial site remain unknown.
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