Alois Brunner

Austrian SS officer and Holocaust perpetrator (1912–2001)

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Lived 1912–2001, aged 89Austria

Austria JournalistsJournalist

Wikipedia
32 languages
Cross-language footprint
Rank in Austria
#236
Journalists
Era
1912–2001
Aged 89

Summary

Updated 2026-06-21

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.

Biography

About

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…

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