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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.
In Syria, Brunner was granted asylum by the Ba'athist regime and assisted Hafez al-Assad in organizing the Ba'athist secret police and trained them on Nazi torture practices. Brunner 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 sent to him in 1961 and 1980, reportedly by Israeli Secret service.
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. The German intelligence agency Verfassungsschutz claims he died in 2010. Brunner's exact date and place of death remain unknown.
Before being named commander of Drancy internment camp near Paris in June 1943, Brunner deported 43,000 Jews from Vienna and 46,000 from Salonika. He was personally sent by Eichmann in 1944 to Slovakia to oversee the deportation of Jews. In the last days of the Third Reich, he managed to deport another 13,500 from Slovakia to Theresienstadt, Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen, and Stutthof of whom a few survived; the remainder, including all the children, were sent to Auschwitz, where none are known to have survived. According to some accounts, Brunner was responsible for the deportation of 129,000 people to death camps.
While serving as the commandant at Drancy, Brunner was remembered for his exceptional brutality. He personally conducted interrogations of new prisoners, and survivors of the camp have claimed that his office was covered in bloodstains and bullet holes. He instituted torture even for slight offences. As he was personally responsible to Eichmann, he circumvented the typical chain of command that included Helmut Knochen, the Chief of the SS in Paris, and Heinz Rothke, the Jewish Affairs expert of the German police. He introduced a rigid system of categorization to control the inmates using information about their race and ethnicity derived from the interrogations. He deliberately misled prisoners about the living standards of their destinations at the extermination camps in the General Government, including Auschwitz-Birkenau. Brunner also led round-ups of Jews in the Italian Military Administration of France when the Germans assumed control in 1943 following the Armistice of Cassibile, ended all legal exemptions preventing Jews from being deported by Vichy France, and extended the deportations to Jews of French nationality. He continued deportations and arrests even as the Allies and the Free France advanced towards Paris.
While the Wehrmacht was already retreating from France, Brunner had 1,327 Jewish children arrested and deported in Paris between July 20 and 24, 1944. Brunner left Paris on August 17 in 1944, a week before the liberation of Paris, on the last train from the Drancy transit camp with fifty-one deported people, including Georges André Kohn Children's Association from Bullenhuser Damm eV, retrieved January 20, 2022 (Bullenhuser Damm), and other German military personnel. His intention was to use the deportees as potential hostages.The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews by Susan Zuccotti Publisher: University of Nebraska Press; (April 1, 1999) ISBN 978-0465030347The Holocaust encyclopedia By Walter Laqueur, Judith Tydor Baumel Publisher: Yale University Press; First edition first printing. edition (March 1, 2001) ISBN 978-0300084320Swastika over Paris by Jeremy Josephs Publisher: Little Brown & Co (T); 1st U.S. Edition. edition (December 1989) ISBN 978-0747503354
Brunner had 23,500 Jews of all ages deported from France to the concentration camps. From 30 September 1944 to 31 March 1945 he smashed the Jewish underground movement in Slovak State and headed the Sereď concentration camp, from where he had approximately 11,500 people deported to Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen, and Terezín for extermination.
Claiming he had "received official documents under a false name from American authorities", Brunner claimed he had 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 fled West 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 hired as a government adviser. The exact nature of his work is unknown. 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, East Germany, led by Erich Honecker, negotiated with Syria in the late 1980s to have Brunner extradition and arrested in Berlin. The government of Syria under Hafez al-Assad was close to extraditing Brunner to East Germany, but the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 severed contacts and halted the extradition plan. During his long residence in Syria, Brunner was reportedly granted asylum, a generous salary and protection by the ruling Ba'ath Party in exchange for his advice on effective torture and interrogation techniques used by Nazis in World War II.
In the Bunte interview, Brunner was quoted as saying he regrets nothing and that all of the Jews deserved their fate. In a 1987 telephone interview with Chuck Ashman, published in the Chicago Sun Times, Brunner was reported to have said: "All of the deserved to die because they were the Devil's agents and human garbage. I have no regrets and would do it again." (While the attribution of this quotation to Brunner was never directly disputed, Ashman was a controversial figure among his peers as journalists, and had previously been convicted of cheque fraud.) In an interview with Austrian neo-Nazi Gerd Honsik, Brunner denied claims of gas chambers.
Until 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 that Brunner had died in 1996 and 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, 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.
According to information released by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad in 2017, it was behind the 1980 letter bomb attack. After intelligence gathering revealed that Brunner had previously bought herbs from an Austrian mail order firm, Mossad agents broke into its office to steal brochures and envelopes with the company logo. After a suitable explosive device was created in Israel, the agents then returned to the town in Austria where the office was located in order to post the letter bomb, however the slot in the Post box was too small for it to fit. This necessitated in the agents having to repackage the device into a smaller envelope with less explosives, which resulted in Brunner only being injured rather than being killed outright in the blast it created.
On 2 March 2001, Brunner was found guilty in absentia by a French court for crimes against humanity,Bridget Johnson, "Most Wanted Nazis" , About.com; accessed 27 December 2016. 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. "French court strikes blow against fugitive Nazi", The Guardian, 3 March 2001.
In 2005, Brazilians police were reportedly investigating whether a suspect living in the country under an assumed name was 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 to Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, but Zuroff could not find any. "Int'l hunt on for top Nazi fugitive", The Jerusalem Post, 28 December 2005.
In July 2007, the Austrian Justice Ministry declared that they would pay €50,000 for information leading to his arrest and extradition to Austria. Warrant of Apprehension , Austrian Justice Ministry; accessed 27 December 2016.
In March 2009, the Simon Wiesenthal Center acknowledged the "slim" possibility of Brunner still being alive. In 2011, some media reports included him on a list of "World's Most Wanted" criminals.
In 2013, the Simon Wiesenthal Center described Brunner as "the most important unpunished Nazi war criminal who may still be alive". Brunner was last seen in 2001 in Syria, whose government had long rebuffed international efforts to locate or apprehend him, but was presumed dead .
In April 2014, Brunner was removed from the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals.
According to the director of the Wiesenthal Center, Efraim Zuroff, the information came from a "reliable" former German secret service agent who had served in the Middle East. The information was also reported in the press. The new evidence revealed that Brunner was buried in an unknown location in Damascus around 2010, unrepentant of his crimes to the end. Zuroff said that, owing to the civil war in Syria, the exact location of Brunner's grave was unknowable.
In 2017, the French quarterly review published an investigation about Brunner's last years in Syria by journalists Hédi Aouidj and Mathieu Palain. Three former security guards in charge of the protection of Brunner recounted how the Assad family used him to train intelligence services staff, then afterwards kept him under house arrest in a Damascus basement throughout the 1990s until his death in December 2001. One of the former guards said that Brunner, who went by the name of Abu Hussein, "suffered and cried a lot in his final years", "couldn't even wash" and ate only "an egg or a potato" a day. According to the report at the time of his death, Brunner's body was washed according to Islamic rites. Brunner was buried in secret, at night in the Al-Affif cemetery in Damascus. Serge Klarsfeld called the report "highly credible". In March 2021, the district court in Vienna-Döbling officially declared him dead.
Numerous sources have said that Brunner was the inspiration for Hans Landa, the Austrian SS officer nicknamed "the Jew Hunter" in the 2009 Quentin Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds, though Tarantino has not confirmed this.Stilwell, Blake. The 10 Best War Movie Villains. Military.com. Retrieved on 27, May 2025 Inglourious Basterds Movie (PDF). Awesome Stories. Retrieved July 24, 2023Howells-Mead, Mark. The evil of Hans Landa. Retrieved on 24 July, 2023Kickassfacts. 24 Interesting Facts About Inglourious Basterds. Retrieved on 28 May, 2025
Notes
Death
On 30 November 2014, the Simon Wiesenthal Center reported receiving credible information that Brunner had died in Syria in 2010. He would have been 97 or 98 years old. Partly due to the ongoing Syrian civil war, the exact date and place of death were unknown.
In popular culture
Brunner is portrayed by in the 2023 political thriller series Bonn – Alte Freunde, neue Feinde. The series was directed and co-written by Claudia Garde.
Sources
Categories: 1912 Births, 2001 Deaths, Antisemitism In Austria, Antisemitism In Syria, Austrian Amputees, Austrian Blind People, Austrian Expatriates In Syria, Austrian Legion Personnel, Austrian Mass Murderers, Austrian Nazis Convicted Of War Crimes, Austrian Neo-nazis, Austrian People Convicted Of Crimes Against Humanity, Austrian People Of Hungarian Descent, Drancy Internment Camp, Fugitives Wanted By France, Fugitives Wanted By Germany, Fugitives Wanted On Crimes Against Humanity Charges, Fugitives Wanted On War Crimes Charges, Gestapo Personnel, Holocaust Perpetrators In Austria, Holocaust Perpetrators In France, Holocaust Perpetrators In Greece, Holocaust Perpetrators In Slovakia, Hungarian-german People, Nazi Concentration Camp Commandants, Nazi Fugitives, Nazi Party Officials, People From Jennersdorf District, Ss-hauptsturmführer, The Holocaust In Thessaloniki, Explosion Survivors, Nazis Sentenced To Death In Absentia By France
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