Alois Brunner was Adolf Eichmann’s principal deputy in the deportation operations and the SS officer who personally commanded the deportation of around 130,000 Jews from Austria, Greece, France and Slovakia between 1939 and 1945. He escaped to Syria in 1954, lived in Damascus under the protection of successive Syrian governments for the next forty-seven years, and is believed to have died there in 2001 or 2002. He was never tried.
Vienna, 1939 to 1942
Brunner was Eichmann’s deputy at the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna from 1939, then Eichmann’s successor when Eichmann moved to Berlin in October 1939. From the Vienna office Brunner ran the deportation of around 47,000 Austrian Jews. The operation included the systematic confiscation of Jewish property, the registration of the remaining Jewish population, the assembly of deportees at the Aspangbahnhof railway station, and the dispatch of trains to the Lódź ghetto, the Theresienstadt transit camp, and from 1942 directly to the killing sites in occupied Poland.
Drancy, 1943 to 1944
Brunner was sent to France in June 1943 to take over the Drancy transit camp from the French police. He commanded Drancy from June 1943 until August 1944. Around 24,000 French and foreign Jews held in France were deported through Drancy to Auschwitz under his command. He instituted procedural changes that significantly increased the deportation rate. He insisted on the inclusion of categories the Vichy authorities had previously been unwilling to deport, including French citizens and the families of French POWs. He was personally involved in the round-ups in Marseille, Nice and elsewhere, including the major round-ups of September 1943 in Nice when the Italian protective regime there collapsed.
Slovakia, 1944
Brunner was transferred to Slovakia in September 1944 to take charge of the deportation of the remaining 14,000 Slovak Jews following the German occupation of Slovakia after the Slovak National Uprising. He commanded the round-ups, the transit camps, and the deportation trains to Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen. The operation killed around 12,000 Slovak Jews. The remaining Slovak Jewish community at the moment of liberation was around 25,000 people, drawn primarily from those who had hidden, fled to Hungary, or joined partisan units during the uprising.
The personal style
Brunner was, even by Eichmann’s standards, a personally brutal officer. Survivors of Drancy and Vienna describe a man who personally beat and humiliated Jewish prisoners, who ordered killings on apparent personal whim, and who took particular pleasure in the deportation of children. The post-war Israeli historian Yad Vashem files contain extensive survivor testimony from each of his postings consistent on these points. He was, in his own framing, an enthusiast for the work in a way that Eichmann himself, the bureaucratic manager, was not.
The escape and Damascus
Brunner escaped from American custody in 1947 and worked under various false names in West Germany for several years before reaching Syria in 1954 via the Catholic ratline. He lived in Damascus from 1954 onwards under the name Georg Fischer. He worked as an adviser to Syrian intelligence on interrogation techniques and reportedly trained Syrian and Iranian operatives. The Syrian government refused all extradition requests from West Germany, France and Austria over the next forty years.
Mossad agents attempted to assassinate Brunner with letter bombs in 1961 and 1980. The 1961 attempt blinded him in one eye and the 1980 attempt cost him several fingers of his left hand and damaged his other eye. He survived both. The Syrian government tightened his protection after each attempt.
The German weekly Der Spiegel located Brunner repeatedly through the 1980s and conducted phone interviews with him in 1985 and 1987. He told Der Spiegel that he had no regrets, that the Jews deserved what they had got, and that his only mistake had been not to have killed more of them. The transcripts are one of the most direct surviving statements by a senior perpetrator about his work and his post-war views.
The death
Brunner is believed to have died in Damascus in 2001 or 2002. The exact date is uncertain. The German federal prosecutor’s office formally closed his file in 2014 on the assumption that he had died. The Syrian government has never confirmed his death. His body, if any remained, has never been recovered. He had lived for forty-seven years in Damascus under Syrian protection. He had been the most senior surviving Holocaust perpetrator never to face trial. He died at around 88 or 89, having outlived the Mossad agents who had bombed him, the German prosecutors who had pursued him, and most of the surviving Jewish witnesses to his work.
What he was
Brunner is the case of the deportation specialist who outlived the system he had served and who was protected by a state that had no interest in surrendering him. He was Eichmann’s most operationally productive subordinate. He had personally commanded the deportation of around 130,000 people. He had spent the rest of his life in comfortable obscurity in Damascus, advising Syrian intelligence, talking to journalists when it suited him, surviving two assassination attempts, and dying in his bed at the end of the twentieth century. The Holocaust required, and got, men of his particular kind. The post-war world was unable to deal with the survivors of that group as a class.
See also
Sources
- Mary Felstiner, Alois Brunner: Eichmann’s Best Tool, Yad Vashem, 1986
- Hans Felix Steiner, Im Auftrag des Reiches: Alois Brunner und die Wiener Zentralstelle, Picus, 1996
- Der Spiegel interviews with Brunner, 1985 and 1987
- Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Memorial to the Jews Deported from France, Klarsfeld Foundation, 1983
- USHMM: Alois Brunner