Alois Brunner

"All of the Jews deserved to die because they were the Devil's agents and human garbage. I have no regrets and would do it again."

- Alois Brunner on his reasons for the killings Alois Brunner (1912-2010) was an assistant to Adolf Eichmann and a Holocaust perpetrator.

Brunner joined the Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler in 1931, the SA under Ernst Röhm in 1932 and the SS and Central Office for Jewish Emigration (COJE) in 1938. He became director in 1939, and met Eichmann while working in this position. Together, they worked on the Nisko plan (an attempt to relocate all Jews to a ghetto in Nisko) but when this failed Brunner began working on deporting Jews to concentration camps. He was also made commander of a train taking captured Jews from Vienna to Riga on one occasion, resulting in an incident where Brunner, after discovering that passenger Siegmund Bosel had been a financier, accused him of being a profiteer, chained him to a platform and shot him.

In 1943, Brunner became commandant of Drancy internment camp, a position he used to deport a further 129,000 Jews to Stutthof, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz Birkenau, Sachsenhausen and Theresienstadt. As commandant, Brunner instituted torture for the most minor infractions, and survivors claim that he would regularly kill prisoners in his office. Brunner would also use racial categorisation to control the camp, was known to mislead inmates about living standards at the camps they were going to be sent to, and enforced the round-up and deportation of Jews in Vichy France.

In 1945, Brunner managed to escape the fall of the Nazi regime after SS officer and executed war criminal Anton Brunner was arrested in his place and staff of a prison camp failed to identify him due to the absence of any identifying features (this was also how Josef Mengele escaped). The US government later gave him a false identity, as they did with many Nazis, and he began working in the US army. He also went to West Berlin, fled to Italy in 1954, escaped again, this time to Egypt, and ended up hiding in Syria. East Germany entered negotiations to extradite Brunner from Syria, however the fall of the Berlin wall destroyed the East German government and halted the plan.

Sightings of Brunner were reported from the 1990s to 2001. The German intelligence service destroyed their files on him in 2011, Mossad were eventually reported to have attempted to kill him by sending him letter bombs which maimed him, a warrant was put out for his arrest after a court sentenced him to death in absentia, and a guard known only as "Omar" came forward in 2017 with the truth about Brunner's fate. He stated that Brunner had been placed under house arrest in his Syrian apartment in 1989 after Mossad maimed him, and he was imprisoned in a basement after insulting the Syrian intelligence service. Brunner remained in the basement in inhumane conditions until his death in 2010 during the rule of Bashar al-Assad.