39 Facts About Alois Brunner

Alois Brunner was an Austrian officer who held the rank of during World War II.

Alois Brunner was known as Final Solution architect Adolf Eichmann's right-hand man.

Alois Brunner was responsible for sending over 100,000 European Jews from Austria, Greece, France and Slovakia to ghettos and concentration camps in eastern Europe.

Alois Brunner 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.

In Syria, Alois 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.

Alois 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 November 2014, the Simon Wiesenthal Center reported that Alois Brunner had died in Syria in 2010, and that he was buried somewhere in Damascus.

Alois Brunner was born on 8 April 1912 in the town of Vas, Austria-Hungary, the son of Joseph Brunner and Ann Kruise.

Alois Brunner joined the Nazi Party at the age of sixteen and the Sturmabteilung a year later.

In 1933, Alois Brunner moved to Germany where he joined the Nazi paramilitary group Austrian Legion.

Over time Alois Brunner supervised the deportation of 56,000 Austrian Jews.

Alois Brunner held the rank of SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer when he organized deportations to Nazi concentration camps from Vichy France and Slovakia.

Alois Brunner was commander of a train of Jews deported from Vienna to Riga in February 1942.

En route, Alois Brunner shot and killed Jewish financier Siegmund Bosel, who, although ill, had been hauled out of a Vienna hospital and placed on the train.

Alois Brunner was personally sent by Eichmann in 1944 to Slovakia to oversee the deportation of Jews.

Alois Brunner personally conducted interrogations of new prisoners, and survivors of the camp have claimed that his office was covered in bloodstains and bullet holes.

Alois Brunner introduced a rigid system of categorization to control the inmates using information about their race and ethnicity derived from the interrogations.

Alois Brunner deliberately misled prisoners about the living standards of their destinations at the extermination camps in the General Government, including Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Alois Brunner 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.

Alois Brunner continued deportations and arrests even as the Allies and the Free French Forces advanced towards Paris.

Alois 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 Andre Kohn, and other German military personnel.

Alois Brunner's intention was to use the deportees as potential hostages.

Alois Brunner had 23,500 Jews of all ages deported from France to the concentration camps.

The identity of Alois Brunner was apparently mixed up with that of another SS member with the same surname, Anton Alois Brunner, who was executed for war crimes.

Alois Brunner 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.

However, East Germany, led by Erich Honecker, negotiated with Syria in the late 1980s to have Alois Brunner extradited and arrested in Berlin.

In December 1999, unconfirmed reports surfaced that Alois Brunner had died in 1996 and been buried in a Damascus cemetery.

In 1961 and 1980, letter bombs were sent to Alois Brunner while he was a resident in Syria.

The article, excerpted from Bergman's book Rise and Kill First, says that Alois Brunner was located by Israeli spy Eli Cohen.

Alois Brunner was twice sentenced to death in absentia in the 1950s; one of those convictions was in France in 1954.

On 2 March 2001, Alois Brunner was found guilty in absentia by a French court for crimes against humanity, including the arrest and deportation of 345 orphans from the Paris region and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

In March 2009, the Simon Wiesenthal Center acknowledged the "slim" possibility of Alois Brunner still being alive.

Alois Brunner was last seen in 2001 in Syria, whose government had long rebuffed international efforts to locate or apprehend him, but was presumed dead as of 2012.

On 30 November 2014, the Simon Wiesenthal Center reported receiving credible information that Alois Brunner had died in Syria in 2010.

The new evidence revealed that Alois 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 Alois Brunner's grave was unknowable.

Three former security guards in charge of the protection of Alois 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.

Alois Brunner was buried in secret, at night in the Al-Affif cemetery in Damascus.

Some sources have said that Alois 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.