World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseAlois Brunner was born in Nádkút, Vas, Austria-Hungary (now Rohrbrunn, Burgenland, Austria). During the Nazi regime in Germany, he was a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS), holding the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer. He was initially placed in charge of transports of Jews being deported to the east, then, between Jun 1943 and Aug 1944, was the commandant of Drancy Concentration Camp near Paris, France. In early 1944, he was sent by Adolf Eichmann to Slovakia to oversee the deportation of Slovakian Jews, then in early 1945 he was placed in charge of the deportation of Austrian Jews in Vienna. After the war, his identity was mixed up with another SS member, Anton Brunner, thus he was given the opportunity to hide before Allied authorities realized the mistake. In 1954, he was sentenced to death in France in absentia. He remained in Germany until 1954, and then, using a fake Red Cross passport, fled to Rome, Italy. From there, he went to Egypt, where he became a weapons dealer. Later, he went to Syria under the pseudonym of Dr. Georg Fischer where he was suspected of being in the service of the Syrian government, something the Syrian government denied. He was reportedly an advisor to the Syrian government on methods to suppress, at times with violence, unwanted sectors of the population. He was also reportedly in charge of arming and training rebel factions outside of Syria. In 1961, Mossad (Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations) agents sent him a letter bomb, which failed to kill him but did blind him in one eye. In 1980, Mossad attempted another letter bomb, this time taking out several of his fingers on the left hand, but still failed to kill him. In Aug 1987, the Interpol put his name on the "red notice" as a wanted person, and in 1995 German prosecutors in Cologne and Franfurt posted a €333,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. He was rumored to have died in 1996 in Damascus, Syria, but his death was not confirmed. On 2 Mar 2001, a French court found him guilty in absentia of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to life imprisonment. In Jul 2007, the Austrian Justice Ministry offered a €50,000 reward for information leading to his arrest and extradition to Austria. In 2010, a source deemed reliable informed the Simon Wiesenthal Center that Brunner had passed away to natural causes in Syria, and Brunner's name was taken off of the fugitive list.

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Alois Brunner Timeline