Nazi war criminal reportedly died in Syrian dungeon
A Nazi war criminal, believed responsible for the deaths of 130,000 European Jews during the second World War, died in a dungeon cell near the presidential palace in Damascus in late 2001 at the age of 89, the French quarterly review XXI revealed in its winter issue this week.
Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the “Final Solution,” wrote in his memoirs that Alois Brunner “was my best man”. Brunner organised the deportation of 56,000 Jews from Vienna, 43,000 from Salonica, 14,000 from Slovakia and 23,500 from France to Auschwitz.
Brunner, who was originally from Austria, was twice convicted of war crimes in absentia in Paris, in 1954 and in March 2001. As XXI’s investigation makes clear, he was still alive when his second trial took place. His fate had remained a mystery.
Though Brunner’s presence in Damascus was for decades an open secret, he was protected and then imprisoned, by the late dictator Hafez al-Assad and his son, Bashar al-Assad. The Nazi hunters Simon Wiesenthal, who died in 2005, and Serge Klarsfeld, now 81, led futile searches for him.
Klarsfeld was a boy when Brunner came to his family’s apartment in Nice in September 1943. While he, his mother and sister hid, they heard Brunner arrest their father and husband, who died at Auschwitz.
When a journalist from XXI told Klarsfeld of its investigation, the first question he asked was whether Brunner had suffered.
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