Top Nazi Alois Brunner Died in Syria 4 Years Ago: Report

MOSCOW, December 1 (Sputnik) — Alois Brunner, one of the world’s most wanted Nazis, allegedly died in Syria four years ago, according to a statement by a chief investigator.

 

The most prominent Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, announced today that Brunner, who served as top lieutenant to Adolf Eichmann during the National-Socialist rule in Germany, must have died roughly four years ago in Syria, where he was laying low evading justice and possibly working for the Assad government.

According to Zuroff, Alois Brunner either directly ordered or was involved in the deportations of 128,500 Jewish people from Austria, Greece, Slovakia and France to concentration camps where most of them died. Being an aide to Eichmann, who is considered a mastermind of the Holocaust, SS captain Brunner was also responsible for mass murders of Jews in France and Northern Italy. After the WWII he fled to Syria, living under the alias of Georg Fischer, according to BBC News report. Successive Syrian governments harbored him, denying the fact before the international community.

Brunner, now, would-be 102 years old, was sentenced to death in France in 1954. The Israeli secret service Mossad then twice attempted at assassinating him, in 1961 and 1980, to no success. His patron Eichmann was captured and killed in Israel in 1962.

“He was a notorious anti-Semite, sadist, fanatic Nazi,” Zuroff said Monday as quoted by the NY Times. “The only known interview we have with him was to a German newsmagazine in 1985, in which he was asked if he had any regrets, and he said, ‘My only regret is I didn’t murder more Jews.’ ”

Zuroff also said that there is new evidence, indicating that Brunner died and was buried in Damascus at some point in 2010. As for Brunner’s consultative collaborations with the Assad regime, Zuroff points out that he is responsible for “the mistreatment of the Syrian Jewish community.”