THE STORY OF ALOIS BRUNNER

 Alois Brunner, born in 1912 in Nadkut (then in Hungary), was an SS officer who was described by Adolf Eichmann as his ‘best man’. He had no qualms about using ‘Gas-Vans’ on a massive scale, one of the most atrocious systems for the mass extermination of Jews before the construction of gas chambers in concentration camps. As head of the Drancy internment camp, he was found guilty of the deportation to extermination camps of over 130,000 Jews rounded up in occupied France. The Gas-Vans were trucks with a sealed body where prisoners were killed with carbon monoxide produced by the exhaust fumes of the vehicle which was piped inside the vehicle itself. Later, the insecticide gas Zyklon B was used. After the war, Brunner managed to escape the Nuremberg trials, under the false identity of Georg Fischer, thanks to a false passport from the Red Cross. Once he reached Egypt in 1953, he disappeared without a trace. It was later discovered that he died in 2010, at the age of 98, while a prisoner in Syria, the country that had given him refuge since the 1960s. The end of Brunner was revealed by the French magazine Revue XXI, which managed to reconstruct the Nazi's time in hiding. After 1953, he lent himself to the cause of the Algerian National Liberation Front, finding weapons to fight French colonial rule and thus entering the blacklist of the French secret services as well as of the Israelis who attempted on his life with two parcel bombs in 1961. In the explosions, he lost an eye and four fingers on his left hand but managed to survive.

Sentenced to death in absentia by France, he fled to Damascus where, under the false identity of Abu Hussein, he remained for decades under the protection of the Syrian regime of Hafez el-Assad. Here he trained the Syrian secret services in the torture techniques he had honed in the Second World War. The protection of the Assad regime turned into imprisonment when Brunner became a potential bargaining chip in exchange for trade agreements and a sum of money offered by the German Democratic Republic. In fact, a document found in the Stasi archives after the fall of the Berlin Wall states that 'Brunner, Alois, will probably be extradited from Syria to the GDR'. According to three former members of the Syrian secret services, following this negotiation Brunner was segregated in the cellar of a building in the diplomatic quarter of Damascus pending ratification of the agreement. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the GDR, contact and any possibility of extradition ceased. Alois Brunner, who never renounced National Socialism and his hatred of the Jews, was destined to spend the rest of his life as if under ‘house arrest’ in that basement since that closed door never opened again. He aged until he slowly wore himself out with frequent screams and desperate cries heard by his jailers in the last years of his life. After his death he was buried in secret in the Al-Affif cemetery in Damascus.