Alois Brunner

Who is Alois Brunner?

Alois Brunner was an Austrian Schutzstaffel officer. Brunner is wanted for war crimes, and was Adolf Eichmann's assistant. Eichmann referred to Brunner as his "best man". Brunner is held responsible for sending at least 140,000 European Jews to the gas chambers. He was commander of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris from June 1943 to August 1944, from which nearly 24,000 people were deported. He was condemned to death in absentia in France in 1954 for crimes against humanity. In 1961 and in 1980, Brunner lost, respectively, an eye and the fingers of his left hand, as a result of letter bombs sent to him by the Israeli Mossad.

In 2003, British newspaper the Guardian described him as "the world's highest-ranking Nazi fugitive believed still alive". Brunner was last reported to be living in 2001 in Syria, whose government had long rebuffed, or became distracted from, international efforts to locate or apprehend him, but is presumed dead as of 2012. The government of Syria under Hafez el-Assad was close to extraditing Alois Brunner to East Germany, before this plan was halted by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.