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Concept
Alois Brunner
Summary
Alois Brunner (8 April 1912 – December 2001) was an Austrian officer who held the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) during World War II. Brunner played a significant role in the implementation of the Holocaust through rounding up and deporting Jews in occupied Austria, Greece, Macedonia, France, and Slovakia. He was known as Final Solution architect Adolf Eichmann's right-hand man.
Brunner was responsible for sending over 100,000 European Jews from Austria, Greece, France and Slovakia to ghettos and concentration camps in eastern Europe. At the start of the war, he oversaw the deportation of 47,000 Austrian Jews to camps. In Greece, 43,000 Jews were deported in two months while he was stationed in Thessaloniki. He then became commander of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris from June 1943 to August 1944, during which nearly 24,000 men, women and children were sent to the gas chambers. His last assignment involved the destruction of the Jewish community of Slovakia.
After some narrow escapes from the Allies in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Brunner managed to elude capture and fled West Germany in 1954, first for Egypt, then Syria, where he remained until his death. He was the object of many manhunts, investigations, and assassination attempts over the years by different groups, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Klarsfelds and Mossad. He was condemned to death in absentia in France in 1954 for crimes against humanity, later commuted to life imprisonment in absentia in 2001. He lost an eye and then the fingers of his left hand as a result of letter bombs sent to him in 1961 and 1980, reportedly by Israeli intelligence. The Syrian government under Hafez al-Assad came close to extraditing him to East Germany before this plan was halted by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Brunner escaped all attempts to capture or kill him and was unrepentant about his activities.
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