Top wanted Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner 'almost certainly' died in Syria: Nazi ...

Posted December 02, 2014 06:56:56

A Nazi war criminal who topped most wanted lists for his part in the Holocaust is 'almost certain' to have died in Syria four years ago, a Nazi-hunting group says.

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Jerusalem office, said a German intelligence officer had said Alois Brunner died four years ago in Damascus, where he had fled seeking refuge decades ago.

The Wiesenthal Centre 'could not confirm the information' for certain, he stressed.

But given the 1912 birth year of Brunner, the unrepentant 'right-hand man' of leading Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann, he was in any case unlikely to be alive.

Brunner topped the Simon Wiesenthal list of wanted Nazis for deporting tens of thousands of Jews to death camps during World War II, although he was removed from the list this year due to his age and almost certain death, Mr Zuroff said.

After the war Brunner escaped detection by taking on a false identity and worked for two years for the US occupying forces in Germany, before fleeing to Egypt in 1954 and from there to Syria, where he was protected by successive regimes.

He was pursued by Nazi hunters and survived assassination attempts allegedly carried out by Israel's secret intelligence service, the Mossad.

'In Brunner's case, he got two letter bombs. He lost three fingers, he lost an eye, so I'm sure that didn't contribute to his health,' Mr Zuroff said, in a veiled allusion to the Mossad.

French investigators trying to call Brunner to account for crimes committed during the occupation of their country, lost track of him in 1992 in Damascus, where he had been living under an assumed identity.

'He was responsible for the deportation to the death camps of 128,500 Jews,' Mr Zuroff said.

Those deported included 47,000 from Austria, 44,000 from Greece, 23,500 from France and 14,000 from Slovakia.

'He was a fanatic anti-Semite, a sadist and a person who was totally dedicated to the mass-murder of European Jewry,' Mr Zuroff said.

AFP

Topics:world-war-2, unrest-conflict-and-war, law-crime-and-justice, germany, austria, syrian-arab-republic