Justice Evaded

"He was a notorious anti-Semite, sadist, fanatic Nazi. The only known interview we have with him was to a German news magazine 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."
"The significance is only that one very prime target can no longer be brought to justice. And that's very sad, because it just underlines the failure of the world community to see to it that the primary movers and shakers of the Final Solution were forced to pay for their crimes."
Efraim Zuroff, director, Simon Wiesenthal Centre Israel office

• Jewish prisoners were treated like cattle; packed tightly into cattle trucks and locked inside for days as the trains travelled to camps across Europe.  © 2011 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Alois Brunner was born in Austria, just like Adolf Hitler. In 1931 he joined the Nazi party and the year before the outbreak of the Second World War he joined the SS (Schutz Staffeinel -- Nazi storm troopers). He distinguished himself by leading the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna in 1939-43, information reflected by the Holocaust museum and memorial of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

In July 1943 he assumed command of the Drancy detention camp in the northeastern suburb of Paris: "the inmates' condition deteriorated rapidly, and deportations to Auschwitz were stepped up." He saw to it personally that 47,000 Jews were deported from Austria, 44,000 from Greece, 23,500 from France, and 14,000 from Slovakia. He was a dedicated servant to the Third Reich.

When the war was over he used a fake Red Cross passport in 1954 to travel to Rome and from there across the Mediterranean to Egypt, working there as a weapons dealer. Until he crossed into Syria and became part of the government apparatus, known there as Dr. Georg Fischer. Foreigners had "spoken with him and occasionally photographed him" at his home at 7 Rue Haddad, according to A.M. Rosenthal, former executive editor of The New York Times, in 1991.

He was an adviser to Hafez al-Assad, the current president Bashar's father. With his vast experience as a tormentor and facilitator of a massive Jew-killing machine, he was in an unique position to lavish his knowledge upon the regime's fixation on torture and repression techniques. Just as the current president of Syria speaks continually of security and terrorism so too did his father, and Dr. Georg Fischer's knowledge was of immeasurable value to the Syrian Baathist regime.

The issue of security and terrorism apparently also encompassed "the mistreatment of the Syrian Jewish community", at which Alois Brunner/Georg Fischer excelled. Known as Adolf Eichmann's 'right-hand man', he had a reputation to uphold, and uphold it he did. He had been tried in absentia and sentenced to death by France in 1954, but in Syria he was perfectly safe, his expertise of immense value, according him respect and position.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre had been informed some four years ago that Alois Brunner had died of natural causes. The information provided by a reputable German intelligence official experienced in the Middle East situation. Unfortunately the 'situation' was such that because of the Syrian civil war "we were never able to confirm it forensically", explained Mr. Zuroff with regret.