Alois Brunner

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Alois Brunner (born April 8, 1912 in Nádkút , Vas County , Hungary , Austria-Hungary , today Rohrbrunn , Burgenland , Austria ; † 2001, 2009 or 2010 in Damascus , Syria ) was an SS-Hauptsturmführer . He was one of the most important collaborators of Adolf Eichmann in the extermination of the European Jews , in Nazi jargon " final solution of the Jewish question ". As head of the SS special commandos set up for this purpose , Brunner was jointly responsible for the deportation of 128,500 Jews from Vienna , Berlin , Greece , France and Slovakia to the German concentration and extermination camps between 1939 and 1945 . In the literature, the abbreviation Brunner I is sometimes used for him , in contrast to Anton Brunner (Brunner II) .

Until 1954 Brunner lived under a false name in Germany. He was sentenced to death twice in absentia by French military courts in 1954. Shortly before his exposure, he set off with the help of others to Damascus, where he lived until his death. Syria's government covered his stay and always denied it. Brunner never had to answer before a German court. There were repeated indications that German secret services would protect him. In 2001 he was again sentenced to life imprisonment in France, and in 2007 a reward of 50,000 euros was offered in Austria for information about his investigation and capture .

He lost an eye and a few fingers in two letter bomb attacks in 1961 and 1980. In interviews in the mid-1980s, Brunner indulged in anti-Semitic hate speech and was proud of his actions. His death was rumored several times in the 1990s; In contrast, a sighting was rumored in 2001. Exact information about his death is so far unknown.

Life

Adolescent years and Nazi activity until 1938

Brunner was born in German West Hungary as the son of the farmer Josef Brunner. From 1918 to 1927 he attended primary and secondary school and then completed a commercial apprenticeship in Fürstenfeld . In May 1931, the then 19-year-old joined the NSDAP in Fürstenfeld and about six months later also the SA . His entry into the SA cost him, as he later stated in a résumé, in 1932 his job with the merchant in Fürstenfeld. After attending a three-month private “crime course” in Graz in 1932 , from the beginning of 1933 he was “district manager” of a Graz loan association in Hartberg for two months . After that, between May and September 1933, he was the leaseholder of the Hartberger "Kaffeerestaurants Wien", whereby according to his statements the paternal inheritance and thus his "entire property [...] was lost".

In September 1933 Brunner left for the German Reich and registered with the Austrian Legion there . As a reason for leaving Austria, he stated in a Nazi personnel questionnaire in 1938 that he had acted on the orders of his district leader because he wanted to take up a post in Switzerland. He stayed with the Austrian Legion until June 1938 and was promoted to SA Obertruppführer (comparable to the rank of sergeant major in the Wehrmacht ) in the news storm during this time . After the so-called Anschluss in 1938, he returned to Austria and in the summer of 1938 was for a short time "Branch Manager" of the Eisenstadt and Oberpullendorf district farms at the Reichsnährstand in Eisenstadt. In the course of this year he too must have recognized the dwindling influence of the SA against the SS in the internal Nazi struggles for power and positions; This is likely to have been the main reason for his, as he stated in his résumé, “voluntarily” reporting to the SS.

In the Eichmann lecture (1938–1945)

In November 1938 Brunner was assigned to the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna. When he took up this new position, the discontinuity in Brunner's life came to an end. First as an employee of Eichmann, then from 1941 as head of the central office , Brunner organized the deportation of Viennese Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in the east. On October 9, 1942, he reported that Vienna was “ free of Jews ” , which meant that 180,000 Viennese had been forced to leave their homeland or had already been sent to certain death.

From October 1942 to January 1943 he worked in the Eichmann department in Berlin and took care of the deportation of 56,000 Berlin Jews.

In February 1943 he, Dieter Wisliceny and Alfred Slawik were transferred. Sent by Eichmann to Greece, which was occupied after the Balkan campaign (1941) , they organized the transport of 50,000 Jews from Salonika to the death camps as members of the "Special Command of the Security Police for Jewish Affairs Saloniki-Aegean" .

In addition to his manhunt, he always found time to enrich himself with the belongings of the persecuted. The systematic robbery of apartments, furniture and works of art accompanied his work from beginning to end. As early as 1938 he and his fiancée moved into a confiscated villa in the noble district of Döbling in Vienna .

His next assignment took place in Paris : in July 1943, he became head of a special commando of the Gestapo in a suburb of Paris, in the transit and assembly camp at Drancy . 22 transports of Jewish people went to Auschwitz under Brunner's command . He interrogated the newly arrived, learned the names of other relatives of the victims and arranged for the arrest of the entire families. He was the main person in charge of the SS and organized the "supplies" for the extermination camps. Brunner headed the hunting detachments that tracked down Jews living in hiding.

With the support of the Vichy regime , Brunner continued his systematic persecution of Jews in the unoccupied southern France in autumn 1943 . A reward of 1,000 francs was offered per Jew . Among other things, "Jewish clerk" and SS-Obersturmführer Heinz Röthke were also involved here. The arrests mostly took place at night, and torture and other violence were used to extort other names.

While the Wehrmacht was already on its withdrawal from France, Brunner had 1,327 Jewish children arrested and deported in Paris from July 20 to 24, 1944. When Brunner left Paris in August 1944, he had 23,500 Jews of all ages deported from France to the death camps. From September 1944 to February 1945 he was responsible for the smashing of the Jewish underground movement in Slovakia and headed the Sereď concentration camp , from where he had 12,000 people deported to Auschwitz for extermination.

It is also suspected that Brunner personally shot Siegmund Bosel while transporting prisoners to Riga .

Activity after 1945

Alois Brunner fled from Linz to Munich and worked under a false name as a truck driver for the US occupation forces .

From 1947 Brunner worked in the Carl Funke colliery in Essen . When he was about to be elected to the works council, his identity threatened to be exposed. Nevertheless, Alois Brunner lived as "Alois Schmaldienst" in Essen until 1954 and was even registered with the police. A procedure “because of incorrect naming” was initiated.

The most prominent escape helper of Brunner was Reinhard Gehlen , the former head of the " Foreign Army East Department " (Eastern espionage) of the Wehrmacht and later head of the BND . Whether Rudolf Vogel , a former member of the propaganda squadron in Saloniki and later a member of the Bundestag for the CDU , was an escape helper is controversial.

Another escape helper was Georg Fischer, a former SS comrade from his time in Paris. Brunner received his passport from him in the spring of 1954 and was named Dr. Georg Fischer to Syria . There, on behalf of Reinhard Gehlen, Brunner became an intelligence expert for this region of the Middle East .

Alois Brunner worked for a short time in Syria as a representative for the Dortmunder Actien brewery . There he had close business contacts with Franz Rademacher , the former Jewish advisor at the Foreign Office .

In 1960 the Syrian secret police interrogated Brunner. Through this contact he became a kind of "advisor on Jewish issues" to the Syrian secret service.

During the Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961 , Brunner Eichmann's lawyer Robert Servatius offered his help in a letter to Germany: "I would be happy if I could help to devalue the one-sided burdens of his opponents." Servatius sent a confidante to Brunner , but left his testimony unused during the trial.

Two letter bomb attacks were carried out on Alois Brunner. The first attack in 1961 cost him an eye. In July 1980, Alois Brunner, alias Georg Fischer, received mail in Damascus from the “Friends of Medicinal Herbs Association” from Austria: The letter bomb tore up four fingers on his left hand. No letters of confession followed the attacks. In 2017, documents were published in Israel proving that Mossad agents were the senders.

Inquiries made by the Austrian government about Brunner in the 1970s were dismissed by the authorities, stating that the person sought had not been in Syria. In reality, “Dr. Georg Fischer “unmolested in Damascus. He lived so little secret that it was easily possible to reach him by phone - even from abroad.

On October 10, 1985, Fischer, alias Brunner, gave an interview to Bunte magazine , in which he emphasized: "Israel will never get me." The interview was so full of murderous anti-Semitic attacks that the magazine only published parts of it. The journalist who interviewed Brunner reported a few years later that Brunner was still proud of his involvement in getting rid of this - so literally - "filth". By that he meant the Jews whom he had deported. He was satisfied with his life and would, if there was the opportunity, do it all over again. Only one thing annoys him: that Jews still lived in Europe.

In 1987 the Krone journalist Kurt Seinitz conducted an interview with Brunner in Damascus, in which he said: “Young friend, let me send my regards to beautiful Vienna and be glad that I made it free of Jews for you.” Seinitz reported, Brunner was the most disgusting person he had ever met.

In 1992 the Federal Criminal Police Office demanded the photos from the journalist who interviewed Alois Brunner in 1985 and after a long time came to the conclusion that "they are probably photos of Alois Brunner". Several extradition requests from Germany and other countries as well as an Interpol arrest warrant and activities of the Simon Wiesenthal Center were unsuccessful.

Another contact with Brunner is recorded from 1993. He was recognized by tourists in a café, introduced himself by his old name and chatted lively. Then he went with his sheepdog and drove to his new domicile, a guest house of Hafiz al-Assad in the mountains near Damascus. In 1995, German prosecutors offered a reward of $ 333,000 for information about the arrest of Brunner.

In December 1999 rumors surfaced that Brunner had died in 1996. In contrast, German journalists stated that they had found Brunner alive in the Meridian Hotel in Damascus, where he is now based. On March 2, 2001, Brunner was sentenced in absentia by a French court to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity .

The Austrian Justice Minister Maria Berger offered a reward of 50,000 euros for the first time in Austria in 2007 for information that led to the investigation, arrest and conviction of Brunner. There is an arrest warrant against Brunner from the Regional Court for Criminal Matters in Vienna.

After the suspicion persisted for years that Brunner was a BND resident in Damascus, the BND internal research and working group “History of the BND” found out in 2011 that a total of 253 personal files had been destroyed in 1996 and 2007.

In August 2011 it became known from Stasi files that the GDR and Syria had negotiated an extradition of Brunner to the GDR on the initiative of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld at the end of the 1980s. How likely an extradition was at the time and how seriously the GDR pursued this is still a controversial issue.

According to an APA report dated November 30, 2014, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Brunner died in Damascus in 2009 or 2010. For the time being, the Austrian Ministry of Justice has left Brunner on the list of people drawn up in 2007, for whom a reward of 50,000 euros was offered for clues leading to the seizure.

According to a report in the French magazine XXI from January 2017, which is based on reports from Syrian secret service employees , Brunner is said to have lived under house arrest-like conditions in the diplomatic quarter of Damascus from 1989 . At the end of the 1990s, for "security reasons", he moved to a basement room in the house, which he then never left. According to the report, Brunner died in 2001 and was secretly buried in the Al Affif cemetery according to Muslim custom. Serge Klarsfeld rated the report as very credible.

Refusal to inspect files by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution

From 2012, a German journalist tried by inspecting the files held by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to gain knowledge of why Brunner was able to evade his arrest and trial for life and which accomplices and which official channels helped him in 1954 deposed from Germany to Damascus. Only after the journalist had filed a lawsuit against action did the BfV reject the application on the grounds that it only had documents that had been created after 1984 and were therefore subject to the 30-year archival protection period. The Cologne Administrative Court sentenced on 25 July 2013, the BFV for a reassessment of the request because had to take on a possible shortening of the term of a discretionary decision. The approval of the appeal requested by the BfV against the first-instance ruling was granted by the Higher Administrative Court of North Rhine-Westphalia on October 10, 2017 , but the appeal was only partially granted with a ruling of July 5, 2018. A discretionary decision is only permissible and necessary when it comes to inspecting documents that were filed more than 30 years ago. Contrary to the opinion of the BfV, the appellate court ruled that a document is the individual document or document contained in a file and a process in the BfV's business area is a sub-unit of the overall file, not the overall file as a whole. The BfV lodged the approved revision. The then BfV President Hans-Georg Maaßen threatened to try to change the Federal Archives Act , if necessary : “If the judgment of the OVG Münster in the Brunner case is confirmed by the Federal Administrative Court , we will ensure that the (Federal Archives) Act is changed. ”MPs from the SPD and FDP criticized Maaßen's disrespect for freedom of the press and justice. The media policy spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group, Martin Rabanus , declared: "The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution must protect our democracy, not Nazis."

In July 2018, survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and the International Auschwitz Committee also demanded the disclosure of all files relating to the Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner in Germany. In December 2019, the Federal Administrative Court rejected the appeal and confirmed the view of the Higher Administrative Court.

literature

Documentaries

  • File B. - Alois Brunner: The Story of a Mass Murderer (1998)
  • Nazis in the BND - new service and old comrades ; Film by Christine Rütten, 2013
  • Alois Brunner, le bourreau de Drancy ; a documentary by Philippe Tourancheau - France, 2018, Éclectic Production, with the support of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Nazi criminal Brunner died in Syria in 2001. In: tagesschau.de , January 11, 2017.
  2. ^ A b Austrian National Socialist Brunner apparently died in 2009. In: Der Standard , November 30, 2014.
  3. ^ SS-Hauptsturmführer Brunner apparently died in Damascus in 2001 In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , January 11, 2017.
  4. ↑ Palash Ghosh: Alois Brunner: The Nazi War Criminal Who Found A Home In Syria. In: International Business Times , July 18, 2012 (English).
  5. ↑ a b c All information based on Alois Brunner's handwritten curriculum vitae, which is attached to the relevant file in the Berlin Document Center . Quoted here from Safrian (1997), p. 53f.
  6. ↑ NSDAP personnel questionnaire, dated June 29, 1938; Personnel file no.340.051 of the NSDAP district in Vienna. Information according to Safrian (1997), p. 54. - However, he did not explain why the alleged plan to take up a post in Switzerland had brought him to the German Reich.
  7. ↑ Michael Martens : No more Nazi price. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . February 9, 2013, accessed December 1, 2014 .
  8. ↑ Hellmuth Vensky: The long protection for the Nazi perpetrators. In: The time . February 8, 2009, accessed December 1, 2014 .
  9. ↑ a b Bettina Stangneth: Why did the BND delete the Eichmann helper's files? In: WeltN24 , July 21, 2011.
  10. ↑ a b Gerhard Freihofner: Kopf (los) money after 62 years ( memento of February 8, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) , Wiener Zeitung , July 20, 2007.
  11. ^ Yossi Melman, Dan Raviv: Why the Mossad failed to capture or kill so many fugitive Nazis. washingtonpost.com, September 22, 2017
  12. ↑ Mirror Mirror on the wall: The mass murderer and the trillionaire (3/4) . April 15, 2013.
  13. ^ For the first time in Austria, grab bonuses for alleged Nazi criminals. In: Der Standard , July 26, 2007.
  14. ↑ Georg Bönisch and Klaus Wiegrefe: BND destroyed files on SS criminal Brunner , Der Spiegel, July 20, 2011
  15. ↑ bnd.bund.de December 22, 2011: Cassations of personnel files in the BND archive ( Memento from July 20, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  16. ^ Andreas Förster: Jurisdiction East Berlin . Profile online, August 1, 2011
  17. ↑ "Hickhack um ein War criminal" In: one day , August 9, 2011.
  18. ↑ Brunner initially remains on the Nazi bounty list in Austria. In: Der Standard , December 2, 2014.
  19. ↑ OVG NRW 15 A 2147/13
  20. ↑ The Office for the Protection of the Constitution is under revision in the dispute over Nazi files , Die Welt, 3 September 2018
  21. ↑ Jörg Köpke: New allegations against Maaßen , HAZ, September 13, 2018
  22. ↑ Mr. Maaßen is not responsible for legislative changes , September 14, 2018
  23. ↑ Auschwitz survivors demand the disclosure of all files on Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner in Germany , International Auschwitz Committee, July 4, 2018
  24. ↑ Judgment of 11 December 2019 - BVerwG 6 C 21.18
  25. ↑ File B. in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  26. ↑ Alois Brunner, le bourreau de Drancy. Un film de Philippe Tourancheau .
personal data
SURNAME Brunner, Alois
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schmaldienst, Alois (wrong name after 1945 to 1954); Fischer, Georg (wrong name after 1954)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian SS-Hauptsturmführer, organizer of the mass murder of Jews in Vienna, Greece and France
DATE OF BIRTH April 8, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Rohrbrunn in Burgenland, Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH uncertain: 2001 or 2009 or 2010
Place of death unsure: Damascus , Syria