Alois Brunner

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Alois Brunner (born April 8, 1912 in Rohrbrunn, Burgenland, reports of death contested) is an Austrian Nazi war criminal who was Adolf Eichmann's assistant. He was a trouble-shooter for the Schutzstaffel and held the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer when he organized deportations to Nazi concentration camps from Vichy France and Slovakia. Through his role in these deportations, he is considered culpable for the mass murder of tens of thousands of Jews. He was personally sent by Adolf Eichmann in 1944 to Slovakia to oversee the deportation of Jews from Slovakia. From early 1944 until March 1945, over one million Jews were transported to Auschwitz.

After the war he is said to have been employed by the CIA because he was fiercely anti-Soviet. He is then alleged to have fled to Syria, possibly in 1954, and hired as a "government advisor"—with some suggesting he was advising the Syrian dictatorship on torture and repression techniques.

While unsuccessfully hunted by the late Simon Wiesenthal, he is believed to live in Damascus, Syria, under the alias "Dr. Georg Fischer". Germany and other countries have unsuccessfully requested his extradition. He was twice sentenced to death in absentia in the 1950s; one of those convictions was in France in 1954, when its death penalty was still in effect. In August 1987 an Interpol "red notice" (a sort of international arrest warrant) was issued for him. In 1995 German State prosecutors in Cologne and Frankfurt posted a €333,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.

Brunner lost an eye and several fingers from letter bombs sent to him years ago by Israel's intelligence service, Mossad. In December 1999, rumours surfaced saying that he had died in 1996 and had been buried. However, German journalists visiting Syria said Brunner was living at the Meridian Hotel in Damascus. On March 2, 2001, he was found guilty in absentia by a French court for crimes against humanity and was sentenced to life imprisonment [1].

Brazilian police are investigating whether a suspect living in the country under an assumed name is actually Alois Brunner. [2]

If still alive, he would likely be considered one of the last surviving major war criminal of the Holocaust yet to be brought to justice, alongside Aribert Heim.