Alois Brunner Talks About His Past

by Mark Weber

"I first heard about gas chambers after the end of the war," says Alois Brunner, the "most wanted Nazi war criminal" still at large.
Following the Anschluss with Austria in 1938, SS Captain Brunner directed the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, through which large numbers of Jews migrated to foreign countries.

The man known as "Eichmann's right hand" later organized deportations of Jews from Berlin, France, Slovakia and Greece to ghettos and camps in eastern Europe.

Since the 1950s he has been living in exile in Damascus, Syria, under the name of "Georg Fischer." Letter bomb attacks in 1961 and 1980 cost him one eye and the fingers of his left hand. Bodyguards constantly protect Brunner, who is now 76 or 77 years old; West Germany, Austria and France have asked for his extradition.

In 1985, the West German magazine Bunte published an interview in Damascus with Brunner, accompanied with color photographs. He told the Munich weekly that he had "no bad conscience" about his wartime work. Two years later, a rather widely reported Chicago Tribune interview gave the impression that an unrepentant Brunner admitted involvement in exterminating Jews. More