Posted on 02/23/2005 4:45:29 AM PST by UnbelievingScumOnTheOtherSide
Alive in Damascus: "the most outstanding surviving Nazi war criminal"
Never too late for justice ..
Alois Brunner was born in Austria in 1912 and joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1931 at the age of 19. His anti-Semitism was considered to be so extreme that he was swiftly tapped to be Adolf Eichmann’s private secretary. As head of the Nazi’s Jewish affairs office in prewar Vienna, he organized persecution that forced thousands of Jews to flee to other European countries and the United States.
When World War II started, he sent 47,000 Austrian Jews to concentration camps. After organizing mass roundups in Berlin, he transferred to Greece, where he was responsible for deporting all 43,000 Jews in Salonika within just two months.
In June 1943, he was sent to France to take over the Drancy transit camp near Paris from its French administrators. During 14 months in France, Brunner sent an estimated 25,000 men, women and children to their deaths.
A survivor, Georges Appel, later recalled that Brunner's mean, cruel demeanor was matched only by his immoral behavior: "He would beat elderly women, and ordered the inmates to prepare Postcards saying that all was well with them." These were mailed after they had been sent to the gas chambers ..
Brunner often sought after young Jewish women, either pregnant or with infants, to join the deportation to the Nazi death camps. As he said: "I can't let children live. They will be future terrorists."
Once Brunner ordered the arrest and deportation of more than 200 French Jewish children. They were loaded aboard the crude cattle cars without any adults to accompany them and were never seen again, according to author Didier Epelbaum in his 1990 book Alois Brunner.
SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Brunner also transported the children of Izieu to Auschwitz. One of the most wanted of all war criminals, Brunner was responsible for the killing of thousands and thousands of Jews.
Eluding Justice ..
After WW2 Alois Brunner found gainful employment courtesy of Reinhard Gehlen and the CIA. Gehlen, Hitler's top anti-Soviet spy, surrendered to the Americans and offered his services. CIA took the bait and Gehlen re-established his spy organization, and enlisted thousands of Gestapo, Wehrmacht and SS veterans. During the Cold War Gehlen's network of agents received millions of dollars in funding from the U.S. From 1956-68 Reinhard Gehlen was Germany's Chief of Federal Intelligence Service.
Later Brunner escaped to Syria where he became a government adviser. To this day Alois Brunner - now 90 - has successfully evaded capture. He is believed to live in Damascus using the name of his cousin Georg Fischer, though in December 1999, there were unconfirmed reports that he had died in 1996 and was buried in a Damascus cemetery.
But German journalists visiting Syria in 1999 said Brunner was living at the Meridian Hotel in Damascus under police protection. Brunner is easily identifiable, having lost an eye and several fingers from letter bombs sent him years ago by French and Israeli security agents.
With the release of Adolf Eichmann's memoirs, Alois Brunner, whom Eichmann once called his best man, was again in the news. Brunner was already sentenced to death in absentia in France in 1953 and 1954; more recently, a new suit was filed there based on his sending children to Auschwitz. Previous attempts to persuade Syria to release Brunner failed. Germany applied for his extradition in 1987, and in 1991 the European Parliament voted to condemn Syria for continuing to harbor the alleged war criminal.
In 1995 German State prosecutors in Cologne and Frankfurt posted a $333,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the last leading Nazi still believed to be on the loose.
Germany, Austria, Slovakia, France and Poland currently seek his extradition but until now the Syrians have ignored all attempts to extradite him, including those by Simon Wiesenthal.
Simon Wiesenthal
The famous Nazi-hunter and Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal has made the pursuit of Nazi war criminals his life's work and has spent more than half his life doggedly gathering information on the whereabouts of fugitive Nazis. In his introduction to In the Lion's Mouth by Joan Campion he writes:
"As these words are written, Alois Brunner, perhaps the most outstanding surviving Nazi war criminal, is living as a free man in Damascus, Syria. Human justice did not get to this man. He committed his crimes not only in Slovakia, but also in Austria, France, Greece, and Yugoslavia, yet he has nothing to fear. All attempts to have him extradited have been refused. It seems that in Syria the murder of Jews is not a crime."
Brunner was interviewed about 15 years ago in the Austrian news magazine Bunte. He said he did not suffer from a bad conscience for, in his own words, "getting rid of that garbage." His one regret was that he hadn't murdered more Jews.
In 1987 in a telephone interview Alois Brunner told the Chicago Sun Times:
"The Jews deserved to die. I have no regrets. If I had the chance I would do it again .."
Victims of Alois Brunner - The Izieu Children
In 1944 the Nazis from Lyon sent two vans to the French village of Izieu. Their Mission: to exterminate the children of an orphanage known as La Maison d'Izieu.
The sleepy village of Izieu lay overlooking the Rhone river between Lyon and Chambery in central France. Refugees from Herault were the first arrivals at the Children's home and their Jewish identity was kept secret by the staff. The children, aged between four and seventeen, felt safe and secure, supervised by seven adults. Often one of the young boys entertained his companions by making movies, paintings on transparent paper and scrolled past a lighted box.
The Children's Home was a perfect idyll and the Jewish children led a happy life with plenty of time for playing, drawing and painting, as these sketches show, made by the Izieu children.
However, on the morning of April 6, 1944, as they all settled down in the refectory to drink hot chocolate, three vehicles, two of which were lorries, pulled up in front of the home. The Gestapo, led by the 'Butcher of Lyon' Klaus Barbie, entered the home and forcibly removed the forty four children and their seven supervisors, throwing the crying and terrified children on to the trucks like sacks of potatoes.
As a witness later recalled: 'I was on my way down the stairs when my sister shouted to me: it's the Germans, save yourself! I jumped out the window. I hid myself in a bush in the garden. I heard the cries of the children that were being kidnapped and I heard the shouts of the Nazis who were carrying them away...'
Following the raid on their home in Izieu, the children were shipped directly to the 'collection center' in Drancy, then put on the first available train towards the deathcamps in the East. Alois Brunner transported the children to Auschwitz and forty-two children and five adults were gassed in the extermination camp. Two of the oldest children and Miron Zlatin, the superintendent, ended up in Tallin in Estonia and were put to death by a firing squad.
Of the forty-four children kidnapped by the Nazis in Izieu, not a single one survived. Of the supervisors there was one sole survivor, twenty-seven year old Lea Feldblum. When the children from Izieu arrived in Auschwitz on April 15, 1944, Léa led the column of children to the selection point. When she informed the SS that these children were from a home, she was ruthlessly separated from them and sent to the prisoners' camp.
One survivor of Auschwitz revealed during Klaus Barbie's trial what happened to the children: 'I asked myself where were the children who arrived with us? In the camp there wasn't a single child to be seen. Then those who had been there for a while informed us of the reality. 'You see that chimney, the one smoke never stops coming out of .. you smell that odor of burned flesh ...'
www.auschwitz.dk Louis Bülow Privacy. ©2002-04.
My response to this article: "Only the Left kills like that. Their arrogance convinces them that they are justified in doing anything to further their agenda. Inhuman acts are just part of the package. To make an omlette, one must break eggs."
Disgusting.
Was under impression Brunner was dead. Deathcamps.org lists him as "probably dead." Another case of justice denied/delayed for these rat-bastards.
""Only the Left kills like that."
Only the left is capable of the kind of hatred that is required to kill like that.
Think Century 21: "Location, location, location". By taking Iraq first, we put a US Army between the two major terrorist players left, Syria, and Iran. We now have the interior line, we can move troops from west to east, and east to west. Militarily, its a better solution. Plus, Iraq was easier to get at, making the logistics easier for round one.
Give it time. This war is a series of engagments, country by country. Iraq was only the first step. There is method and reason to the way it's being done.
Think of it as island hopping in the South Pacific 1942-1945.
bttt
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