Alois Brunner, the world's most wanted German Nazi war criminal is presumed dead after Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff received a message from a German intelligence officer in 2010 that Alois Brunner died in the same year.
Brunner, who is supposed to be 102 years old this year was said to have died and was buried in Damascus, Syria where he was hiding as a fugitive for many years. The information was released on Sunday by Zuroff who is also the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem.
According to BBC, Zuroff is 99 percent that Alois Brunner had died already. Zuroff told BBC that they just can't prove it with enough evidence at the moment due to the ongoing war in Syria, but he is certain that the man who is believed to be the head of Holocaust that sent 128,000 Jews to their death is dead.
In April this year, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre had removed Brunner from their most wanted German Nazi war criminal list due to his age and that he is more presumed to be dead. Zuroff said that the information he received has proven it more to be true.
Efraim Zuroff had tweeted several times that the world's most wanted German Nazi war criminal who was left unpunished, Alois Brunner is dead.
Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner 'died in Syria' - https://t.co/y0YFSJthDM #GoogleAlerts More on the Brunner case, supreme frustration!!
— Efraim Zuroff (@EZuroff) December 1, 2014
Alois Brunner is one of Adolph Hitler's most reliable lieutenants or "best man" and is one of the notorious Nazis who conceptualized the Holocaust that led more than 100,000 Jews from France, Greece, Austria, and Slovakia to concentration camps where gas chambers awaited their death.
Former SS captain Alois Brunner was able to escape captivity and death for 65 years by mixing up his identity with other SS officers and that of Anton Brunner. U.K. Daily Express reported that he even survived two assassination plots by Mossad, an Israeli secret service.
After the World War II, Alois Brunner surfaced on a different identity and was even employed under the U.S. Army in Berlin while working as a spy for the Gehlen organization.
The former SS Alois Brunner went to Rome, Mediterranean to Egypt through a fake passport in 1954. There he worked as a weapon dealer. After some time, he fled to Syria and assumed the name of Dr. Georg Fischer.
When he reached Syria, he became a national advisor to Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez, where he taught and propagate heinous ways of torturing methodologies.
Inspite of his massive protection from the Syrian government, Alois Brunner was targeted by the Mossad in 1961 and 1981 that led to lost of his eye and three fingers on his left hand upon opening letter bombs.
In 1999, news came out that Alois Brunner was dead and he was buried in Damascus, which is contrary to the fact that he was seen at Meridian Hotel in Syria the same year, in 2001 and 2003.
The Institute for Historical Review by Mark Weber has mentioned that the right hand man of Hitler, Alois Brunner was interviewed by Bunte, a West German magazine in 1985 and Brunner claimed that he had "no bad conscience" about his past work.
In 1987, the Institute for Historical Review claimed that Chicago Tribune reported that Alois Brunner was still "unrepentant" to what he had done in the past.
However, the first two interviews were opposite to what the Institute for Historical Review reported about the last interview with Alois Brunner by an Austrian journalist Gerd Honsik. Honsik fled to Damascus to interview the former SS officer in 1987 in his apartment.
After Honsik interview, he stated that Alois Brunner is an innocent man and those who believe that he is a mass murderer are only victims of a great allied propaganda.
The interview of Honsik with Alois Brunner in 1987 was published in his book "Freispruch fur Hitler?" in Vienna, but was banned in Austria. It is a compilation of statements made by 36 witnesses that include six former concentration camp inmates and several historians.
Efraim Zuroff stands firm that Alois Brunner is a mass murderer. He believes that families of the Jews who were victim of his terror execution had been served justice after Brunner had been proclaimed dead.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre is a global human rights organization, focuses on publishing updated list of Nazi war criminals to help bring justice to people whom the Nazi criminals committed crimes. They are also in-charge of reminding the governments to extend their efforts in capturing unpunished murderers.
