Newsletter 11 – 18 stycznia 2017

How Nazi war criminal who invented mobile ‘gas vans’ to kill Jews died after years of squalor living in a Syrian cellar

ALLAN HALL

• Alois Brunner was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 130,000 Jews
• He died in 2001 at the age of 89 and remained an unrepentant Nazi
• He fled to Syria after the war where the regime sheltered him for decades
• He went by the name Abu Hussein and lived off Syrian army rations
• Passed on torture and interrogation methods developed by the Nazis
• He lived in miserable conditions beneath an apartment block in Damascus

Alois Brunner – of the world’s most wanted Nazi criminals who invented mobile gas-vans to kill Jews during WW2 – met his death in a squalid cellar in Damascus 16 years ago.
The fate of Brunner has been one of the lingering mysteries left over from WW2.
But on Wednesday a French magazine reported that the monster, who described Jews as ‘human garbage’, met his end in the country which gave him sanctuary after 1945.
Veteran Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld said from his Paris home that he had read the report in the magazine XXI and found it ‘highly credible.’
Brunner, who was 89 in 2001, was one of the most notorious of Nazi killers during the Holocaust which claimed six million Jewish lives.

Alois Brunner, one of the most notorious figures of the Holocaust, died in Syria in 2001 a new report claims. Brunner (pictured left and right) became an advisor to the Syria secret police ‘passing on torture and interrogation methods developed by the Nazis’

Until a few years ago he occupied the number one slot of most wanted war criminals on a list compiled by by the Simon Wiesdenthal Nazi hunting organisation in America.
Brunner was the right-hand-man to Adolf Eichmann, the supreme logistician of the Holocaust of who plotted the transports across Europe to the extermination camps in occupied Poland.

A diabolical Nazi, Brunner was the inventor of mobile ‘gas vans’ – innocent looking lorries whose passenger compartments were sealed.
Exhaust gas from the engine of the trucks fed back into the van, killing all its occupants.
The vans operated outside of ghettoes and concentration camps in eastern Europe before the static killing factories like Auschwitz went on-line.
Brunner was also personally responsible for rounding up at least 130,000 Jewish men, women and children in France and had them shipped off for extermination.

The Nazis began using mobile gas chambers in specially adapted vans (pictured) after its mobile killing unit reportedly got tired of shooting large numbers of women and children

He fled to Syria after the war where the regime sheltered him for decades. Israeli agents managed to send him parcel bombs on two occasions which wounded him but did not end his life.
Now three ex-members of the Syrian secret service who he tutored in torture and clandestine police work have confirmed to XXI that his remaining years were spent in ‘miserable and squalid’ conditions beneath an apartment block in Damascus
One of his guards called Omar said Brunner, who went by the name of Abu Hussein, ‘suffered and cried a lot in his final years. Everyone heard him. In the end he couldnt even wash himself.
‘All he had to eat were army rations — awful stuff — and an egg or a potato. He had to choose one or the other.’
Klarsfeld, whose father was murdered in Auschwitz, once flew to Damascus in the 1980’s to plead with the Assad regime to give Brunner up for trial in the west.
‘I am satisfied to learn that he lived badly rather than well in exile,’ sáid Klarsfeld after the magazine was published on Wednesday.
‘XXI’s investigation is highly credible. They have questioned someone who knew him at close quarters,’ he added.
Brunner left Germany for Egypt in 1953 with a passport in the name of Georg Fischer and worked for a time as a gun-runner for Algerians fighting to throw off French colonial rule in their country.
Then he moved on to Damascus where he passed on all the terrible interrogation and torture techniques of the Gestapo he had learned during the Third Reich.
Convicted by French courts in absentia to death, he lost an eye and four fingers in the two Mossad bomb attacks, but nothing diminished his love of Nazism or his hatred of the Jews.

Brunner was the right-hand-man to Adolf Eichmann, the supreme logistician of the Holocaust of who plotted the transports across Europe to the extermination camps in occupied Poland. He is pictured here on trial before he was executed for crimes against humanity in 1962

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Security Expert: Threats Against US Jewish Institutions Part of ‘Unfortunate Growing Trend’

Barney Breen-Portnoy

The Jewish Community Center in Manhattan. Photo: Team Boerum via Wikimedia Commons.

The bomb threats received by more than a dozen Jewish community centers across the US on Monday — leading to evacuations at some of them — were part of an “unfortunate growing trend,” an international security consultant and political risk analyst told The Algemeiner.

“There has been an increase in non-profit organizations — both Jewish and not — receiving these types of bomb threats, whether through robocalls or other telephonic means,” Dr. Joshua Gleis, president of Gleis Security Consulting, said.

One reason for this, according to Gleis, is technology.

“It’s very easy today to anonymously make phone calls,” he noted. “Law enforcement cannot always find out where they are coming from.”

The perpetrators, Gleis said, might “just be looking to sow fear in the community.”

“But another concern, which is more sinister, is that it is not just to create panic and fear, but really, God forbid, to see how different organizations respond and then potentially attack them while they’re responding — for example attack them while they are evacuating, where they could be potentially more vulnerable because now there are hundreds of people outside,” he added.

Evacuating a threatened building, Gleis pointed out, might not always be the best move.

“You have to start to think like a bad guy,” he said. “Why are they calling in a bomb threat and should you in fact evacuate as a knee-jerk reaction? Often times the case is no. By not evacuating, you’re not exposing yourself to other potential threats — such as an active shooter or vehicular ramming outside. It doesn’t mean that you never evacuate, it just means there are specific times when you would evacuate, but much of the time — like on Monday when the threats were non-specific — you should not. Terrorists today who are looking to target Jews tend not to give them a heads-up beforehand.”

Another concern, Gleis said, is that the threats could be a diversionary tactic.

“All these times these things are making the news and nothing is happening,” he said. “They might do it again and draw all the law enforcement response to one place and hit another location, or just get people so attuned to assuming that it’s nothing that eventually they just ignore the threats and eventually there ends up being one that is serious and it is ignored.”

In general, in Gleis’ view, Jewish institutions “do not have proper security measures in place yet — be it a combination of proper training for staff, well-trained security guards and different target-hardening measures. Many are against doing so — not necessarily JCCs, but Jewish non-profits in general.”

“Unfortunately, we live in a time when we do need security and we have to be thinking about these things,” Gleis said. “And I actually think that by doing these things and being pro-active, instead of creating fear and panic, it actually does the opposite. To me, knowledge is power. So the more you can train yourself and understand how to better protect yourself, the safer you’re going to feel ultimately.”

Michael Feinstein — the president and CEO of the Bender JCC of Greater Washington, which was among the JCCs that received threats on Monday — told The Algemeiner that a review of security procedures was underway in the wake of the incident.

“I don’t know if it will lead to changes,” he said. “JCCs balance being open and welcoming with providing for the safety and security of our members and participants. We feel that currently we have the right procedures in place. We are always learning and seeking to improve what we do. External forces may require us to change what we do.”

Feinstein said he believed Monday was the first time ever that the Bender JCC — which opened in 1969 — had received a bomb threat.

“The possibility of a serious security incident is one of the things I lose sleep over,” he said. “There seems to be a recent uptick in hate speech and hate crimes. In our local area, there have been a number of instances involving antisemitic symbols. All of these actions seem to be intended to cause fear and disruption. We need to be vigilant in adhering to our security procedures and emergency response plans.”