A Long-Sought Fugitive Died Four Years Ago in Syria, Nazi Hunter Says

By JODI RUDORENDEC

Alois Brunner, a top lieutenant to Adolf Eichmann, in an undated photograph. He sent 128,500 Jews to death camps. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

JERUSALEM — A leading Nazi hunter said on Monday that Adolf Eichmann’s top lieutenant, long one of the world’s most wanted fugitives, died at least four years ago in Syria, where he had escaped justice and may have advised the government.

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, said the lieutenant, Alois Brunner, was responsible for the deportation of 128,500 Jews to death camps, and described him as Eichmann’s “right-hand man.” Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, was apprehended, tried and executed by Israel in 1962.

Mr. Brunner was tried in absentia and sentenced to death by France in 1954, and he had been the subject of at least two assassination attempts attributed to the Mossad, the Israeli secret service.

“He was a notorious anti-Semite, sadist, fanatic Nazi,” Mr. Zuroff said in a telephone interview on Monday, after the British newspaper The Sunday Express reported his confirmation of Mr. Brunner’s death. “The only known interview we have with him was to a German newsmagazine in 1985, in which he was asked if he had any regrets, and he said, ‘My only regret is I didn’t murder more Jews.’ ”

Mr. Zuroff said a German intelligence official with extensive experience in the Middle East — “a reliable source in our eyes” — had informed the Wiesenthal Center about four years ago that Mr. Brunner had died of natural causes, but that because of the Syrian civil war “we were never able to confirm it forensically.” Given that Mr. Brunner would be 102 today, Mr. Zuroff added, “I took his name off the list” of wanted Nazis.

The Wiesenthal Center did not announce Mr. Brunner’s death when the German operative reported it in 2010, or this year, when it published its annual list of fugitives without him on it. Mr. Zuroff said it came up now only because of an inquiry by The Sunday Express.

Born in Austria, Mr. Brunner joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and the SS in 1938, and he led the Vienna-based Central Office for Jewish Emigration from 1939 to 1943, according to the research center at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum and memorial in Jerusalem.

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