The weed lasted. It was in 2014 when the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an institution designed to document the victims of the Holocaust, confirmed the good news: the last great living Nazi leader, SS Captain Alois Brunner, had left this world between 2001 and 2010. The most striking thing is that the guy who was responsible for the deportation of at least 128,000 people to extermination camps, evil if they existed, had died in Syria; and he had done so under the heat of the same regime – that of the Al-Assad family – that he had helped to forge through torture after the Second World War. The details of his death are still unknown. For some he died peacefully; For many others, he did it in a Syrian prison after falling from grace. You go to know. What we can be sure of is that Brunner was the right-hand man of the architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, that he was the man who sent 128,000 Jews to the gas chambers and that he became the visible head of the death camp. Drancy concentration, in France. “Among the criminals of the Third Reich who are still alive, Alois Brunner was the worst of all,” wrote Nazi investigator and hunter Simon Wiesenthal in his memoirs. On the runBut let’s go in parts, because Brunner’s race to escape from Justice began long before. After the suicide of Adolf Hitler and the fall of the Third Reich, the Allied authorities launched a witch hunt against the highest-ranking Nazi leaders; the most popular, wow. According to historian Donald M. McKale in the essay ‘Nazis after Hitler’, our protagonist was on that list, but the “chaos and confusion of the postwar period” allowed him to flee. “Like many other former members of the SS, he changed his uniform for one of the ‘Wehrmacht’ and claimed to have been just a soldier,” adds the expert. It helped him not to have a unit tattoo. Standard Related News Yes The Soviet island of cannibal terror that Stalin hid: “We ate human hearts” Manuel P. Villatoro In Nazino, located in Siberia, the lack of food generated “cases of cannibalism » among thousands of deportees One of his former companions claimed to have seen Brunner back in June 1945 on a prisoner transport heading to Linz. As he confirmed, he was dressed “in the uniform of an infantry soldier” and sported “a long black mustache that he had grown for the occasion.” Anything was worth it to hide and avoid hanging. Fortune was with him: on those same dates, Soviet troops captured an SS captain named Anton Brunner and, believing him to be Alois, executed him. That gave the leader some air. At the same time, and under the protection of a new identity as a low-level prisoner, he worked as a driver for the United States Army for a few weeks. It is unknown how on earth Brunner fled, but he did: at the end of summer, the former leader was in Vienna under an assumed name. And from there he went, according to McKale, to Linz and Passau: “In 1947 he settled in West Germany as a member of its intelligence agency and registered in Essen-Heisingen under the name Alois Schmaldienst.” He had borrowed the surname from one of his cousins, and the truth is that it did not go badly. Although his fortune ran out in early 1950, when an alarmed official government office in Vienna crossed his identity with that of his relative and discovered the truth. From then on, the former SS officer was forced to change his plans. To Syria with Al-Assad, Brunner was in hiding for several years while Europe tried him in absentia for his role in the Final Solution. However, in 1954 he had no choice but to flee to the other side of the globe after France sentenced him to two death sentences for the outrages perpetrated in his country during World War II. His destination was the Syria of Háfez Al-Assad. «He settled in Damascus and received protection from the government. Together with another ex-Nazi involved in the Final Solution, Foreign Ministry official Franz Rademacher, he worked as an advisor to the Interior Ministry on matters such as torture techniques and repression,” explains the historian. His contacts with the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union, Egypt and Algeria were the icing on the cake; an ingredient that added to his knowledge of torture that he had learned in the Drancy internment camp. All this forged an ideal cocktail for the dictator. “In practice, Brunner lived in Syria for years and ended up becoming the highest-ranking Nazi war criminal alive,” adds the expert. Brunner wanted to keep a low profile, but it was of little use. In the following years, Nazi hunters such as Beate Klarsfeld discovered him and began a campaign to have him extradited. There began the last phase of his life. Photographs of children who were deported by Alois Brunner. The snapshot was taken in 2001, during the trial of the AGENCIES leader. The sixties were the most dangerous decade for Brunner. In the 1960s, the Mossad sent him a letter bomb that is believed to have blinded him in his left eye. And twenty years later, another explosive blew off three fingers on one hand. It was payment for fame. In exchange, the Syrian regime welcomed him into its fold and offered him a home to shelter in. The facts speak for themselves: although Israel, Austria and Germany requested his extradition several times between 1968 and 1984, the Al-Assad family rejected the request again and again. Their maxim was that no Nazi hierarchy resided there. Syria’s refusal did not stop Nazi hunters like Klarsfeld herself. At the end of the eighties, this Jewish woman, whose father had been gassed on Brunner’s orders, traveled to the East posing as a Nazi sympathizer and managed to locate him. ABC reported the news in 1991: “Anti-Nazi activist Beate Klarsfeld was arrested in Syria after protesting to the authorities over the alleged granting of asylum to Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner. The news was given yesterday in Paris by her husband, lawyer Serge Klarsfeld, who said that he had been able to speak on the phone with his wife, who was arrested in a hotel in Damascus. “Last confessions From then on, there were many media outlets throughout the world who contacted Alois Brunner. In 1985, just a year after Syria denied its presence in the country for the umpteenth time, the German magazine Bunte published an interview with the former SS captain in which he not only indicated his physical address in Damascus, but also reiterated that he “had no bad conscience” for his role in the Final Solution. Quite the opposite, since he repeated ad nauseam that his mission had been, and would be, to “get rid of that Jewish garbage.” Two years later, the Chicago Sun-Times returned to the fray with an even harsher telephone interview with Brunner. In it, published at the end of October, the Nazi war criminal confirmed that he did not regret his actions and that he would repeat them: “All Jews deserved to die because they were agents of the devil and human trash. “I don’t regret what I did, and I would do it again.” Months later, of course, he clarified another reporter who was referring to his “deportation work.” At 75 years old, he also admitted to having offered his services to the Syrian government in “security matters” in exchange for protection and explained that he had lived in recent years under the identity of George Fischer. Subsequent extradition requests were of no use; The response was always silence and denying the maxim. The Syrian government, in fact, insisted that suggesting that Brunner was in the country was “inappropriate and in bad taste.” From there, mystery replaces certainties. The elderly captain was last seen in 2001, shortly after his 88th birthday, as doctors took him to the hospital by ambulance. That same year, a French court tried him for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Many experts consider that this was the year he died, although it is impossible to know.
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