ALOIS BRUNNER , THE ESCAPED CRIMINAL OF NAZI BORN APRIL 8,1912 - DIED 2001 UNKNOWN DATE

ALOIS BRUNNER , 

THE ESCAPED CRIMINAL OF NAZI 

BORN APRIL 8,1912 - DIED 2001 

UNKNOWN DATE

இரண்டாம் உலகப்போரில் பல்லாயிரம் யூத படுகொலைக்கு காரணமான ALOIS BRUNNER கடைசி வரை பிடிபடாமல் சிரியாவில் 2001 இல் இறந்தார்

SS Colonel (Standartenführer) Hans Landa - a Nazi "Jew Hunter" who speaks four languages and takes his work seriously in occupied France - is played by Christoph Waltz. Is Hans Landa based on a real-life person?

Even if Quentin Tarantino was not influenced by historical events, a Nazi "Jew Hunter" named Alois Brunner comes to mind as a real-life "Hans Landa." Who was he?

Adolf Eichmann personally chose Brunner to implement Hitler's "Final Solution" in France. Operating on "orders directly from Berlin," the ruthless SS officer was brutally efficient.

What were his methods? In Vichy France and the Jews, by Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, we learn that:

Brunner organized squads that prowled about the country [of France] making arrests. His forces included Gestapo, Feldgendarmeries, and miscellaneous French forces under German control...but never the French police...

...In the fall [of 1942], Brunner's squads...spread a "veritable panic" according to the prefect [of Savoie]. In September they were at work in the Alpes-Maritimes in "a real climate of terror." (Vichy France and the Jews, pages 330-31.)
We learn more about Brunner's methods (and what he thought of himself, as reflected in his SS application) from a Brunner-researcher, Mary Felstiner:

Brunner's SS colleagues remarked on his slight build, "hooked nose" and "kinky hair." They nicknamed him "Jew Suss," the foul protagonist of an anti-Semitic film...Brunner set out to eliminate from Europe everything he considered sub-male and counter-Aryan. (Felstiner, quoted in Reading Charlotte Salomon, ed. by Michael Steinberg and Monica Bohn-Duchen, pages 206-7.)
Where, in France, did Brunner conduct his operations?

He was a master deceiver. As commandant of Drancy, a huge transit camp outside Paris...he derived his power from disinformation. In Brunner's camp deportees guessed nothing of their fate. (Felstiner, in Reading Charlotte Salomon, pg 206)
Although many high-ranking Nazis were captured after the war, such was not the lot of Alois Brunner:

This murderer escaped. After 1945, a secret postwar network...obscured SS men, including Brunner. He [allegedly] worked for Syria from the 1950s on ... hiding his identity ... he'd personally dispatched 130,000 Jews. "All of them deserved to die," said Brunner in Damascus to a journalist [Günther Deschner, who published his article in Bunte, a West German magazine], as late as 1987; "I have no regrets and would do it again." (Felstiner, in Reading Charlotte Salomon, pg 207)
Brunner was never captured. An American documentary, from 2003, sheds some light on his criminal activities:

In March 2003, an American documentary film entitled Alois Brunner: The Last Nazi was released, reflecting widespread interest in the fate of a key war criminal who was never caught. His crimes had been brought before courts [including in France, during 2001, where he was convicted in absentia], but he had never personally appeared there. His entire postwar career was shrouded by fog and deception.

Born in 1912 in the Austrian Burgenland, Brunner joined the Nazi Party illegally in 1931 and joined the SS on October 10, 1939. From 1939 he served as Eichmann's secretary ... whose task it was to force Jews from the Reich. In this capacity he organized forced deportations of 47,000 Austrian Jews to ghettos and death camps.

Transferred to Salonika in March 1943, Brunner oversaw the deportation of 43,000 Jews from Greece in two months.

In June 1943 he took over the Drancy camp, the assembly point for Jews to be deported from France. In fourteen months he sent roughly 24,000 Jews to the East.

He also directed a special commando unit to arrest Jews in Nice and bring them to Drancy, and he paid French collaborators for each Jew arrested.

As late as July 1944, he organized a sweep for hidden Jewish children in France, which located and deported 250 minors as well as the last Jewish convoy from Paris on August 17, 1944.
Where did he spend his time after the war?

The best evidence suggested that Brunner was in Damascus. He was said to have suffered disfiguring wounds from a package bomb attack in September 1961, possibly sent by an Israeli intelligence agent. (Above series of quotes from U.S. intelligence and the Nazis, by Richard Breitman, excerpts from pages 159 - 162.)
In Sword of the Golem, a novel by Jeff Minde and Ken Tucker, Alois Brunner (using his alias Georg Fischer, as he allegedly had, in real life, during his sojourn in Syria) meets a young woman named Shoshona:

"Let us not waste time on irrelevancies," Brunner waved her off. "I must introduce myself. I am Herr Georg Fischer."

"You are Alois Brunner," Shoshona said flatly.

Brunner looked surprised for a moment... (Sword of the Golem, pages 80-81.)
As it happens, therefore, we have compelling evidence for a real Hans Landa, the SS "Jew Hunter" of "Inglourious Basterds." (This link takes you to the film's screenplay.)

In December of 2014, Dr. Efraim Zuroff (director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem) announced his belief that Brunner died in Syria during 2010. Nazi hunters have therefore stopped searching-for the world's most-wanted war criminal.

In reporting the news of Brunner's death, the BBC also summarizes some of his key activities:

"The Austrian-born SS chief was once described by Adolf Eichmann - the architect of the 'Final Solution' - as one of his best men."
"Eichmann dispatched Brunner wherever he felt round-ups of Jews were proceeding too slowly."
"From June 1943 until the liberation of France, he sent thousands of Jews to their almost certain deaths."
"He waged a reign of terror on the French Riviera, hunting down Jews who had sought refuge in the relative safety of the Italian occupied zone."
"It is widely believed that he fled to Syria in the 1950s - living under the false name of Georg Fischer - and that successive regimes offered him protection."
"Syria has repeatedly denied harbouring him."
Brunner's final resting place is apparently in a Damascus grave.

One of the world's most wanted Nazi war criminals died in 2001 aged 89 after spending more than a decade incarcerated in a dilapidated Damascus basement, a French magazine has said.

The Revue XXI magazine reported that Austrian-born SS commander Alois Brunner spent his last years living in squalid conditions.

It said he remained a fervent anti-Semite right up to his death.

Brunner is accused of deporting more than 128,000 Jews to death camps.

He was in charge of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris where Jews rounded up in France were held before being sent to the death camps. An estimated 345 children were among his victims.

For many years there has been uncertainty as to whether Brunner - born in 1912 - is still alive, although the chief investigator pursuing him told the BBC in 2014 that he believed Brunner died in 2010 in Damascus.

Brunner is believed to have fled to Syria in the 1950s from West Germany, reportedly serving later as an adviser to the Syrian government on torture tactics before being shunned by the authorities.

'A monster'
The latest investigation by the Revue XXI magazine (in French) quotes one of Brunner's guards as saying that he "suffered and cried a lot in his final years, [and] everyone heard him".

Alois Brunner sent thousands of Jews to their deaths in Nazi camps

French lawyer Serge Klarsfeld - seen here during a press conference about Alois Brunner in 1985 - has welcomed news of the Nazi's death
The guard, identified only as Omar, said Brunner survived on meagre army rations in the last years of his life.

The magazine's findings have been welcomed by renowned Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld.

"We are satisfied to learn that he lived badly rather than well," Mr Klarsfeld told the AFP news agency.

Brunner was removed in April 2014 from the Simon Wiesenthal Center's most wanted list, in a move signifying that it too considered him to be dead.

The SS commander played a key role in the implementation of Hitler's "Final Solution" to murder Jews and has been described by Nazi hunters as "a monster", responsible for sending 47,000 Jews in Austria, 44,000 in Greece, 23,500 in France and 14,000 in Slovakia to camps where most were murdered.

Alois Brunner
Was once described by Adolf Eichmann - the architect of the "Final Solution" - as one of his best men
Eichmann dispatched Brunner wherever he felt round-ups of Jews were proceeding too slowly
From June 1943 until the liberation of France, he sent thousands of Jews to their almost certain deaths
He waged a reign of terror on the French Riviera, hunting down Jews who had sought refuge in the relative safety of the Italian-occupied zone
It is widely believed that he lived under the false name of Georg Fischer while in Syria - and that successive regimes offered him protection
Syria has repeatedly denied harbouring him

In 2001 he was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment by a court in France and is reported to have survived at least two Israeli intelligence assassination attempts while in Syria in 1961 and 1980.

Mussolini’s DEATH

Mussolini’s Final Hours, 

APRIL 28, 1945 


By Christopher Klein

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After a failed attempt to flee Italy with his mistress, Benito Mussolini was executed on April 28, 1945. On the 70th anniversary of the Italian dictator’s death, read about his final hours, the desecration of his corpse in a public square and his body’s strange journey in the ensuing years.

By April 25, 1945, Benito Mussolini’s dream of re-creating the Roman Empire, much like the crumbling Roman Forum itself, lay in ruins. With the Allies closing in from the south and anti-fascist partisans rising up to seize city after city in northern Italy, Mussolini’s power base was quickly evaporating.

The 61-year-old Italian dictator who sought to become a modern-day Julius Caesar had first risen to power more than two decades earlier when he became prime minister in 1922. “Il Duce” allied himself with fellow fascist Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany in World War II, but his outdated Italian military was badly outclassed. By July 1943, the Allied invasion of Sicily and bombing of Rome caused the Italian high command and King Victor Emmanuel III to remove Mussolini from power and place him under house arrest.

In September 1943, Nazi paratroopers staged a daring commando raid that rescued Mussolini from the Apennine Mountain ski resort where he was being detained. Hitler installed Mussolini as the figurehead of the Social Republic of Italy (known informally as the Republic of Salo), a Nazi puppet state in German-occupied northern Italy.

By April 25, 1945, however, the Third Reich was quickly losing its grip on northern Italy. With his stronghold of Milan teetering on the precipice, Mussolini agreed to meet with a delegation of partisans at the palace of Milan’s Cardinal Alfredo Schuster. There, a furious Mussolini learned that, unbeknownst to him, the Nazis had begun negotiations for an unconditional surrender.

Clara Petacci

Mussolini stormed out of the palace and fled Milan with his 33-year-old mistress, Clara Petacci, in the 1939 Alfa Romeo sport car he had bought as a gift for his girlfriend. The following day, the pair joined a convoy of fellow fascists and German soldiers heading north toward Lake Como and the border with Switzerland. Mussolini donned a German Luftwaffe helmet and overcoat, but the disguise did little to save him when partisans stopped the convoy at the lakeside town of Dongo on April 27. For 20 years, Mussolini had built a cult of personality with his image emblazoned on posters and newspapers. Now, the familiarity of his distinctive shaved head and granite jaw, even in disguise, did him in.

The partisans seized Mussolini and Petacci. Fearing that the Nazis would again try to liberate the dictator, the partisans hid the pair in a remote farmhouse for the night. The following day, Mussolini and Petacci were removed from the house and driven to the small village of Giulino di Mezzegra on the shores of Lake Como. They were ordered to stand in front of a stone wall at the entrance to Villa Belmonte where both were executed by machine gun fire. The identity of the triggerman remains a point of contention, but it was likely communist partisan commander Walter Audisio.

There’s no uncertainty, however, about what happened to Mussolini’s body in the hours after his execution. In the pre-dawn hours of April 29 the corpses of Mussolini, Petacci and 14 fellow fascists were placed in a truck and dumped like garbage in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto, a deeply symbolic public square for the anti-fascist forces. There, eight months earlier, fascists acting under orders from Hitler’s SS publicly displayed the bodies of 15 executed partisans.

After Mussolini’s arrest in July 1943, jubilant crowds mutilated images of the dictator. Now, as the sun rose on the “Square of the Fifteen Martyrs,” residents of Milan had the chance to do the same thing, only this time for real. They hurled invectives and vegetables at the dictator’s corpse before kicking, beating and spitting upon it. One woman, deciding Mussolini wasn’t dead enough for her, emptied a pistol into the dictator’s body and shouted, “Five shots for my five assassinated sons!” The crowd then strung the bodies of Mussolini, Petacci and other fascists by their feet from the girders of a gasoline station in a corner of the square.

Cross marking the execution location.

In early afternoon, American troops ordered the bodies to be taken down and Mussolini’s bullet-ridden corpse transported to the city morgue. By this point, Mussolini’s badly beaten body was barely recognizable, but a U.S. Army photographer still staged the bodies of the former dictator and his mistress in each other’s arms in a macabre pose.

As the Soviets closed in on Berlin, Hitler received news of Mussolini’s death. Determined not to give his enemies the satisfaction of killing him or defiling his body, Hitler committed suicide on April 30 and had his corpse subsequently burned. Mussolini’s body, meanwhile, was buried in an unmarked grave in a Milan cemetery. Its location was hardly a secret, however, and anti-fascists made regular pilgrimages to the cemetery to desecrate his grave until Mussolini made a resurrection of sorts on Easter Sunday 1946 when Domenico Leccisi and fellow fascists dug up Il Duce’s body, washed it in a nearby fountain and pushed it in a wheelbarrow to a getaway car. The note left behind by the “Democratic Fascist Party” stated they would no longer bear “the cannibal slurs made by human dregs organized in the Communist Party.” The corpse was missing for nearly four months before it was found in August 1946 in a monastery outside Milan.

Once the Italian government recovered Mussolini’s corpse, it kept its whereabouts secret for more than a decade. In 1957, however, newly elected prime minister Adone Zoli needed the support of a far-right party and in return for its votes, he delivered the bones of Mussolini to his widow. After spending 11 years in the cupboard of a Capuchin monastery, Mussolini’s body finally received a burial in the family crypt in his birthplace of Predappio, which has become a pilgrimage site for neo-fascists. In 1966, the last piece of Mussolini’s body was returned to his widow as the United States handed over a sample of the dictator’s brain that was removed at autopsy and tested inconclusively for syphilis.

RUDOLF HESS THE LAST NAZI COMMITTED SUICIDE IN NUREMBERG ON 1987 AUGUST 17

RUDOLF HESS THE LAST NAZI COMMITTED SUICIDE IN NUREMBERG ON 1987 AUGUST 17

BIRTH AND EARLY LIFE

Rudolf Hess was born in Alexandria, Egypt, April 26, 1894, the son of a prosperous wholesaler and exporter. He did not live in Germany until he was fourteen. He volunteered for the German Army in 1914 at the outbreak of World War One, partly to escape the control of his domineering father who had refused to let him go to a university but instead persuaded him into an unwanted career in the family business.

In World War One, Hess was wounded twice, then later became an airplane pilot. After the war, Hess joined the Freikorps, a right-wing organization of ex-soldiers for hire, involved in violently putting down Communist uprisings in Germany.

At the University of Munich, Hess studied political science and came under the influence of the Thule Society, a secret anti-Semitic political organization devoted to Nordic supremacy. Hess was also influenced by Professor Karl Haushofer, a former general whose theories on expansionism and race formed the basis of the concept of Lebensraum (increased living space for Germans at the expense of other nations).

JOINING WITH NAZI

After hearing Adolf Hitler speak in a small Munich beer hall, Hess joined the Nazi Party, July 1, 1920, becoming the sixteenth member. After his first meeting with Hitler, Hess said he felt "as though overcome by a vision."

At early Nazi Party meetings and rallies, Hess was a formidable fighter who brawled with para-military Marxists and others who often violently attempted to disrupt Hitler's speeches.

In 1923, Hess took part in Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch in which Hitler and the Nazis attempted to seize control of Germany. Hess was arrested and imprisoned along with Hitler at Landsberg prison. While in prison, Hess took dictation for Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, and also made some editorial suggestions regarding Lebensraum, the historical role of the British Empire, and the organization of the Nazi Party.

POLITICAL GROWTH

After his release from prison in 1925, Hess served for several years as Hitler's personal secretary in spite of having no official rank in the Nazi Party. In 1932, Hitler appointed him Chairman of the Central Political Commission of the Nazi Party and SS General as a reward for his loyal service. On April 21, 1933, he was made Deputy Führer, a figurehead position with mostly ceremonial duties.

Hess was a shy, insecure man who displayed near religious devotion, fanatical loyalty and absolute blind obedience to Hitler.

 In 1934, Hess gave a revealing speech stating - "With pride we see that one man remains beyond all criticism, that is the Führer. 

This is because everyone feels and knows: he is always right, and he will always be right. The National Socialism of all of us is anchored in uncritical loyalty, in the surrender to the Führer that does not ask for the why in individual cases, in the silent execution of his orders. We believe that the Führer is obeying a higher call to fashion German history. There can be no criticism of this belief."

One of his most visible tasks was to announce the Führer at mass meetings with bellowing, wide eyed fanaticism, as seen in the Nazi documentary, Triumph Of The Will.

Although often rewarded by Hitler for his dogged loyalty, Hess was never given any major influence in matters of state due to his lack of understanding of the mechanics of power and his inability to take any action on his own initiative. He was totally and deliberately subservient to his Führer.

He was granted titles such as Reich Minister without Portfolio, member of the Secret Cabinet Council, and member of the Ministerial Council for Reich Defense. In 1939 Hess was even designated to be Hitler's successor after Göring.


But over time, his limited power was further undermined by the political intrigue of the top Nazis around Hitler who were constantly scheming for personal power. Hess had only one desire, to serve the Führer, and thus lacked the will to engage in self serving struggles for power and lost out primarily to his subordinate and eventual successor, Martin Bormann. As a result, Hitler gradually distanced himself from Hess.

Hoping to regain importance and redeem himself in the eyes of his Führer, Hess put on a Luftwaffe uniform and flew a German fighter plane alone toward Scotland on a 'peace' mission, May 10, 1941, just before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Hess intended to see the Duke of Hamilton, who he had met briefly during the Berlin Olympics in 1936.


CAPTURE ON PEACE TALK

With extra fuel tanks installed on the Messerschmitt ME-110, Hess, an expert flier, made the five hour, 900 mile flight across the North Sea and managed to navigate within 30 miles of the Duke's residence near Glasgow, Scotland. At 6,000 feet Hess bailed out and parachuted safely to the ground then encountered a Scottish farmer and told him in English, "I have an important message for the Duke of Hamilton."

Hess wanted to convince the British Government that Hitler only wanted Lebensraum for the German people and had no wish to destroy a fellow 'Nordic' nation. He also knew of Hitler's plans to attack the Soviet Union and wanted to prevent Germany from getting involved in a two-front war, fighting the Soviets to the east of Germany, and Britain and its allies in the west.

During interrogation in a British Army barracks, he proposed that if the British would allow Nazi Germany to dominate Europe, then the British Empire would not be further molested by Hitler. He insisted that German victory was inevitable and even threatened that the British people would be starved to death by a Nazi blockade around the British Isles unless they accepted his generous peace offer. 

IMPRISONMENT

But Hess also displayed signs of mental instability to his British captors and they concluded he was half mad and represented only himself. Churchill, realizing this, and somewhat infuriated by his statements, ordered Hess to be imprisoned for the duration and treated like any high ranking POW.

Hess was declared insane by a bewildered Hitler, and effectively disowned by the Nazis. His flight ultimately caused Hitler and the Nazis huge embarrassment as they struggled to explain his actions.

During his years of British imprisonment, Hess displayed increasingly unstable behavior and developed a paranoid obsession that his food was being poisoned. 

NUREMBERG TRIAL

In 1945, Hess was returned to Germany to stand trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

In the courtroom, he suffered from spells of disorientation, staring off vacantly into space and for a time claimed to have amnesia. In periods of lucidity he continued to display loyalty to Hitler, ending with his final speech - 

"It was granted me for many years to live and work under the greatest son whom my nation has brought forth in the thousand years of its history. Even if I could I would not expunge this period from my existence. I regret nothing. If I were standing once more at the beginning I should act once again as I did then, even if I knew that at the end I should be burnt at the stake…"

In spite of his mental condition, he was sentenced to life in prison. 

The Soviets blocked all attempts at early release. 

He committed suicide in 1987 at age 92, the last of the prisoners tried at Nuremberg.