Alois Brunner
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Alois Brunner
Alois Brunner (born April 8, 1912) is an Austrian Nazi war criminal who was Adolf Eichmann's right hand man. He was a trouble shooter for the SS deportations to concentration camps from France and, through his role in these deportations, he is considered a mass murderer due to his alleged responsibility for the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews.
Brunner was born in Rohrbrunn, Austria. After the war he is said to have been employed by the CIA because he was fiercely anti-Soviet. He is then alleged to have fled to Syria, possibly in 1954, and hired as a "government advisor"—with some suggesting he was advising the Syrian dictatorship on torture and repression techniques.
While unsuccessfully hunted by Simon Wiesenthal, he is believed to live in Damascus, Syria, under the alias "Dr. Georg Fischer." Germany and other countries have unsuccessfully requested his extradition. He was twice sentenced to death in absentia in the 1950s; one of those convictions was in France in 1954, when its death penalty was still in effect. In August 1987 an Interpol "red notice" (a sort of international arrest warrant) was issued for him. In 1995 German State prosecutors in Cologne and Frankfurt posted a US$333,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.
Brunner lost an eye and several fingers from letter bombs sent to him years ago by Israel's intelligence service, Mossad. In December 1999, rumors surfaced saying that he had died in 1996 and had been buried. However, German journalists visiting Syria said Brunner was living at the Meridian Hotel in Damascus. On March 2, 2001, he was found guilty in absentia by a French court for crimes against humanity and was sentenced to life imprisonment [1] (http://www.guardian.co.uk/nazis/article/0,2763,445717,00.html).
If still alive, he would be considered the last surviving major war criminal of the Holocaust to go unpunished.