Alois Brunner (8 April 1912 – December 2001 or 2010) was an Austrian officer who held the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) during World War II.

Brunner played a significant role in the implementation of the Holocaust through rounding up and deporting Jews in occupied Austria, Greece, France, and Slovakia.

Brunner was responsible for sending over 100,000 European Jews from Austria, Greece, France and Slovakia to ghettos and concentration camps in eastern Europe.

After some narrow escapes from the Allies in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Brunner managed to elude capture and fled West Germany in 1954, first for Egypt, then Syria, where he remained until his death.

En route, Brunner shot and killed Jewish financier Siegmund Bosel, who, although ill, had been hauled out of a Vienna hospital and placed on the train.

According to historian Gertrude Schneider, who as a young girl was deported to Riga on the same train, but survived the Holocaust:Alois Brunner chained Bosel, still in his pajamas, to the platform of the first car—our car—and berated him for having been a profiteer.

As he was personally responsible to Eichmann, he circumvented the typical chain of command that included Helmut Knochen, the Chief of the SS in Paris, and Heinz Rothke, the Jewish Affairs expert of the German police.

From 30 September 1944 to 31 March 1945 he smashed the Jewish underground movement in Slovakia and headed the Sereď concentration camp, from where he had approximately 11,500 people deported to Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen, and Terezín for extermination.

[15] In a 1985 interview with the West German magazine Bunte, Brunner described how he escaped capture by the Allies immediately after World War II.

Anton Brunner, who had worked in Vienna deporting Jews, was confused after the war with Alois due to the shared surname, including by historians such as Gerald Reitlinger.

[20][21][22] He fled West Germany only in 1954, on a fake Red Cross passport, first to Rome, then Egypt, where he worked as a weapons dealer, and then to Syria, where he took the pseudonym of Dr Georg Fischer.

Syria had long refused entry to French investigators as well as to Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, who spent nearly 15 years bringing the case to court in France.

[24] During his long residence in Syria, Brunner was reportedly granted asylum, a generous salary and protection by the ruling Ba'ath Party in exchange for his advice on effective torture and interrogation techniques used by the Germans in World War II.

In a 1987 telephone interview with Chuck Ashman, published in the Chicago Sun Times, Brunner was reported to have said: "All of [the Jews] deserved to die because they were the Devil's agents and human garbage.

"[26] (While the attribution of this quotation to Brunner was never directly disputed, Ashman was a controversial figure among his peers as journalists, and had previously been convicted of check fraud.

[35] After intelligence gathering revealed that Brunner had previously bought herbs from an Austrian mail order firm, Mossad agents broke into its office to steal brochures and envelopes with the company logo.

After a suitable explosive device was created in Israel, the agents then returned to the town in Austria where the office was located in order to post the letter bomb, however the slot in the mailbox was too small for it to fit.

This necessitated in the agents having to repackage the device into a smaller envelope with less explosives, which resulted in Brunner only being injured rather than being killed outright in the blast it created.

[37] On 2 March 2001, he was found guilty in absentia by a French court for crimes against humanity,[38] including the arrest and deportation of 345 orphans from the Paris region (which had not been judged in the earlier trials) and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

[2][48] According to the director of the Wiesenthal Center, Efraim Zuroff, the information came from a "reliable" former German secret service agent who had served in the Middle East.

[49] In 2017, the French quarterly review XXI [fr] published an investigation about Brunner's last years in Syria by journalists Hédi Aouidj and Mathieu Palain.

Three former security guards in charge of the protection of Brunner recounted how the Assad family used him to train intelligence services staff, then afterwards kept him under house arrest in a Damascus basement throughout the 1990s until his death in December 2001.

[50][51] One of the former guards said that Brunner, who went by the name of Abu Hussein,[52] "suffered and cried a lot in his final years", "couldn't even wash" and ate only "an egg or a potato" a day.