Nazi war criminal, Alois Brunner, likely died in Syria four years ago, says man who hunted him

A prominent Nazi hunter revealed that an SS war criminal responsible for the deaths of 128,500 Jews in WWII most likely died four years ago in Syria.

Former SS Lt. Alois Brunner, who would be 102 today, deported thousands of European Jews to the death camps during the Holocaust — becoming one of the most wanted unpunished Nazi war criminals in the world.

But it appears he eluded justice until the very end.

“We received information from a German intelligence operative, who worked in the Middle East for many years, that he died and was buried in Damascus,” Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff said in an interview with Yahoo News on Monday.

Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center office in Jerusalem, coordinates the organization’s research on Nazi war criminals worldwide and has helped bring many before courts.

The ongoing violence in Syria prevented the Simon Wiesenthal Center from verifying Brunner’s death forensically. But they trust the former secret service agent from Germany who relayed the information four years ago.

Zuroff publishes an annual report on the status of Nazi War criminals, intended to encourage governments to maximize their efforts to hold unprosecuted murderers in Hitler’s reign of terror accountable for their actions.

“We try to help bring people who committed crimes against innocent civilians to justice,” he said. “We are only an NGO, so we find the people, find the evidence and find the political will to bring them to justice, which is probably the hardest part of this whole business.”

Zuroff said the account of Brunner’s apparent death became a news story after he mentioned its likelihood during an interview with the U.K.’s Daily Express.

Brunner, born in 1912, was the right-hand man to one of the Holocaust’s chief architects, Nazi SS Lt. Col. Adolf Eichmann.

He sent thousands of European Jews to their deaths: 47,000 from Austria, 44,000 from Greece, 23,500 from France and 14,000 from Slovakia.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center says he lived in Syria for decades after the atrocities.

Brunner was convicted of war crimes in absentia in France but the Syrian government’s refusal to cooperate undermined prosecution efforts, according to the international Jewish human rights organization.