The infamous “Slayer of Thessaloniki” Alois Bruner and the mystery of his death

His death has been reported several times in recent years and now. The Nazi war criminal, the infamous “Slaughter of ThessalonikiAlois Bruner, responsible for the extermination of 130,000 Jews, could be declared dead this summer, following a death statement now issued by the Dumpling District Court in Vienna.

The court ruling is in the process of formally confirming the death of Bruner, who was born in 1912 in Rohrbrunn in the state of Genersdorf in the present-day Austrian state of Burgenland.

He himself was the “right hand” of Adolf Eichmann, the organizer of the Holocaust, and is believed to be responsible for the deportation and extermination of 130,000 Jews there in German Nazi concentration camps, between 1939 and 1945, having managed, after the war, to take refuge in Syria, where he is said to have lived for many years.

Bruner last appeared in 1999 and since then his death has been reported repeatedly, with 2009 and 2010 being considered the probable years of his death., while, last time, four years ago, a French magazine reported that he had already died in 2001, as broadcast by the Athens News Agency.

According to the Austrian Interior Ministry, no further findings or observations have been made on Bruner since 1999, but he is still officially on the wanted list. war criminals.

The “invitation” from the District Court to “give signs of life” is probably the last chapter to close definitively, after next August, the case of the wanted Nazi war criminal.

As early as December 2014, when the issue of his possible death was raised, the Austrian Ministry of Justice announced that “as long as it is not certain that Alois Bruner is dead, he will remain on the list of declared Nazi war criminals”, reacting to Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said: “Bruner has already passed away in 2010 in Syria, where he has lived for decades.”

As Ephrem Zuroff, then head of the Center named after the 2005 Vienna-born “Nazi hunter” Simon Wiesenthal, said, “Alois Bruner, one of the most wanted Nazis war criminals, he is 99% dead and, although we can not prove it, we are sure that is true. “

Bruner, originally from Austria, along with Austrian war criminal Arybert Heim, also known as the “Doctor of Death”, were announced in July 2007 by the Austrian Ministry of Justice for 50,000 euros each.

Known as the “Slaughterer of Thessaloniki”, Alois Bruner, – who remains on the list of declared Nazi war criminals until the final confirmation of his death, most likely next August- was accused of being transferred to German Nazi concentration camps and the killing of tens of thousands of Greek Jews there, France Hungary, Slovakia and Austria.

Brunner was a close associate of the Nazi chief criminal Eichmann in the so-called “Central Office for Jewish Immigration” in Vienna, of which he was also the director for several years and was responsible for the transfer to 44 Nazi extermination camps. Greece, 47,000 from Austria, 23,500 from France and 14,000 from Slovakia.

Although never brought to justice, Bruner was tried and sentenced to death in absentia in France in 1954 for crimes against humanity, and escaped two attempts at his life with trapped letters, losing an eye and four of his left fingers. hand.

In relation to the second announced in Austria, after coordinated German-American investigations, it was announced in February 2009 that Aribert Heim had not been alive since 1992, having died of bowel cancer in Cairo, where he was said to have lived since of the 1960s as a doctor with a false identity and had converted to Islam.

According to a statement from the Austrian Ministry of Justice, Aribert Heim, born in 1914 in Bad Radkersburg, southern Austria, was charged with “brutally murdering thousands of prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp.” from 1941 until the end of the war and where 3,700 Greeks lost their lives in its crematoria.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center had already launched a campaign in 2003 to find the last surviving Nazi war criminals living in Austria, with a newspaper article entitled “The killers are among us”.

The text called on the public to help identify and prosecute Nazi war criminals who had not yet been brought to justice; however, information gathered in the following years as part of that campaign called “Operation Last Chance” they were meager and worthless.

In Austria, in the first ten years after the war, Nazi war criminals were prosecuted in the “people’s courts”, and 13,000 people were convicted under the law, 43 of whom were sentenced to death. cases were executed.

After 1955 and the withdrawal from Austria of the troops of the four allied powers (USA, Soviet Union, France and Britain) the administration of justice was taken over by regular jury courts.

In the 1960s, 51 cases of persons involved in crimes at the Auschwitz concentration camp were investigated, four of whom were tried in 1972 and eventually acquitted, with the last trial in 1975 involving a concentration camp detainee in Mauthausen, who was also acquitted.

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