Tomorrow an appeal process will take place at the Higher Administrative Court in Münster in which a journalist is trying to ensure that the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution finally discloses the remaining files on the Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner.
This journalist has been trying since 2012 to gain access to the files stored by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in efforts to discover how Brunner managed to avoid his arrest and trial throughout his life, and which willing helpers and ‘official channels’ aided him in his escape from Germany to Damascus in 1954. Brunner, who supposedly died in Damascus after the year 2000, lived unhindered in that city and repeatedly boasted in public about his savage role in the murder of European Jews as Adolf Eichmann’s right-hand man. An interview that he gave to a German illustrated magazine in 1984 was printed with numerous omissions because of his recurring, bloodthirsty ant-Semitic tirades. Through to the end Brunner remained a permanently hardened anti-Semite and a murderous hater of all Jewish life.
Christoph Heubner, Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee, said in Berlin:
"The bloody trail left by this ‘desk murderer’ and executioner can be traced from Vienna to Berlin, Salonika in Greece, Paris, Southern France and Sered in Slovakia, from where he deported 12,000 people to Auschwitz as late as autumn 1944. That same year, between 20 and 24 July, Brunner had 1,327 Jewish children deported from Paris to the Nazi extermination camps. In addition to this, Brunner was one of the greediest Nazi murderers who systematically enriched themselves with the property of the victims.
He lived in Germany under a false name until 1954. Shortly before being exposed, Brunner managed to escape to Damascus with the help of others. The Auschwitz survivors have an urgent interest in the speedy disclosure of the files relating to him and stored by state institutions in Germany. It is scandalous that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution is still virtually protecting this mass murderer by refusing to disclose the files. And naturally, the survivors are also keenly interested to find out about Brunner’s entrenchment in the official post-war structures of old-Nazi networks in Germany which aided him in his escape to Syria and supported him for many decades in Damascus."
