SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Alois Brunner belonged to a small nucleus of deportation experts who helped Adolf Eichmann conduct the Final Solution. Scholarly and popular attention has rarely reached beyond Eichmann to these deputies. Among them Alois Brunner was singled out by his Jewish victims as "the most cold-blooded murderer in Eichmann's retinue,"1 and by Eichmann himself as "one of my best men."2 Now in his mid-seventies, Brunner has lived largely forgotten in Damascus for most of the last 30 years.
The postwar obscurity of Alois Brunner derives in part from Syrian protection, and in part from the way books on the Final Solution have neglected him or fused him with another deportation officer named Brunner. For example:
BRUNNER, Anton Alois. Eichmann's most successful Jewish deportation expert.... Hanged by sentence of Vienna People's Court (Russian sector) May 1946;3BRUNNER, Alois (1911-1975);4
BRUNNER, Alois (?) ... Missing.5
Was he hanged, did he die, or has he been missing? And was his name actually Alois? Anton? Or both?
The published Nuremberg trial documents helped initiate the confusion. Their index lists a "Brunner, Anton (SS Hauptsturmfuhrer): Jews, deportation of, from Vienna; Sentence of death for execution of Jews."6 In fact, Anton Brunner worked as a deportation functionary in Vienna where he was condemned and put to death after the war; but he was apparently not a member of the SS, let alone an officer.7 The SS Captain was Alois Brunner, who directed the deportations from Vienna, but also from other locales. The two Brunners worked in the same organization in Vienna, the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, and were known as Brunner I (Alois, the Director) and Brunner 11 (Anton, a deputy). They were mistakenly called brothers after the war, and the Nuremberg trials, at least, did not attempt to sort them out. The impression, still current, that a condemned Nazi named A. Brunner received his just deserts right after the war has doubtless helped Alois Brunner stay at liberty.
In general, postwar trials gave his name very little public hearing. The chief of the Security Police and Security Service in Vienna, Wilhelm Hoettl, could not name at Nuremberg the SS official in charge of Viennese deportations, though Alois Brunner had sent him reports.8 The chief of the Security Police in France, Helmut Knochen, had signed crucial orders with Brunner, but in daily coverage of Knochen's 1954 trial, the public never read Brunner's name.9 Even Adolf Eichmann, under whom Brunner most often served, apparently stumbled over Brunner's identity in testimony at his 1961 trial: "I keep mixing the two Brunners up." Surely Eichmann was disassociating himself from Brunner's activities: "Whether this man was in France or whether he still belonged to department IVb4 (Eichmann's) or perhaps whether he had been reassigned to one of the local SD commanders, this I do not know."10
The defendants who did focus attention on Brunner were his co-workers or subordinates, those with culpability to dischargenamely SS deportation expert Dieter Wisliceny and Anton Brunner. Wisliceny named Brunner in many self- exonerating statements (e.g., "Brunner directed the entire action"),11 but his examiners did not press for details. Anton Brunner asserted "subordination to Brunner I" as his own defense, but the People's Court of Vienna played down Alois's culpability to highlight Antons.12 Anton was hanged, while his superior stayed out of sight. Although postwar trials and histories have left a nebulous image of Brunner, other sources-eyewitness accounts, signed orders, deportation statistics and so on-can testify to the signal breadth of his activity.
The questionnaires, resumes, and correspondence of Alois Brunner, collected in SS files, offer some clues to the formation of a Nazi.13 Born at Rohrbrunn in the Burgenland region of Austria on 8 April 1912, Brunner went to school until age 15 in the town of Furstenfeld, where he was then apprenticed to a merchant, took trade school courses, and worked in a department store. On 21 May 1931, at the age of 19, he joined the Nazi Party's Furstenfeld branch and the SA six months later. In a handwritten summary dated 15 November 1938 he claimed, "I had to resign my job [as salesman] in the department store because of my membership in the SA." After several months (October 1932-January 1933) in a private police academy in Graz, Brunner worked another few months at a savings and loan company in Hartberg. When that closed, he leased a cafe, but after four months "lost [his] entire inheritance." On an SS form four years later, he embellished the stories: he had been fired from a managerial post in the department store "because of my active membership in the SA," and he "had to give up [the cafe] because of my political activities."14 He knew the SS honored such sacrifices.
In September 1933 Brunner joined the Austrian Legion, an illegal paramilitary Nazi organization, and stayed active in it until the Anschluss in March 1938. But he had been dropped from the Nazi Party in April 1933 for not paying his dues. Brunner claimed that his Nazi group in Furstenfeld, had failed to forward his dues to the group in Hartberg where he had moved. Hartberg dues "had to be paid through a bank into the group's account. This was impossible for me because it would have given my company proof that I belonged to an undesirable party." Brunner's Nazi group leader requested Brunner's reinstatement in phrases that help elucidate why this hapless young man should ever have risen within the SS. Brunner was "tireless," ,'my most dependable colleague," the "main support of the Furstenfeld, SA," an "enthusiastic fighter for the idea, . . . [who] sacrificed all his free time to the movement." The Party took its time between cancelling his membership on 1 April 1933 and reinstating it on 17 May 1939.15 No doubt the years of claims and appeals for reinstatement marked Brunner: he could not take the Party's acceptance for granted; he would have to prove himself.
From Brunner's SS questionnaires we learn that he was without religious affiliation or volunteer activities, and that after 1936 he was managing SA intelligence and communications in Eisenstadt and Oberpullendorf. As of 1938 he was living in Vienna, where he joined the SS on 15 November 1938, just a week after Kristallnacht. By 20 April 1940 Brunner had become an officer in the SS Security Service [SD]. As of 15 November 1938 he listed his occupation as "employee of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna." A 1942 questionnaire explained: "My voluntary application to the SD was accepted; I was assigned to the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna where I now serve as Director." Since the Central Office opened on 26 August 1938, Brunner must have been among its earliest employees. According to his later co-worker, Dieter Wisliceny, Brunner started off as Adolf Eichmann's personal secretary in 1938.16
In July 1942 Brunner applied to the SS for permission to marry. His Fiancee, Anni Roder, had worked since 1939 as stenographer in the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, after a stretch as typist for the Hitler Youth propaganda office. Rigorous physical, political, and genealogical examinations declared her and Brunner fit to bear children by SS standards.17
What emerges from Brunner's SS file is a man able to defend his own interests with great persuasiveness, not above fabrication, and determined to achieve the place he believed he deserved; a man with little education but much experience suited to an emigration officepolice training, salesmanship, banking, communications; a man accustomed to taking orders and to engaging himself, with no side interests, in the Nazi cause.
Circumstantial evidence may suggest why an assignment involving anti- Jewish policies attracted him. He probably associated his financial setbacks with Jews-e.g., losing his job in a Jewish department store.18 No doubt he also received antisernitic indoctrination in the Austrian Legion and in his early contacts with Adolf Eichmann. Possibly he suffered from lack of the manly stature that counted for so much in SS imagery. At a height of 5'9" he weighed 123 pounds, which intrigued many of those who dealt with Brunner. "Brunner had an insignificant physique: small in size, poorly built, puny, with an expressionless look, wicked little eyes, and a monotonous voice."19 He appeared "small, dark, nervous, long and pointed nose, slightly bow-legged, slightly hunchbacked. "20"Physically, he is not at all the German type."21 "To judge from his features, he could be Jewish."22 Even his colleague Dieter Wisliceny commented that Brunner had "bad posture, black kinky hair, dark eyes, thick lips, hook nose. Brunner obviously had some gypsy blood."23 "Among his SS cohorts Brunner had the nickname 'Jew Suss,'"24 the sleazy protagonist of an antisernitic film. As the butt of such comments, Brunner may have compensated by moving to get rid of all that could be called Jewish, which was precisely the task of the Central Office of Jewish Emigration where Brunner made his mark.
Vienna: November 1938-February 1943
From the time Germany incorporated Austria on 12 March 1938, Austrian Nazis like Alois Brunner presided over the destruction of the Viennese Jewish community. The earliest measures aimed to force rapid Jewish emigration. With the compliance of Jewish community leader Dr. Josef Loewenherz, who was anxious to protect potential emigres from official and mob harassment, Eichmann set up the Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle ffir judische Auswanderung) in Vienna on 26 August 1938.25 "An idea took shape in my mind: a conveyor belt. The initial application and all the rest of the required papers are put on at one end, and the passport falls off at the other end."26 What Eichmann didn't describe was how much Jews had to load onto the belt to make the passport fall off: the emigration tax, the Jewish tax, all real estate and other assets.
When Alois Brunner entered the Central Office in 1938, he became part of a unique experiment in emigration, one that linked the Nazi practice of persecution with the Jewish practice of protection. In May 1938 the Nazis reorganized Vienna's Jews into one community organization, the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (referred to as the Kultusgemeinde), to handle emigration and welfare. As Eichmann reported on 8 May 1938, "All Jewish organizations in Austria ... are now entirely in my hands."27 Eichmann's experiment made most Jews dependent on a few, and these few dependent on the Central Office for Jewish Emigration.
In October 1939, one month after the onset of war, the idea arose of replacing emigration to various countries by another enterprise: "Give the Jews an autonomous territory, then the whole problem will be solved to the satisfaction of all."28 In mid-October 1939 the Vienna Jewish community provided, on orders, almost a thousand men to build a Jewish "reservation" at Nisko in southeastern Poland. Alois Brunner signed the memorandum of 17 October 1939 about Eichmann's projected "resettlements" in Poland, guaranteeing that "the first transport leaves on Friday, 20 October 1939" with five more transports to follow, each of a thousand people.29
The Nisko transports, now famous as the first organized convoys to Poland, became the pilot projects for mass deportation.30 At the time of these transports, Eichmann said, "Hauptsturmfuhrer Rolf Giinther and the future "Hauptsturmfuhrer Alois Brunner took over the Central Office in Vienna. I wasn't in charge there any more."31 Shortly after, Eichmann "brought Rolf Giinther from Vienna to Berlin as his second-in-command and turned the Vienna Central Office over to ... Alois Brunner."32 Thus Brunner, together with Eichmann and under his command, dispatched the first Jews of Europe to Poland.
In a progress report to Eichmann of 18 October 1939, Brunner wrote:
The resettlement to Poland is underway.... The transports are being put together by the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde in Vienna (as long as this is still possible), and a Jewish transport agency is responsible for the transport. Additionally, 25 security officers under the chief of police will accompany the transport, armed to prevent any escape. In the total resettlement action the gypsies who are now in the Ostmark are included in a separate wagon.
Though Brunner assured Eichmann that "further transports will be taking place every week, Tuesday and Friday, with 1,000 Jews,"33 he could not squeeze from the resistant Kultusgemeinde enough ablebodied men for building the reservation. So he pulled Jewish men from asylums and nursing homes for the second transport on 20 October 1939; and for the third, he rounded up women and children.34
While the Central Office claimed to be colonizing a "Lublin Reservation" approved by high Nazi echelons, Brunner's trains discharged Jews into a wasteland. After about 1,500 Viennese Jews had arrived in the Lublin area, deportations halted in spring 1940, partly because the idea of a Lublin reservation, an autonomous colony, never amounted to much more than fantasy.35
Brunner's unswerving thoroughness in deportations proved him worthy of Eichmann's trust. The lesson of Eichmann's own advancement-promoted because "in Vienna ... I did my job with unusual zeal"36 was hardly lost on Brunner. He rose by acting like Eichmann and by adhering to him.37 According to Wisliceny, Eichmann "very purposely kept the circle of his collaborators at a minimum. Most of them came from the Vienna Central Office."38 Possibly, in the period of illegality before the Anschluss Austrian Nazis became more cohesive and radical, which in turn accounted for their disproportionate prominence in the Nazi persecution program.39 For example, in organizing the deportation of Austrian Jews, Hitler and Eichmann gave orders from Berlin; Brunner assembled convoys in Vienna; Seidl, Burger, and Rahm received them in Theresienstadt (Czechoslovakia) as did Globocnik in Poland: all Austrians. Working with an Austrian brotherhood made deportation a smooth, inside operation.
And that operation presented unmistakable rewards. From cancelled Party member in the 1930s, Brunner advanced to SS-Unter sturmfuhrer on 20 April 1940 (after the successful deportations of fall 1939), then to Obersturmfuhrer on 9 November 1940; and on 30 January 1942 to "Hauptsturmfuhrer (after the massive deportations of November and December 1941).40 By 1942, as Captain in the SS Security Service, representative of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), and Director of the Vienna Central Office, Brunner was able to channel intramural persecution into transnational destruction.
The Fiihrer gave the order in late 1940 to deport "the 60,000 Jews still residing in Vienna."41 Eichmann, as head of RSHA IVb4, the Jewish Affairs section, would coordinate the "total evacuation of Jews" from Austria.42 Dr. Ebner, chief of the Vienna Security Service, issued, in Brunner's presence, the specific directives for deportation.43 And Brunner forced the Jews out. On Brunner's orders Jews with jobs or foreign citizenship lost the benefits of Kultusgemeinde welfare; on Brunner's orders the Kultusgemeinde evicted masses of Jews from their residences.44 As the Central Office coerced these Jews into transports, its emigration activities ground to a halt. As soon as Himmler abandoned the emigration policy, Viennese Jews witnessed the metamorphosis of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration into the central office to prevent it. By early November 1941 Brunner had closed off all destinations but Poland.45
By his daily initiatives, Brunner worked out the mechanisms for preempting Jewish resistance or escape. It was Brunner who turned the Jewish community organization into a funnel for the Central Office. The Central Office turned over its deportation lists to the Kultusgemeinde a few days before each transport; then the SS and the Jewish Order Service, created by the Central Office in 1941 with commissions signed by Brunner, rounded up the Jews for deportation.46 For instance, Brunner ordered the Kultusgemeinde to prepare 500 Jewish residents of old age homes for deportafion,47 and the Jewish Order Service had to help round up Jews at home and raid the Jewish hospital.48 What led the Kultusgemeinde to provide information and prepare transports for Brunner? His financial leverage, certainly: Brunner controlled the Jewish assets absorbed by the Central Office, so that all Kultusgemeinde welfare projects received their subventions from the Central Office; Dr. Loewenherz had to solicit Brunner for an Jewish needs.49Bureaucratic leverage too: it was Brunner who inspected the Kultusgemeinde and allowed it to continue, or ordered it to reduce its staff, as in November 1940 and again in August 1941.50 Brunner exerted ultimate pressure by demonstrating that if the Kultusgemeinde refused to make selections and roundups, he would make them himself.51
Brunner developed the method for balancing threats against favors. He would get prisoners released from Dachau and Buchenwald if the Kultusgemeinde would put them on a transport to Poland; he would not "resettle" Jews with valid emigration papers if the Kultusgemeinde would assemble others punctually; he would exempt Kultusgemeinde employees from transports if they would make everyone else available.52
What enlisted the Kultusgemeinde was this power of Brunner's to permit exceptions and exemptions. On 30 September 1941, when Brunner announced a new wave of deportations, he demanded assistance from the Kultusgemeinde and promised in return not to deport orphans until the spring.53 To ensure Kultusgemeinde compliance, the Central Office in November 1941 agreed not to deport wounded or decorated veterans, Jewish administrators, residents of old age homes, complete invalids, those with emigration arrangements or in labor camps.54 In principle, Brunner permitted certain exemptions accepted by high-ranking police and SS officials such as Muller and Ebner, or requested by the German Army.55 in practice, Brunner disregarded exemptions at will: e.g., when the head of the Jewish War Invalids Organization pulled wounded war veterans off deportation trains, Brunner fired him.56
Brunner's practice of approving and then disregarding exemptions caused severe dissension within the Jewish community. The Organization of Jewish War Invalids learned to suspect the Kultusgemeinde, calling it "nothing but an institution to carry out the orders of the Central Office." In the Kultusgemeinde offices, Rabbi Murmelstein even told the veterans' representative, "Don't say anything, because whatever you say here, Brunner will know tomorrow."57
As for other presumably exempted categories, in fall 1942 the Central Office demanded a fixed number of Kultusgemeinde personnel for deportation, thereby annulling the community workers' exemption.58 Brunner was clearly approachable about canceling the exemptions of those with valid emigration visas.59 And as for those in old age homes, they went with the rest of the deportees over age 60-altogether 16,000 in 1942.60 Brunner's deputy Anton Brunner deported "Jews living in mixed marriages, even people of mixed race and of foreign nationality, all of whom were at that time exempted from evacuation."61 Sooner or later Brunner deported everyone, virtually without exception or exemption. By the end of summer 1942, the population of Viennese Jews had sunk below 10,000.62
Brunner's hard line on deportations derived from the conventions of German antisernitism. A Jewish veteran recalled Brunner's screaming: "We lost the first Jewish war, but the second Jewish war we will not lose."63 Brunner reveled in the topsy-turvy of Jewish impoverishment and SS enrichment-making Dr. Loewenherz beg for scanty allocations, while he confiscated Jewish possessions and set himself up in a "noble villa with the most modish furniture, like a museum."64 He turned his own behavior into an object lesson. In Berlin (fall 1942), he kept 500 Jews standing at attention for six hours while he sat casually before them with Eichmann and his assistant, Giinther, laughing, smoking, and looking "ridiculously young."65
In October 1942 a group of Gestapo officers and Jewish aides from Vienna, under Alois Brunner's command, arrived in Berlin, apparently to sharpen local Gestapo tactics.66 or as Brunner put it, to show "those damn Prussian pigs how to handle schweinhund Jews."67 As one Berlin Jew testified, "Things changed completely. Brunner in order to speed up the action started in broad daylight to catch and round up Jews."68 As in Vienna, he coerced Jewish functionaries into aiding in roundups; anyone who refused or who helped Jews would be shot and his family deported.69 Brunner threatened to shoot one Jewish leader for every Jew absent from collection centers: when 20 Jews escaped, he took 20 officials, shot eight, and sent their families the ashes before deporting them.70Under such pressures one Jewish leader had a fatal heart attack in Brunner's presence, while Brunner yelled, "Get that Jew out of here. I don't like the way he's lying there."71 Long after "Brunner and his men disappeared" (in late 1942 or early 1943), the Berlin Gestapo retained his practices, such as humiliating Jews and arresting them openly on the streets.72
Clearly, Brunner's activities set precedents for Nazi persecution beyond Austria. The Viennese system became a model when it succeeded. "The Central Office for Jewish Emigration (in Vienna) was a first in the German administrative machine," according to Eichmann. "The Prague Central Office . . . simply followed the example of Vienna."73 Eichmann announced a Berlin Central Office "based on the example of Vienna,"74 while Heydrich recommended Vienna-style offices in other major German cities.75 It was Brunner who had developed the prototype. In Vienna the SS first established the Jewish community's collective responsibility. Though the cooptation of Jewish leaders began with Eichmann, it was under Brunner's leadership that the Central Office gained its stranglehold. It was Brunner who retooled the conveyor belt to discharge persons instead of passports, sending out the first wave of Europe's Jews to Poland. When, after a moratorium, Hitler insisted in mid-September 1941 that the Reich be cleared of Jews by year's end, it was Brunner who jumped the gun again, informing the Kultusgemeinde, three weeks before the official order, to get ready for new deportations. In the earliest deportations, of October 1939, to the Lublin Reservation, and those after October 1941 to the ghettos and camps of the East, Brunner's Central Office played the exemplary role.
"He was ... one of the best tools of Eichmann. He never had an opinion of his own and, as Eichmann himself described him, he was 'one of my best men.'"76 This description of Brunner by his SS colleague Dieter Wisliceny suggests that "the men who worked with Eichmann were accustomed to carry out orders blindly." Eichmann affirmed this: "I noticed no resistance."77 Brunner's personal responsibility, however, went beyond following Eichmann's orders. Brunner's deportations outdid the expectations of other officials. He deported orphans, the hospitalized, war wounded, spouses in mixed marriages, communal officials-all categories that might have received exemptions.
Moreover, Brunner's personal treatment of Jews exceeded the needs of his policy. He set the example for subordinates like Anton Brunner, allowing them to maltreat Jews because he did so himself. "As brutal as possible," witnesses called him.78 He wore a white glove on the hand that beat Jews.79 He "abused young and old women.... He poured cold water over them-in December 1942. The other abuses were so barbaric that the clerk, who was probably used to a lot, had to leave the room. I could give many examples of how this sadistic inhuman character worked."80
Finally, Brunner most certainly knew the fate of those he deported. He knew that deportation no longer meant "colonization" because the highest authorities had called off the Jewish reservation idea by summer 1940.81 He knew how few deportees ever returned, because he arrested those few when they did.82 If the Security Police and SD informed the Gauleiter of Vienna about exterminations, then surely they informed their own deportation expert.83 If Brunner's subordinates told deportees they would need nothing at all in Poland, then Brunner knew their destination.84 If in the summer of 1942 Eichmann told Wisliceny, his man in Slovakia, of the order to annihilate all Jews, then he was unlikely to keep it from his man in Vienna.85 Later testimony by Wisliceny stated that in fall 1942, "I ascertained that Eichmann had discussed this new order [for the Final Solution] with several of his staff. I can now indicate the names of those people." Brunner's name headed the list.86
Brunner understood the destination of his transports. According to the Commandant of Theresienstadt, Brunner was there at the time with Eichmann.87 Eyewitnesses also testified to Brunner's journey in February 1942 to the ghettos of Riga and Minsk. Travelling with a convoy from Vienna, Brunner tortured and killed a famous Viennese banker-philanthropist en route to Riga. Most of the other passengers went directly from the transport to mobile killing vans or mass execution graves in the nearby Rumbula Forest.88
From the above evidence, Brunner emerges as the person accountable for cancelling exemptions, conducting deportations, and comprehending the outcome. What Brunner combined in Viennabureaucratic centrality, Jewish cooptation, persistent deception, and unstinting terror-was noted by higher authorities and would be activated elsewhere.
47,000 deported from Vienna under Brunner's command.89
Salonica: February-May 1943
Brunner's next assignment proved his solid standing with Eichmann, who posted him as deportation expert to Salonica. When the Germans occupied Macedonia in April 1941, they placed a grid of anti-Jewish regulations over the occupied territory, but stopped short of deportations. As late as 1942 the mass of Jews-over 50,000 were still living in Salonica, Greece's third largest city and the center of Sephardic Jewish culture in Europe.90 Though Jews had suffered famine and typhus in 1941 as well as forced labor in 1942, yet at the peak of deportations in Europe, they could still call Salonica home.
Then Eichmann's office turned its attention to Greece. In late January 1943, Eichmann told Wisliceny that "Hauptsturmfuhrer Brunner had been named by him for the technical execution of all operations in Greece," while Wisliceny's job "was to make contacts with the authorities and governmental agencies."91 Wisliceny and Brunner left together for Salonica early in February 1943.
Their orders were "for preparing and carrying out the expulsion of Jews from the region of Salonica, as envisaged in the framework of the Final Solution of the Jewish problem in Europe."92 Six months earlier Eichmann had explained to Wislieny that "Final Solution" meant that Jews were "annihilated biologically."93 During interrogation, Eichmann confirmed Wisliceny's assertion: "Of course we discussed it."94 Without question, Brunner knew at least as much as Wisliceny.
Wisliceny and Brunner arrived in Salonica in February 1943 conscious of what their job involved. Wisliceny knew that "the Salonica Jews had lived in Greece since the fifteenth century when they had fled from the Inquisition in Spain."95 Reciprocally, one Jewish resident in Salonica easily identified the new arrival as "the Brunner who solved the Jewish problem in Vienna."96
Brunner and Wisliceny immediately set up a Sonderkommando for Jewish Affairs. It superseded all other German agencies, and Wisliceny even informed Jewish leaders that "not the Military Commander, but they, the SS Department, will be responsible for actions against the Jews."97 Brunner and Wisliceny issued orders for the imposition of Jewish stars and the creation of ghettos-a prelude to deportation. The SS forced Jews into the ghetto (a district built by Baron de Hirsch 50 years earlier for Jews fleeing Russian pogroms) and sealed it on I March 1943.98 A German observer noted that Brunner, Wisliceny, and their staff isolated the Jews "with overwhelming speed" and planned "an intensification of the measures against the Jews of the city."99
While Jews crowded into the Hirsch ghetto, the Jewish Affairs Sonderkommando settled into a spacious mansion, formerly a Jewish residence (as was the Central Office in Vienna) at 42 Velissariou Street. A black death's-head banner floated over the upper floor, where Wishceny and Brunner had sumptuous private quarters. Below, the offices and meeting rooms faced a garden, for which the new residents ordered rare plants brought from abroad. There "they strutted about, surrounded by flowers and objects of rare luxury"; there "the SS organized orgies."100 And there in the cellars they set up torture rooms.
Various survivors of the cellars have described Brunner as "an SS officer infamous for his cold and ferocious sadism ... true mastermind of the police."101
The most ferocious of the 12 executioners was Brunner, who personified teutonic sadism in all its horror. He flogged his victims with a horsewhip made of thin leather thongs threaded with iron wire. Then he terrorized them with a pistol which he aimed against their necks, foreheads, or temples.... Brunner rushes up. Fuming with rage, he interrogates them himself. The response he gets doesn't satisfy him. He holds a revolver in each hand. He orders the two patients to turn toward the wall and he levels his two weapons at their necks, fingers on the triggers. Terrorized, imploring, our two men make complete confessions. They are thoroughly thrashed and they leave this hen bathed in blood. 102
Along with torture, Brunner applied tactics he had perfected in Vienna for manipulating Jewish leadership. He and Wisliceny issued their commands (e.g., for a ghetto, curfew, collective bank account, and Jewish star) to Salonica's chief rabbi, who passed them on to the Jews. When Brunner wanted Jews collected for deportation, he also turned to the Jewish authorities, pressing Rabbi Koretz as he had Dr. Loewenherz.103 Then the SS took 25 Jewish leaders hostage; for the moment, no one tried to escape so as not to expose the hostages to reprisal.104
Altogether, only 3,400 of Salonica's 56,000 Jews fled to the relative safety of Athens.105 It could be that Brunner's careful sequence kept the Jews in place: reorganizing the community and working with its leaders, isolating it, keeping hostages, and going after Jewish property, so that the Jews "believed that this was all the Germans wanted, that they were not after their lives, but after their money."106
On 10 March 1943, "Eichmann sent Brunner a message that the compulsory evacuation (Aussiedlung) of Jews was to start at once."107 The first deportation order went out on 14 March 1943, and the next day the convoy pulled out from the tracks behind the ghetto with 2,800 people. Brunner was there to see it off.108 Thereafter Brunner sent off four transports in March, nine in April, two in May, and at least one in early June, before he left Salonica.109 The size of each transport ranged from 2,500 to 2,800 people, in sealed boxcars.110 Even Eichmann later commented, "A pretty big load, it seems to me. But I don't know what reasons they may have had down there for putting in such loads."111 Brunner's team required the Jewish community to provide food, but it hardly lasted the entire journey to Poland.112 Red Cross representatives who tried to supply milk to the convoys were sometimes told to go away.113
Brunner mainly provisioned the convoys with lies. The most effective scam involved currency exchange.
They told us that "your money has to be exchanged. You will get the equivalent of what you deposit in zlotys."114They even distributed receipts to us bearing the name of the Bank of Cracow.115
In fact, as the deportation experts knew,
the cash which the Jews possessed was taken away and put into a communal account at the Bank of Greece. After the Jews had been evacuated from Salonica this account was taken over by the German military administration. 116
The deportees also received maps of the areas they would supposedly colonize as Jewish territory.117 This deception-modelled on the defunct Lublin reservation plan-convinced the deportees: survivors recalled believing "The men would work, the women would stay in the camps. Once the war was over, we'd come back.... And above all, it was asserted that we would be received by the Jewish community of Cracow."118 In fact, the Jewish community of Cracow had been liquidated on 13 March 1943, two days before Brunner began sending convoys from Salonica.
As the transports rolled, Brunner's Jewish Affairs Sonderkommando nourished other deceptions: only workers would be deported, while the middle class, intellectuals, community leaders, and Jewish police were to remain in Salonica. And so they did for a time, till informed of their own deportations to the so-called privileged ghetto of Theresienstadt; in reality, the trains took them to Auschwitz.119
Who was really responsible for the Salonica deportations? Most official communications bore Wisliceny's or Military Commander Merten's signatures. But from Wisliceny's perspective, Brunner ran the operation: "Brunner directed the entire action in Salonica in person. . . . Brunner was not subordinate to me, he worked independently"; and during Wisliceny's absence from Salonica in April and May 1943, the operation was "carried out by Brunner alone."120 Wisliceny designed his postwar testimony to exculpate himself, but it has stood up compared to other evidence.121 Eichmann later commented: "Brunner operated independently? Obviously, Wisliceny, who outranked him [in fact, they had the same rank though Wisliceny had seniority] was in command in Salonica."122Eichmann on trial wanted to distance himself from Brunner. But in 1943 it was Brunner to whom he cabled the orders to begin the deportations. When Wisliceny informed Eichmann of a typhus epidemic in the Hirsch ghetto, Eichmann cabled Brunner-not Wisliceny-to disregard the typhus and keep the transports rolling.123 (Those trains in fact brought typhus to Auschwitz.)124 Moreover, Brunner was accountable for the quotas: "Upon the departure of each transport a message was sent to Eichmann in Berlin stating the number of heads sent. I have seen copies of these cables in a folder kept by Brunner and upon completion of the movement of Jews from Northern Greece, Brunner made a summary report to Eichmann."125 Eichmann-in his behavior at the time if not in his later testimony-considered Brunner the master of the situation.
Ultimately, the deportation relied more on Brunner's capacities than Eichmann's or Wisliceny's. The "technical conduct of deportations"- Brunner's mandate-comprised the preparation and deception of the community as well as the frequency and condition of the convoys. The convoys from March through June 1943 eliminated almost 80 percent of Salonica's Jewish population.126 After two weeks' travel in sealed trains, Greek deportees had nothing to sustain them through the first selections at Auschwitz.127
The Reich Security Main Office wanted speed, an operation lasting "six to eight weeks."128 Brunner managed it. Halfway through, after having sent almost 20,000 people to Auschwitz, Brunner turned 31. In May 1943, according to Wisliceny, "Brunner was preparing the last shipment ... and upon completion of the last shipment, Brunner was transferred to Paris for his next assignment."129
44,000 deported from Salonica under Brunner's command.
France: June 1943-August 1944
In France, deportations had not moved as smoothly as elsewhere, and those responsible decided they "must catch-up."130 Although 50,000 Jews had been deported by spring 1943, Eichmann sent Brunner to Paris to accelerate the process.131
Brunner first made his presence known in France on 17 June 1943 at Drancy, France's main transit camp, located just outside Paris. When he took command of Drancy a week later, a three-month period without deportations ended. According to Georges Wellers, doctor at Drancy, "all inmates of the camp were ordered to report one by one to this man Brunner. He interrogated every single prisoner, and after three days of interrogations, on the 21st June, the transport went out, all of which was composed by Brunner himself."132
In matters of deportation, force majeure cut through the usual structure of authority. The German Embassy deferred to the Gestapo, travelling to its offices at 72 Avenue Foch for instruction on Jewish questions. And even within the Gestapo, Brunner evidently superseded Heinz Rothke, the official expert on Jewish affairs. 133 Even the Chief of Security Police in France, Helmut Knochen, produced his major policy directive (14 April 1944) only with Brunner's co-signature.134 In deportation affairs, Brunner waited for no one but Eichmann, cabling only Eichmann and the commandants of Auschwitz and other camps, to clear transports. Indeed, a list of deportation directors in the field-compiled by Wisliceny for the Nuremberg trials-included only Brunner's name for France.135
In the transit camp of Drancy, Brunner exerted sole authority. Witnesses reported that Brunner's arrival at Drancy signaled a radical change in the camp. Brunner "organized everything in his own way according to a system I later was to encounter in Auschwitz and Buchenwald."136 First, Brunner fired all the French guards and officials, forbidding them access to the camp's interior.137 Then Jewish prisoners were chosen to run the camp as administrators and police, with a handful of SS guards supervising them. Brunner's prison in the cellars of the camp began to punish anyone, even the old and sick, for slight infractions.138 One day he ordered the central court covered with cement, buildings painted, lawns planted-all with inmate labor and supplies from the Union Generale des Israelites de France, the UGIF, a Nazi-initiated Jewish council. Inmates realized the improvements spelled propaganda-"to prove Drancy a comfortable, beautiful place" and "a true paradise where the inmates five in joy."139 Under French control, Drancy inmates had received mail and packages; Brunner prohibited both, a source of apprehension to charitable organizations like the UGIF and the JDC (Joint Distribution Committee), which reported "real famine since the sending of food packages was discontinued."140 No one could have ignored the changes that Brunner's presence brought.
His successes in Vienna and Salonica had taught Brunner how to manipulate Jewish leadership. In a meeting with UGIF leaders on 30 June 1943, Brunner labelled Drancy deportations "unsatisfactory" and announced that the camp would be "totally modified during the next few days." He ordered the UGIF to set up workshops and a more efficient infirmary, to surpervise the searching of prisoners, and most important, to take over provisioning the camp and the transports.141 The first requisitions suggest Brunner's intention to force UGIF collaboration in a massive roundup: 40,000 index cards and 500 armbands printed "Jewish Order Service." After 5 July 1943 provisions for Drancy ceased to come from French authorities and came (in expanded amounts and variety) only from the UGIF.142 Tightening the entire process of deportation, Brunner made it serve German material needs. For example, each transport carried supplies, provided at exorbitant cost by the UGIF. But deportees who survived testified, "We did not get any food and only once during the whole journey did we obtain drink."143 The supply inventories usually had a note appended by Brunner, "that these precious food supplies not be used for camp inmates."144
In some cases, Brunner received less than he demanded from the UGIF. The UGIF did not round up relatives of Drancy inmates and did not stop Jewish escapes to Italy and Spain.145 But in general, Brunner kept UGIF leaders in harness by threatening their personal safety and UGIF welfare programs. When two young men escaped from Drancy, Brunner forced the UGIF to appeal for their recapture by arresting the UGIF vice-president.146 The UGIF also complied when Brunner demanded a map of France locating all UGIF institutions (orphanages, old age homes, etc.), since Brunner announced that he would consider all unlisted institutions illegal.147
With a very small number of German assistants, Brunner effectively controlled thousands of Jewish inmates at Drancy.148 He managed this by introducing a system that placed each prisoner in one of six categories; the worst was Category B, those liable for immediate deportation. Brunner interrogated arriving prisoners many times about their race, citizenship, and also about their relatives on the outside. On the basis of this information, he invented a special category of prisoners labeled "waiting for family"; they were safe from deportation until the moment their families arrived.149
Classification in safer categories, such as "half-Jewish," "spouse of Aryan," or "wife of prisoner of war" depended on having proof and making the right impression on Brunner; a poor impression and he simply tore up the documents and passports in front of the prisoner, making her or him deportable.150 Brunner kept all categories potentially transferable to B, so that safer prisoners had an incentive to stay in line.
Other Brunner innovations turned prisoners into one another's antagonists. One was the Order Service, which handled the prisoners and brought them out for the convoys. Any order disregarded, any prisoner absent, and the Order Service itself got placed on the next transport. Another novelty was "Brunner's police," that is, Jews who, under his orders, "compel persons at liberty to surrender themselves for internment under threat of torture to members of families already in Drancy."151 "The names of persons to be arrested and brought to Drancy were given by Brunner. Sometimes it did not even involve the arrests of relatives, but of persons somehow interesting to Brunner."152 Most prisoners refused to serve as socalled missionaries, but some acquiesced, to keep their own children from being deported.153 Brunner disbanded these "missions" after a few months since those at liberty learned to resist such threats.
Inmates called the camp "Drancy la Creve," Drancy the Killer. Reports described the terror introduced by Brunner.
Every Jew arrested or brought to the camp submitted to a brutal interrogation by Captain Brunner or his acolytes.154The walls of Captain Brunner's office were covered with bloodstains and bullet holes.155
There were whippings; there was a special kind of torture ... called the 'spinning top' torture. They forced people to go around in circles, at least ten times and after a few times, the people would faint.... Brunner in person was at times present during this so-called amuse- ment.156
Sometimes Brunner pulled out his pistol and shot into crowds of prisoners. Regularly visiting the prison, "for an hour he puts his hand to beating the prisoners with a riding-whip."157
Brunner also dominated inmates by playing on their fear of reprisal. Jewish camp administrators knew, for example, that if one prisoner escaped, at least 20 functionaries would be deported.158 Brunner considered all doctors at the Rothschild hospital that served the camp to be hostages for any missing patient.159 When the UGIF failed to locate two escapees, its Paris leaders were held hostage and then deported.160 When Brunner's men discovered an escape tunnel in September 1943, not only those involved, but the chief of Jewish camp administration and 65 assistants selected at random, were tortured and deported.161
Torture and reprisal kept inmates in line, but Brunner, as always, specialized in deception. According to a camp physician, Brunner himself created the "methods directed at hoodwinking and deceiving us."162 In Drancy he introduced two ruses he had used in Vienna and Salonica, as well as some new ones. Each prisoner had to deposit French money against a nicely printed receipt guaranteeing that "the equivalent amount will be reimbursed in zlotys by the Council of Elders of the Jewish community in [Poland]."163(The "Council of Elders" rang truer than the "Bank of Cracow," the rubric he had used in Salonica.) "Since we heard about money which we would be receiving, we thought it would be a place where one could buy goods."164 Prisoners believed what they were told: that "the convoys go to the ghetto of Auschwitz ... where the older people do nothing, the children go to Jewish schools, the men and women able to work labor in factories and mines."165 The authorities carefully fabricated the basis for such fantasies. The RSHA asked French officials not to mention "Auschwitz" as a destination, and circulated glowing reports about Polish camp life in French papers.166 Brunner assured the UGIF that he planned regular mail service between France and the deportees in Poland.167Officials in Drancy showed inmates postcards, apparently from healthy, hard-working inmates at Birkenau.168
Even Brunner's handling of supplies led prisoners to believe in a labor- camp destination. For the first time, under Brunner, "the deportees were also encouraged to take belongings with them [on the transports] and thus we thought that we were being taken to labor camps"; meanwhile, special teams stole Jewish goods and collected them at a Paris railway terminal, where Brunner "would appear a few times a week to survey the situation."169 Under Brunner's regime the UGIF received orders to supply Drancy deportees with enormous stocks for what he called labor camp. Then he would accuse the UGIF of "sabotage for not giving them enough supplies to meet their needs while laboring."170 All the goods assembled at Drancy by these means and sent off reassuringly with the deportees were recycled to the Reich from Auschwitz.
Two circumstances obstructed the smooth deportation of all the Jews in France: the German agreement with Vichy authorities not to deport Jews of French nationality, and the refusal of Italy to implement the Final Solution in its territories. Germany's Fascist ally occupied eight French d6partements bordering Italy after Germans overran the southern French zone in fall 1942. Word went out that Italian authorities were not assisting the deportations. As a result, Jews began funneling into the Italian zone from German-occupied France, and were concentrated around Nice, where the new French prefect offered Jews legal residence."171 Heinz Röthke of the Gestapo reported: "The Italian zone of influence, particularly the C6te d'Azur, has become the Promised Land for the Jews in France. In the last few months there has been a mass exodus of Jews from our occupation zone into the Italian zone ... [where] they have been placed in the best hotels."172
Immediately after the Allies signed an armistice with Italy (3 September 1943), Brunner broke into the Italian zone. On 4 September Röthke sent out a confidential order:
Hauptsturmfiihrer Brunner accompanied by HauptscharfUhrer Bruckler will arrive in Lyon and Marseille on the 5th or 6th to prepare everything on the spot and to obtain an idea of the local conditions. When the capture of the Jews is completed, they will be transferred ... to the Jewish camp in Drancy, whence after thorough examination of their citizenship they will be immediately evacuated to the east.173
Brunner reported to Röthke that the retreating Italians were transporting Jews by truck to the safety of Italy.174 He also reported in person to Eichmann, who met him in the former Italian zone.175
The Italians tried to protect Jews from Brunner's operation, as they had done in Salonica; moreover, the refugee grapevine informed Jews of the safest spots, and clandestine presses printed false identification papers at the rate of 20,000 a month.176 Brunner-who had compelled Jewish leaders to keep files in Vienna, Salonica, and Paris, and who had tortured Drancy inmates for addresses-could not get his hands on a list of Jews. The Italians had no lists and the French prefect also claimed to have none.177 Then Brunner resorted to the street-by-street dragnets. As described by numerous eyewitnesses,
the operations were led by Brunner, the executioner of Drancy, in person.... The Nazis barricaded a street, burst into the hotels, and gathered up all those who by identity card or physiognomy appeared to be Jews. In these operations the Gestapo relied very little on the French police.178
Without lists and confronted with widespread use of falsified papers, Brunner fell back on primitive measures: "Prisoners have to take down their pants. They are classified Jews or Aryans by whether or not they are circumcised."179
In these roundups, when a subordinate tortured or killed someone, Brunner received the report.180 so According to a Jewish aide Brunner brought from Drancy,
a team of 12 to 14 torturers under Brunner's command proceeded to arrest Jewish men, women, and children, mostly at night.... Among the arrested there were the ill and feeble, the elderly, nursing babies, pregnant women; all underwent the violence and torture of these brutes.
When one man arrived in a coma, with a fractured skull, Brunner refused to have him treated for a week "he's faking, he'd better talk" until the man died."181 Such scenes caused the historian Leon Poliakov, then an eyewitness, to conclude:
The 'human hunt' on the C6te d'Azur in the autumn of 1943 surpassed in horror and brutality everything of this kind previously known, at least in Western Europe.182
After destroying the Jewish sanctuary in the former Italian zone, Brunner returned to Drancy in early November 1943 to close other gaps in the French operation. First, he dismantled the structure of exemptions all over France. Disregarding the exemptions UGIF personnel and their families had received when Röthke ran the deportations, Brunner closed the UGIF's Paris social service center on 30 July 1943 and arrested the staff, whether Jewish or not.183 "To acquaint them directly with the needs of the camp," Brunner brought UGIF administrators to Drancy and deported most of them.184 By December 1943, with most UGIF leaders gone, "every new person assuming a prominent part in Jewish social work" risked deportation.185 In fact, any exemption provoked Brunner to reverse earlier practices (e.g., in 1942 the Germans had released 817 people-the old and the young-from transit camps).186 When doctors at Drancy submitted the usual lists of those too ill for deportation, Brunner's men subverted the intention, deciding on impulse to deport an the contagious, or the pregnant, or new mothers.187 While German officials before Brunner had allowed Jewish women to remain at the Rothschild Hospital after childbirth, Brunner transferred them to Drancy for deportation; he also deported patients with tuberculosis and cancer.188 The spouses of Aryans lost their exemptions and if they were without children, Brunner reclassified them as deportable.189 Mixed marriages contracted after 1940 were dissolved on Brunner's and Knochen's orders, and the Jewish spouse arrested. Other mixed marriages were grudgingly exempted by Brunner, to comply with RSHA regulations, and to prevent "intervention on the part of the French."190 The wives of prisoners of war, formerly exempt, found themselves on Brunner's transports to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.191
Before Brunner's arrival, the Gestapo had negotiated with Vichy authorities, agreeing to the exemption of French Jews in exchange for French assistance in the deportation of foreign Jews. Brunner's presence in France marked the definitive end of any distinction between French and foreigners: in Brunner's dominion a Jew was a Jew. In this regard, Brunner did more than implement orders from Berlin. He set local goals and procedures for eliminating French Jews, such as planning to arrest 20,000 Paris Jews during June 1943, and to deport those naturalized after 1927.192 At a higher level, Brunner signed (with Helmut Knochen, Chief of Security Police in France) one of the most important policy directives of the Occupation, on 14 April 1944:
All persons who are Jews within the meaning of the law are to be arrested immediately without regard of nationality or other circumstances.... All Jews must be taken from French labor camps for foreigners, from all penal institutions [where Jews had discovered safety] and prisons.
All Jews of French nationality, as well as others, would be evacuated to the East.193
Brunner was also responsible for reactivating Eichmann's orders of summer 1942 to deport children from France.194 When Brunner took over deportation operations a year later, he specifically marked children as targets. The 14 April 1944 order from Brunner and Knochen specified that "small children who are living in children's homes must also be included in this [arrest] action."195 Brunner demanded up-to-date information from the UGIF on children in all Jewish orphanages and children's centers.196 Alarmed cables reached the American joint Distribution Committee:
MASS DEPORTATIONS MEN WOMEN CHILDREN ALL AGES AND FORCED LABOR. AUTHORITIES THREATENING CLOSE ALL CHILDREN'S HOMES AND DEMANDING FULL LISTS JEWISH CHILDREN ALL OVER FRANCE.197
Agencies began transferring Jewish children to the presumed safety of southern France, but the former unoccupied zone no longer provided sanctuary from Brunner's roundups. For example, 30 orphans of deportees were dispatched from Marseille to Drancy, while "the Germans took 60 hostages beforehand" to prevent protest or escape;198 100 small children from a clandestine center in Nice lost their refuge, as did many others throughout France.199 When Jewish organizations continued to find sanctuaries, Brunner challenged leaders of the UGIF: "So you continue to hide from us your children, do you?"200
On 6 April 1944 a cable arrived at the Paris Gestapo office: "The home for Jewish children, 'Child Colony/ at Izieu (Ain) was raided this morning and a total of 41 children aged from 3 to 13 were apprehended."201 This cable was signed by Klaus Barbie, and the case prepared against him in France since 1983 centers on it. Less noted is the addendum pencilled on the cable when it reached police headquarters in Paris:
Matter discussed in the presence of Dr. v. B. [unidentified] and Hauptsturrnffihrer Brunner. Dr. v. B. stated that in cases of this kind, special measures were provided for the billeting of the children by Obersturmffihrer Röthke. Hauptsturmfuhrer Brunner stated that he knew of no such instructions or plans and that on principle he did not approve of such special measures."202
In April Brunner transported most of the children of Izieu to Auschwitz.
In May Brunner increased the numbers, dispatching three convoys with 3,078 deportees. "He had to beat his personal deportation record each month. The game gave him pleasure."203 But this became harder in June and July 1944, when the Allied advance blocked his supply of Jews from the provinces. "He had a reserve in Paris," according to a witness,
something to dig into when the provinces yielded nothing more ... the children's centers kept by the UGIF. Knowing the location of these centers, he sent out his buses three nights in a row, July 20 to 24 [19441. . . . Brunner brought to Drancy 500 children ages one to fifteen.204
By all reports, the inmates of Drancy sprang into action, doing everything possible to shield the children from hunger and cold and trauma, until the buses took them to the trains that took them to Poland.205
On principle, Brunner allowed no special provisions for children on deportation trains. Three hundred children, including an unaccompanied newborn, left with the last regular deportation on 31 July 1944. One inmate watched them go:
The last deportation of Captain Brunner! There were 60 children per wagon- cattle-cars, you understand, and locked shut! Only one pot of drinking water and two or three adults to take care of the little ones, one, two, three and four years old.... I am afraid in fact that these children will never see their parents again because at Drancy so many little 'boarders' ceased to remember their family names.206
The evidence shows that Brunner filled the quotas with children less from fear of his superiors 207 than from personal conviction. For example, when Kurt Schendel of the UGIF spoke with Brunner on 20 July 1944, Brunner demanded retribution for an alleged Jewish assassination of Germans:
Brunner explained to me that for him nothing stood above the blood of a German soldier, and that he had decided to arrest the young people in our centers and simultaneously those in the children's homes.... I tried in every possible way to change Brunner's opinion ... finally insisting that it was not an act of courage to lay the blame on little children. I told him that I was 100 percent Jewish and that I was wining to be deported if he would leave the children alone. He countered in his every response that these children were 'future terrorists.' There was nothing to do; it was impossible to move this man; no argument, no sentiment had any hold on him.208
The "future terrorist" idea exposes one source of Brunner's vindictiveness toward children-his nightmare of retribution to come.
Likewise, he feared the judgment of anti-Nazi victors.
Captain Brunner has a sickly terror of indiscretions with regard to the world abroad.... Above all, he -fears that outsiders will discover the treatment of Jews and the general criminal activity of the racial police. Every time a new fact comes out on British radio, or the name of another SS officer, he flies into a fury and the repercussions are felt immediately.209He got up, pointed at me and accused me of sending a report on treatment of Drancy inmates by himself and Bruckler to England, where it had been broadcast twice lately on the BBC.... I had the clear feeling that given one false move he would have slaughtered me.210
But reports did begin to circulate as German positions weakened and as the French police and populace retreated from collaboration. Then Brunner had to hunt the prey himself. One witness observed that "wholesale arrests occurred, Brunner in person arresting whole families."211 He offered substantial rewards for denunciations of Jews, and issued an order that imposed the payment on the victim.212 Now that every Jew was an irreplaceable catch, Brunner grew more paranoid about escapes. Anyone suspected of resistance he deported in chains, and he recommended roping together all prisoners bound for Drancy.213
Even as the Allies approached Paris, Brunner, determined to send one last transport, collected 1,300 Jews from wherever he could still find them, including children's homes.214 As the Germans aban doned Paris on 17 August 1944, Brunner still tried to exert his control over Drancy, dispatching 51 more Jews to Buchenwald in a car attached to the last German military train.215 One day later, the Red Cross assumed jurisdiction over Drancy and Brunner departed, saying "The hell with the camp."216
Brunner had rationalized the war against the Jews in France beyond the practices of his predecessors Theodor Dannecker, Heinz Röthke, or the French administrators of Drancy. Before Brunner, Jewish aides in Drancy helped make transport selections, largely by their own criteria-foreign before French Jews, civilians before veterans. But Brunner interrogated every inmate, classifying only by race, race of spouse, potential for attracting relatives, and whim. Brunner disregarded the exemptions always held by UGIF personnel, spouses of Aryans and of POWs. His predecessors established the UGIF to manipulate the Jews, but it was Brunner who permitted its continued welfare activities only on condition of its delivering supplies, information, and access to children. While deportees had always gone hungry, it was Brunner who demanded and appropriated UGIF provisions, and Brunner who ended the practice of supplementing children's provisions. Nazi policy had always dictated secrecy about deportations, but only Brunner sealed the camp: French authorities relinquished jurisdiction, Röthke rarely visited, Eichmann never did.217 For the first time, no French police could enter the camp and no mail could move in or out. Survivors' accounts testify unanimously to Brunner's astounding success: in his transit camp, inmates never knew the destination of the transports.218 Drancy illuminates Brunner's true personality, what he would do without constraint. To cover his tracks, Brunner ordered the destruction of the Drancy deportation lists- more than 67,000 names.219 A copy of the list, but few named there, escaped destruction.
In the last year of a long war, Brunner sent off a third of all those deported from France, 22 transports, of which 20 ended on the ramp at Auschwitz. Fewer than one percent of his deportees-1,645 people-lived to see the war end.220
23,500 deported from Drancy under Brunner's command.
Slovakia: September 1944-March 1945
Slovakia was a German satellite, not an occupied territory. To make Slovakia impose anti-Jewish legislation based on the German model, Berlin sent Dieter Wisliceny as advisor.221 Under German influence the Slovak regime dispatched transports of Jews for "resettlement" in Poland.222 But in spring 1942 the Slovakian authorities had begun hearing terrible evidence from escaped inmates and finally from the Vatican about the Jewish fate in the East. The deportations, after sweeping away at least 55,000 people, two-thirds of Slovakia's Jews, came to a standstill for two years after August 1942, on orders of the Slovakian government, which placed the remaining 25,000 Jews of the country in labor camps.223 German Ambassador Ludin pleaded in August 1944 for "the permanent presence of an expert" on deportation, meaning Wisliceny. But "Eichmann refused the suggestion," according to Wisliceny, "because I no longer had his confidence."224
Eichmann sent Brunner, who apparently did have his confidence, with orders "to expel the Jews who were still there."225 At the end of August 1944, as Russian troops were advancing, an insurrection had broken out and in response the Germans finally occupied Slovakia. Administratively, Brunner was attached to the office of the Commander of the Security Police, who reported to the RSHA.226 But Brunner, as usual, seems to have established his own authority, with direct links to Eichmann; security considerations took second place to the deportation of Jews. In the eyes of Jewish leaders working in Slovakia, the Commander of the Security Police had been superseded by Brunner.227
The Slovakian insurrection mobilized at least 15,000 anti-Nazis from Slovakia, Hungary, and elsewhere, including a few thousand Jews.228 By asserting that Jews alone had inspired and directed the revolt, the Nazis justified an entire persecution program.229 But the chronology does not quite fit: Brunner kept arresting Slovakian Jews long after the insurrection collapsed in October 1944.
"Brunner in a large action had arrested all Jews in the territory reoccupied by German troops in Slovakia and had them sent to Camp Sered," one of the work camps already used by the Slovakian government.230 "A new commander had come to Sered and all the people in the command, all the officers, as well as the Slovak gendarmerie, were fired. Five or six days later, the first transport was sent off."231 Brunner was applying the tactics tested at Drancy.
What he had learned in Vienna, Salonica, Paris, and Nice served him in Bratislava; his roundups moved so rapidly that in one night, 28 September 1944, 1,800 Jews were arrested.232 Wisliceny had the impression that the whole Slovakian operation was completed in October 1944.233 Arrest orders continued, however, and followed Brunner's habit of rejecting all exemptions, for example, baptism papers or presidential guarantees previously acceptable in Slovakia. The orders included
all Jews, irrespective of citizenship, profession, age or sex, including Jews to whom exemptions had been granted by Slovak or German authorities or enterprises, also Jews of mixed marriages who have no children, or whose children are above 18.234
For almost two years Slovakian Jews had been warding off such deportations by proposing a fantastic ransom plan, not for individual lives, but for the entire Jewish population. Led by Gisi Fleischmann, the Slovakian "Working Group" had contacted Wisliceny with a large-scale scheme called the Europa Plan: Jewish funds from abroad (up to $2 million to come mainly from the JDC) in exchange for the cessation of deportations and mass murder.235 Wisliceny had agreed in 1942 to a moratorium on deportations, which lasted two years, but neither party would make permanent commitments.236 Between 1942 and 1944 ransom discussions had attracted not only Wisliceny, but Himmler and Eichmann; though Himmler had cooled, Slovakian and Hungarian Jewish leaders were still pursuing ransom when Brunner arrived.237 In other words, Brunner faced a situation where negotiations were still possible. His behavior proved his commitment to deportation.
At first he appeared accessible to negotiators, as Ernst Abeles recounted:
Brunner, well I first met him in Bratislava in the transit camp. I made him a proposition of paying a few million Swiss francs in exchange for permission on his part to let the small remnant of Slovakian Jews leave. I told him that there were only a few Jews left, and, as I put it, they were tired of Europe; they would leave Europe after the war. . . . He answered me, "Yes, I like this proposal. I Re this expression of being tired of Europe."
But in actual negotiations, Brunner always laid traps, and Jewish leaders soon learned "what Brunner's promise was worth."238 Brunner punished Jewish ransom negotiators, whereas Himmler, Eichmann, and Kurt Becher (Himmler's representative in Budapest) had all accepted them. When Rabbi Weissmandel of Slovakia set before Brunner a ransom proposal, Brunner put him on the next transport with his wife and children.239 Brunner also ordered Gisi Fleischmann's Jewish welfare office closed and turned the premises into offices for Gestapo interrogations.240
Even more revealing was his contemptuous attitude toward those Nazis who negotiated for ransom. Wisliceny claimed that he and Becher, with no success, tried to stop people from being "sent to Auschwitz in several transports by Brunner."241 Brunner told Wisliceny bluntly "not to interfere with his duties. He was always afraid that I should still return to Slovakia in time and therefore hurried the transports very much."242 One Jewish leader reported how Brunner punished Becher's adjutant Hauptsturmfiihrer Gruson who went to see Brunner and ... pointed out that secret negotiations were taking place at Budapest, negotiations regarding the delivery of strategic material, and that the Jews of Slovakia could also play an important part in the exchange of men for goods .... SS Brunner gave a flat refusal to Griison's various requests .... Brunner after his interview with Gruson at Bratislava had immediately telephoned a report to the main office of the Reich Central Security. Hence Gruson's arrest.243
Nonetheless, those trying to stop the deportations kept approaching Brunner, attempting to gain time and perhaps more. Georges Dunand, representative of the Red Cross in Bratislava, left one account of an interview that reveals a good deal about Brunner's personality.
"What do you want?" [asks Brunner].
"I want to go see Camp Sered."
"Ask Berlin."
"It wouldn't occur to Berlin to authorize me."
:,so?"
'So I'm coming directly to you, since you have full power in Slovakia."
He is visibly flattered and puffs up. I see with astonishment that, judging from his features, he could be Jewish. . . . It's with these features and manners that Brunner gives me a course in racism (another one!)....
"Which Jews are you interested in at Sered?" It's a magnificent trap....
"The Red Cross is interested in all your prisoners, all together, as well as victims of the war."
"Victims! Fomenters of the war. International Jewry" "I know, I know all that" . . .
Sure of his power and my powerlessness as "devoted philanthropist," he smiles broadly now, plays with words, lets himself banter, then suddenly, a new racist tirade: "All those who protect the Jews stink. Alle, die Juden beschutzen, stinken."244
Among the many attempts to protect Jews in Slovakia, the Working Group, under Gisi Fleischmann, managed to save people from deportation through clandestine activities and ransom arrangements.245 A few survivors who worked with Gisi Fleischmarm recalled her confrontations with Brunner. "Gisi Fleischmarm decided to contact Brunner directly" about stopping the deportations.246 His response: to arrest, chain, and imprison her in Sered (17 October 1944), ostensibly for writing to a colleague, "I am in the jaws of the lion," a phrase that provoked Brunner.247 In Sered Brunner interro- gated her for hours, offering to protect her if she informed on her connections with Jewish organizations abroad and on Jews hiding in Bratislava.248 When she refused, Brunner swore to deport her.249 Although SS negotiators Wisliceny and Becher tried to save her for their own reasons,250 Brunner, backed by Eichmann, sent Gisi Fleischmarm to Auschwitz and made sure she was killed on arrival.251
According to Fleischmann's colleague Oskar Neumann, the prisoners in Sered called Brunner "The Tiger." He was everywhere at once, roaring orders, beating prisoners, "covering the camp like a dark nightmare"; even his SS guards trembled before him.252 As in Drancy, Brunner himself would conduct the selections. "Brunner had a baton with which he carried on the selection, and he knocked [Rabbi Weissmandell over the head."253 In Sered as in Drancy, "nothing could bring him into mad anger so much as the escape of a Jew."254 Brunner used every means at his disposal-terror, deception, bribery-to fill his transports to Auschwitz.255
In mid-March 1945, with the Russians approaching, Jewish leaders negotiated what Rudolf Kastner called "Brunner's last blackmail"-a bribe to route a transport to Theresienstadt as ordered. When Himmler agreed to release a number of Slovakian Jews to Switzerland, the negotiators required guarantees that Brunner would not "interfere." Yet Brunner did all he could to sabotage this small rescue effort.256 Even after the Russians cut the route from Sered to Auschwitz in spring 1945, Brunner deported Jews elsewhere. Finally, at the end of March 1945, when the front was only 20 kilometers away, Brunner, "like a slavedriver," even "working himself as one possessed," forced the dismantling of Sered.257 With Russian troops bombarding the camp, he dispatched its remaining Jews to Theresienstadt.258
How many Jews had Brunner deported? From the time he renewed deportations (after a two-year hiatus) on 30 September 1944, until liberation by the Russians in April 1945, Brunner dispatched at least 11 transports with 12,306 people: 1,638 to Theresienstadt, 2,732 to Sachsenhausen, and 7,936 to Auschwitz.259 Rudolph Kastner estimated that during Brunner's regime 13,500 Jews were transported from Sered.260 Interrogated at Nuremberg, Wisliceny gave a figure which he claimed to have checked with Eichmann: 38,000 deportees during Brunner's period. Later he testified: "Brunner assembled these Jews in several camps and transported them to Auschwitz. According to Brunner's statement, about 14,000 persons were involved."261
By the highest estimate, one out of three Jews deported after fall 1944 survived the war.262 But by Wisliceny's reckoning, "SS Hauptsturmfiihrer Brunner . . . had all Jews that could be found arrested and sent to Sered. They were thereafter transported to Auschwitz and executed. I know of no survivors from this evacua- tion."263
14,000 deported from Slovakia under Brunner's command.
Since the War
In March 1944 Eichmann gathered most of his "best men" into a commando for the massive deportation of Hungarian Jews. During interrogation in Israel, Eichmann listed "the two Brunners" as part of that commando, but at his trial he altered his testimony: "I don't even know if one of the Brunners was there."264 Wisliceny was certain that Brunner took no part in the commando for Hungary,265 though in one sense he did participate by cutting off sanctuary in neighboring Slovakia. By early spring 1945 Eichmann's group was dissolving, and there after his hand-picked deportation experts scattered. Eichmann himself hid in Argentina until captured, tried, and executed in Israel. Dieter Wisliceny was tried in Bratislava and executed in 1948. Alois Brunner left Sered in March 1945 for Vienna, where Wisliceny recalled seeing him for the last time on 2 April 1945.266
According to a 1985 interview with Brunner, he was imprisoned in 1945 under a false name by the Czechs, the Americans, and the British; he was released each time. After serving as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army until 1947, he worked several years more in Germany.267 In 1954, using identification papers from a man named Georg Fischer, whom he closely resembled, Brunner travelled to Egypt and then to Damascus. According to Brunner, the Syrians arrested him in 1960 and released him when he revealed his identity.268 Monitors of Nazi activities have asserted Brunner's presence in Damascus for decades, as well as his services for the Syrian secret service.269 Brunner even claims that with Syrian help he planned to abduct Eichmann in 1961 from Israeli custody.270
Warrants for Brunner's arrest have been on the books for many years in several countries. In 1954, France sentenced him to death in absentia.271 Austrian proceedings against Brunner are still pending.272 In 1961, the Frankfurt District Court in the Federal Republic of Germany issued a warrant for Brunner's arrest that is still in force. On 10 October 1984, a warrant was also issued by the prosecutor's office in Cologne, followed on 18 December 1984 by a West German extradition request to Syria.273 Up to this time, Syrian authorities have given no sign of compliance with requests for Brunner's extradition.
Brunner's prominence as Eichmann's deputy emerges in Wisliceny's testimony for the Nuremberg trials.
QUESTION: You use the expression "Schweinehund" in connection with Brunner's name. Why did you do that?ANSWER: He was an extremely unscrupulous individual, one of the best tools of Eichmann. He never had an opinion of his own, and as Eichmann himself described him, he was "one of my best men."274
True, Alois Brunner followed orders from Eichmann. But his alacrity and initiative in carrying out these orders was tantamount to a policy in itself. When higher authorities failed to reach consensuse.g., on whether to deport or exempt persons in mixed marriagesBrunner imposed the harshest interpretation. When his superiors allowed for deporting some Jews and ransoming others, Brunner only deported. When policy allowed compromise- e.g., deporting foreign but not native Jews from France-Brunner drafted general orders and specific tactics for taking all Jews. Where others left loopholes-e.g., exempting Jewish orphanages and welfare workers-Brunner closed them for the sake of filling transports. When procedure called for local inifiative-e.g., deceiving deportees-Brunner was most inventive. Brunner targeted the formerly exempt, denied transports the food provided for them, tracked down children and refused them special provisions, foiled Jewish and German ransom negotiators, and exploited the credulity born of despair.
Working at every echelon, Brunner issued the orders, maintained control over the procedures, and coerced the victims. It was no coincidence that Brunner dispatched the first convoys from Austria and the last ones from Salonica, France, and Slovakia. The arrival of Brunner on site always marked a new and final period, teaching everyone how the New Order should be imposed. Brunner's mastery of deception, cooptation, and terror not only precluded resistance from victims; it also showed his superiors how far they could actually go.
The effectiveness of the destruction program depended on just such powerful intermediaries, men who could unite in their own person the pan- European project and the streetcorner arrest. Brunner's policy, his practice, and his personality constituted one unit, with no preoccupation but genocide.
| From Vienna | 47,000 |
| From Salonica | 44,000 |
| From France | 23,500 |
| From Slovakia | 14,000 |
| ESTIMATED TOTAL | 128,500 |
NOTES
I would like to thank the following individuals and institutions for their generosity in helping me to find material: Serge Klarsfeld, Paris; Agnes Peterson, Hoover Institution Library, Stanford University; Vidar Jacobsen, CDJC, Paris; Marek Web and Fruma Mohrer, YIVO Institute, New York; Andrea Schwab, DOW, Vienna; Denise Gluck, JDC Archives, New York; Gerald Margolis and Aaron Breitbart, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Los Angeles; Daniel Simon, Berlin Document Center; John Mendelsohn, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Simon Wiesenthal, Documentation Center, Vienna; Alfred Streim, Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, Ludwigsburg. I am especially grateful to the Stanford Center for Research on Women for the Visiting Scholars Program; to Ursula Berg-Lunk for translation assistance; to Sybil Milton and Henry Friedlander for editorial guidance equivalent to intensive seminars; and to John Felstiner for the readiness in discussion and childcare that made my work possible.
1. Eichmann quoted by Dieter Wisliceny, Wisliceny interrogation, 15 Nov. 1945, The Holocaust: Selected Documents, ed. John Mendelsohn, 18 vols. (New York, 1982), 8: 91.
2. Rudolph Kastner, Der Kastner-Bericht uber Eichmanns Menschenhandel in Ungarn (Munich, 1961), p. 185.
3. Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945 (London, 1953), p. 507.
4. Ladislav Lipscher, Die Juden im Slowakischen Staat (Munich, 1979). p. 205.
5. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961), p. 705. In the new and revised 3-vol. edition [continuously paginated] (New York, 1985), p. 1093, Hilberg clearly identified Brunner. All further citations are from the revised 1985 edition.
6. Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal [Blue Series], 42 vols. (Nuremberg, 1946-1951), 24: 321 [hereafter cited as TMWC I.
7. Anton Brunner was born on 8 Aug. 1898 and worked at the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, 1939-1942, then at the Jewish Emigration Office in Prague, 1942-1945. He claimed not to be a member of the SS and has no SS file in the Berlin Document Center, nor was he referred to by an SS title. Vienna, Dokumentationsarchiv des osterreichischen Widerstandes [hereafter cited as DOW], file 9359: interrogation of Anton Brunner, 1 Oct. 1945.
8. DOW, file 854: Brunner to Hoettl, 5 Feb. 1941.
9. Le Monde's coverage of the Knochen-Oberg trial: 13 Sept. to 12 Oct. 1954.
10. The Attorney General of the Government of Israel v. Adolf, the Son of Adolf Karl Eichmann, Criminal Case No. 40/61, 121 sessions Jerusalem, 1961], Eichmann testimony, sess. 103, p. XI; sess. 100, p. Ul (the minutes of the Eichmann trial exist in mimeograph and on microfilm). The primary investigator for the Eichmann trial, Avner Less, also confused the careers of Alois and Anton Brunner: see pre-trial interrogations in Eichmann par Eichmann, ed. Pierre Joffroy and Karin Konigseder (Paris, 1970), pp. 281-82.
11. TMWC 4: 363, 364: Wisliceny testimony, 3 Jan. 1946.
12. DOW, file 9359: indictment of Anton Brunner, 12 Apr. 1946; judgment against Anton Brunner, 10 May 1946.
13. Berlin Document Center [hereafter cited as BDC], file of Alois Brunner.
14. Ibid., SS Questionnaire, 15 Nov. 1938; Personal Resume, 27 July 1942.
15. Ibid., Brunner to Reichsschatzmeister der NSDAP, 8 Mar. 1937; recommendation from Wilfried Hoffer to NSDAP Fluchtlingshilfswerk, Mitgliedschaftsamt, 11 May 1937; Brunner to Finanz- und Parteiverwaltung in Osterreich, 29 Aug. 1938; NSDAP report, Vienna representative to Gauschatzmeister des Gaues Niederdonau der NSDAP, 17 May 1939.
16. Wisliceny deposition, Bratislava, 11 Feb. 1947. A copy of this document was kindly provided by Serge Klarsfeld.
18. Kastner, Kastner-Bericht, p. 185.
19. Georges Wellers, De Drancy d Auschwitz (Paris, 1946), p. 94.
20. Paris, Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine [hereafter cited as CDJCJ, file CCXVI-66: account of Dr. A. Drucker, 15 Feb. 1946.
21. Jacques Darville and Simon Wichene, Drancy la Juive ou la Deuxieme Inquisition (Cachan, 1945), p. 62.
22. Georges Dunand, Ne perdez pas leur trace! (Neuchatel, 1950), p. 149.
23. Wisliceny deposition, 11 Feb. 1947 (see above, n. 16).
24. Deposition, 3 Oct. 1945, trial of Anton Brunner. A copy of this document was kindly provided by Serge Klarsfeld.
25. On the destruction of Austrian Jews, see Herbert Rosenkranz, "The Anschluss and the Tragedy of Austrian Jewry, 1934-45," in Joseph Fraenkel, ed., The Jews of Austria: Essays on Their Life, History, and Destruction (London, 1967), pp. 479-545; idem, "Austrian Jewry: Between Forced Emigration and Deportation," in Patterns of Jewish Leadership in Nazi Europe, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Cynthia J. Haft (Jerusalem, 1979), pp. 65-74.
26. Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archives of the Israeli Police, ed. Jochen von Lang (New York, 1983), p. 52.
27. Eichmann Trial, sess. 18, pp.T1, Ul.
28. Eichmann Interrogated, p. 59.
29. Reproduced in Widerstand und Verfolgung in Wien 1934-1945: Eine Dokumentation, 3 vols. (Vienna, 1975), 3: 284-85.
30. See Jonny Moser, "Nisko: The First Experiment in Deportation," SWC Annual 2 (1985): 1-30.
31. Eichmann Trial, sess. 91, p. LI; Eichmann Interrogated, p. 58.
32. Wisliceny deposition [2 Dec. 1946, Bratislava], reproduced in Tuviah Friedman, The Hunter (Garden City, 1961), p. 157.
33. Reproduced in Jonny Moser, Die ludenverfoigung in Oesterreich, 1938-1945 (Vienna, 1966), p. 16.
35. Hilberg, Destruction, p. 457; Philip Friedman, "The Lublin Reservation and the Madagascar Plan (Two Aspects of Nazi Jewish Policy During the Second World War)," YIVO Annual 8 (1953): 151-65.
36. Eichmann Interrogated, p. 156.
37. DOW, file 9359: [Anton Brunner deposition, 24 Aug. 19451: "Organisation der Zentralstelle ffir jud. Auswanderung Wien."
38. Wisliceny deposition, 2 Dec. 1946, in Friedman, The Hunter, pp. 156-57.
39. See Peter Black, Ernst Kaltenbrunner: Ideological Soldier of the Third Reich (Princeton, 1984), p. 283; John M. Steiner, Power Politics and Social Change in National Socialist Germany (The Hague, 1976), pp. 70, 247; Radomir Luza, Austro-German Relations in the Anschluss Era (Princeton, 1975), pp. 226-27.
41. TMWC 5: 303: Hans Heinrich Lammers to Baldur von Schirach, 3 Dec. 1940 (Nuremberg Doc. PS-1950).
42. Memorandum of Dr. Loewenherz, 1 June 1942, in Documents on the Holocaust, ed. Yitzhak Arad and others (Jerusalem, 1981), pp. 159-61.
43. Nuremberg Doc. PS-3934: Wilhelm Bienenfeld Affidavit, pp. 41-46.
45. Ibid., p. 52: Brunner informed Loewenherz of the cessation of emigration 5 Nov. 1941.
46. Ibid., pp. 41-42; order signed by Brunner, 7 Oct. 1941, in Widerstand und Verfolgung in Wien 3: 289-90, 565.
47. Nuremberg Doc. PS-3934, p. 61.
48. Rosenkranz, "Anschluss," p. 519.
49. Nuremberg Doc. PS-3934, pp. 40, 48, 66.
51. Ibid., p. 61. For another example, see H. G. Adler, Der verwallete Mensch: Studien zur Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland (Tubingen, 1974), p. 210.
52. Nuremberg Doc. PS-3934, pp. 21, 45; Rosenkranz, "Anschluss," p. 513.
53. Nuremberg Doc. 3934, pp. 51-52.
54. Hilberg, Destruction, p. 433.
55. Report of Meeting, 12 Feb. 1941, reproduced in Widerstand und Verfolgung in Wien 3: 290-91; Hilberg, Destruction, p. 432.
56. Rosenkranz, "Anschluss," p. 519.
57. Hilberg, Destruction, p. 435; Rosenkranz, "Anschluss," p. 543.
58. Rosenkranz, "Anschluss," p. 522.
59. Dr. Christian to Brunner, 7 Mar. 1942, in Widerstand und Verfolgung in Wien 3: 244.
60. Rosenkranz, "Anschluss," p. 517.
61. DOW, file 9359: indictment of Anton Brunner, 12 Apr. 1946.
62. Norman Bentwich, "The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Austria, 1938- 42," in Fraenkel, ed., The Jews of Austria, p. 476.
63. DOW, file 9359: testimony of Albert Welt, 3 Sept. 1945.
64. Ibid., testimony of Max Waldemar, 6 Sept. 1945.
65. CDJC, file LXX-70: "Leben der Juden in Berlin in den Jahren 1940 bis 1943" [anonymous accounts gathered by Hans Klee, Geneva, ca. 19431.
66. New York, Leo Baeck Institute [hereafter cited as LBI], microfilm reel 239: indictment of Otto Bovensiepen (1969), p. 202.
67. CDJC, file LXX-70: "Leben der Juden in Berlin."
68. Eichmann Trial, sess. 37, p. Wwl: testimony of Hildegard Henschel.
69. LBI, microfilm reel 239: Dr. Martha Mosse cited in Bovensiepen indictment, p. 203.
70. CDJC, file LXX-70: "Leben der Juden in Berlin"; Eichmann Trial, sess. 37, p. Vvl.
71. CDJC, file LXX-70: "Leben der Juden in Berlin."
72. Witnesses cited in the Otto Bovensiepen indictment testified that Alois Brunner was in Berlin from Oct. 1942 through Jan. 1943. An anonymous account written around 1943 placed Brunner in Berlin from Sept. 1942 until at least the end of Feb. 1943, calling him responsible ("Brunner's last terrible deed") for the massive "Factory Action," 27 Feb. 1943, which swept up thousands of exempted Jewish workers (CDJC, file LXX-70). However, Wisliceny claimed to have travelled with Brunner to Salonica on 2 Feb. 1943 (Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression [Red Series], 8 vols. and 2 suppl. (Washington, 1946-1948), 8: 612 [hereafter cited as NCAJ). Jacob Robinson dates the "Brunner-Aktion" deportations from Berlin as Nov. and Dec. 1942 (And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight [New York, 19651, p. 280); and Hilberg (Destruction, p. 463) suggests that Brunner was in Berlin from late Oct. to late Nov. 1942. Hildegard Henschel, wife of the last head of the Berlin Jewish community, testified at the Eichmann trial that "Brunner No. 2" [the label given to Anton Brunner in Vienna] ran the deportations from Berlin. The prosecuting attorney identified this Brunner as "the brother of Alois Brunner. He was sentenced in Vienna" (Eichmann Trial, sess. 37, pp. VvI, Wwl). However, Anton Brunner claimed not to belong to the SS and did not mention a posting in Berlin (DOW, file 9359). Years earlier, Hildegard Henschel described an "SS Boss Brunner" in Berlin from late Nov. to late Dec. 1942, who brought with him "the Vienna method," i.e., street and house arrests (Hildegard Henschel, "Aus der Arbeit der judischen Gemeinde Berlin wahrend 1941-43 [1946], Zeitschrift ffir die Geschichte der Juden [Tel Aviv] 9, no. 1-2 [19721: 43-44). Other witnesses described him as "Sturmbannfuhrer Brunner from Vienna" (Martha Mosse in LBI, microfilm reel 239, p. 204) or "SS Obersturmfuhrer Brunner from Vienna" [Alois Brunner's rank at the time] (CDJC, file LXX-70).
73. Eichmann Interrogated, pp. 56, 58.
74. Eichmann Trial, sess. 15, p. Get: testimony of Benno Cohn.
75. Rosenkranz, "Anschluss," p. 500.
76. Holocaust: Selected Documents 8: 91: Wisliceny interrogation, 15 Nov. 1945.
77. Eichmann Interrogated, p. 198.
78. DOW, file 9359: Waldemar testimony, 6 Sept. 1945.
79. Rosenkranz, "Anschluss," p. 520.
80. DOW, file 9359: Regine Wiener testimony, 19 Sept. 1945.
81. Friedman, "The Lublin Reservation," p. 163.
82. Rosenkranz, "Anschluss," p. 517.
83. TMWC 1: 319: judgment of the IMT, Nuremberg, against Baldur von Schirach.
84, DOW, file 9359: Anton Brunner indictment, 12 Apr. 1946.
85. TMWC 4: 357: Wisliceny testimony, 3 Jan. 1946.
86, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10 [Green Series], 15 vols. (Washington, 1950-1952), 5: 810-11 [hereafter cited as TWC]: Wisliceny testimony, 23 June 1947.
87. Eichmann Trial, sess. 45, pp. Eel, Ffl.
88. DOW, file 9359: Landesgericht Vienna, judgment against Anton Brunner, 10 May 1946; G. Schneider, "The Riga Ghetto, 1941-1943" (Ph.D. diss., City Univ. of New York, 1973), pp. 73, 75.
89. The Vienna Court estimated 48,000 people were deported by Anton Brunner 1939-1942 [i.e., under Alois Brunner's orders) (DOW, file 9359: judgment against Anton Brunner, 10 May 1946). Jonny Moser calculates (for the period of Brunner's control) 45 transports with 46,847 people; 2,142 of these survived (Moser, ludenverfolgung, pp. 51-52); Rosenkranz notes 1,747 deportation survivors who returned to Vienna afterward, and only 219 Jews who remained hidden in Vienna throughout the war. He calculates 43,421 people deported in 71 transports between 20 Oct. 1939 and 1 Sept. 1944. The last mass transports left Vienna in Sept. 1942 (Rosenkranz, "Anschluss," pp. 519, 522, 526). Brunner also left Vienna in late fall 1942: under his regime as director of the Central Office, the vast majority of deportations took place. I have chosen the figure 47,000 deportees, reflecting Moser and the Vienna Court. As it does not include any figures from Berlin, it is a conservative estimate of Brunner's deportations during this period.
90. See Michael Molho, In Memoriam: Homage aux victimes juives des Nazis en Grece, 2 vols. (Salonica, 1948-1949), 1: 3-25; Cecil Roth, "The Last Days of Jewish Salonica," Commentary 10 (1950): 49-50.
91. TMWC 4: 363: Wisliceny testimony, 3 Jan. 1946; NCA 8: 611: Wisliceny affidavit, 29 Nov. 1945.
92. Israel Police Document 1000: Memorandum from RSHA IVb4, 25 Jan. 1943.
93. TMWC 4: 366: Wisliceny testimony, 3 Jan. 1946.
94. Eichmann Interrogated, p. 95.
95. NCA 8: 612: Wisliceny affidavit, 29 Nov. 1945.
96. Yom Tov Yacoel diary, quoted in Eichmann Trial, sess. 47, p. MI.
97. NCA 8: 612: Wisliceny affidavit, 29 Nov. 1945; Eichmann Trial, sess. 51, p. Rrl, sess. 83, p. Bbl. See also Joseph Ben, "Jewish Leadership in Greece during the Holocaust," in Patterns of Jewish Leadership, p. 339.
98. Molho, In Memoriam 1: 72; Roth, "Last Days," p. 53.
99. Israel Police Document 1003; Consul General Schoenberg to German Foreign Office, 26 Feb. 1943.
100. MoIho, In Memoriam 1: 77-78; Account of Hella Cougno, in Le Passage des barbares: Contribution d l'histoire de la deportation et de la resistance des juifs grecs, ed. Miriam Novitch (Paris, 1967), p. 58.
101. Molho, In Memoriam 2: 28.
103. Ben, "Jewish Leadership," pp. 339-40, 349-50; Eichmann Trial, sess. 49, p. Bbbl, sess. 51, p. Rrl: Yom Tov Yacoel diary.
104. Novitch, Le Passage, pp. 10-11.
105. Isaac Kabeli, "The Resistance of the Greek Jews," YIVO Annual 8 (1953): 283- 86.
106. Eichmann Trial, sess. 51, p. RrI: Yom Tov Yacoel diary.
107. NCA 8: 612: Wisliceny affidavit, 29 Nov. 1945.
108. Account of Isaac Aruh, in Novitch, Le Passage, p. 23.
109. Nikos Stravroulakis, "Introduction," in Errikos Sevillias, AthensAuschwitz (Athens, 1983), p. xvi.
110. TMWC 4: 365: Wisliceny testimony, 3 Jan. 1946.
111. Eichmann Interrogated, p. 163.
112. Sevillias, Athens-Auschwitz, p. 19.
113. Reitlinger, Final Solution, p. 373.
114. Eichmann Trial, sess. 47, p. VI: Yitzhak Nehama testimony.
115. Aruh, in Novitch, Le Passage, pp. 23, 15.
116. TMWC 4: 366: Wisliceny testimony, 3 Jan. 1946.
117. Novitch, Le Passage, p. 23.
118. Cougno, in Novitch, Le Passage, p. 59.
119. Molho, In Memoriam 1: 94; Roth, "Last Days," p. 54; Reitlinger, Final Solution, p. 373.
120. TMWC 4: 364: Wisliceny testimony, 3 Jan. 1946; NCA 8: 612: Wisliceny affidavit, 29 Nov. 1945.
121. In an affidavit for the Eichmann trial, Wisliceny's interrogator from the Nuremberg trial called him a credible witness. Eichmann Trial, sess. 13, P. lil.
122. Eichmann Interrogated, p. 162.
123. TMWC 4: 363, 364: Wisliceny testimony, 3 Jan. 1946.
124. Molho, In Memoriam 2: 28.
125. NCA 8: 613: Wisliceny affidavit, 29 Nov. 1945; according to Molho, Brunner went to Berlin to consult with Eichmann (In Memoriam 1: 87).
126. Wisliceny estimated 55,000 deportees (NCA 8: 620); Joseph Nehama estimated 43,850 deportees from Salonica and 48,921 from the Macedonian region, mostly deported via Salonica (Molho, In Memoriam 2: 164). 1 have used the figure 44,000 as a conservative estimate.
127. On convoy conditions, see the memoir of Sevillias, Athens-Auschwitz, pp. 15-20.
128. Israel Police Document 1000: RSHA IVb4 Secret Memorandum to German Foreign Office, 25 Jan. 1943.
129. NCA 8: 613: Wisliceny affidavit, 29 Nov. 1945.
131. Barbara Vormeier, Die Deportierungen deutscher und osterreichischer Juden aus Frankreich (Paris, 1980), p. 64.
132. Eichmann Trial, sess. 32, p. NI: Georges Wellers testimony.
133. See Georges Wellers, De Drancy d Auschwitz (Paris, 1946), p. 94.
134. Nuremberg Doc. NO-1411 [published in French transl. in Adam Rutkowski, "Directives allemandes concernant les arrestations et les deportations de Juifs en avril-aout 1944," Le Monde Juif 82 (1976): 60-65].
135. NCA 8: 609: Wisliceny affidavit, 29 Nov. 1945. Wisliceny list also used in Eichmann Trial, sess. 14, p. DI. See also Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York, 1983), p. 330.
136. Eichmann Trial, sess. 32, p. Yl.
137. CDJC, file CDXXV-19 (5): "Situation au 15 juillet 1943."
138. CDJC, file CCXVIII-8: "Mesures d'internement" [ca. July 1943].
139. Darville and Wichiene, Drancy la Juive, pp. 66; CDJC, file CDXXV-19 (5): "Situation au 15 juillet 1943."
140. New York, American [Jewish] Joint Distribution Committee Archives [hereafter cited as JDC Archives], box 516: AJDC Lisbon to AJDC New York, 4 Aug. 1943; Report Sept. 1943; box 621: AJDC Lisbon to AJDC New York, 4 Nov. 1943.
141. New York, YIVO Institute Archives, UGIF Collection, file 4.4, pp. 0111-0113: Minutes of UGIF meeting with Brunner, 20 June 1943. A copy of these minutes was sent via Switzerland to the U.S. State Department (Washington, D.C., National Archives, 851.4016/166).
142. [bid. UGIF Minutes, 30 June 1943; UGIF Collection, file 111.11: Drancy management record book.
143. Roger Berg, "Quelques temoignages sur le drame juif en Europe (1939-1945)," Le Monde Juif 95 (July-Sept. 1979): 75.
144. Reproduced in Adam Rutkowski, "Les deportations des Juifs de France vers Auschwitz, Birkenau et Sobibor," ibid. 57-58 (Jan.-June 1970): 75.
145. YlVO Archives, UGIF Collection, file 4.4: pp. 0116-0117: Minutes of UGIF meeting, 6 July 1943; Leni Yahil, "The Jewish Leadership of France," in Patterns of Jewish Leadership, p. 331.
146. YlVO Archives, UGIF Collection, File 4.11: p. 013: director of UGIF Northern Zone (G. Edinger) to director of Southern Zone (R. Lambert), 2 Aug. 1943.
147. Ibid., p. 014: Edinger to Lambert, 11 Nov. 1943.
148. Wellers, De Drancy d Auschwitz, p. 92.
149. Idem, L'Etoile jaune 4 I'heure de Vichy: De Drancy d Auschwitz (Paris, 1973), p. 198.
150. Ibid., pp. 194-196; Eichmann Trial, sess. 32, p. M2.
151. JDC Archives, box 516: Report, Sept. 1943.
152. Wellers, De Drancy d Auschwitz, p. 99.
154. CDJC, file CCXVI-66: testimony of A. Drucker, 15 Feb. 1946.
156. Eichmann Trial, sess. 32, pp. 01, Pl.
157. CDJC, file CCXVIII-27: deposition of Mme. Zaleman, 20 Mar. 1945; file CCXVIII-8: "Mesures d'intemement."
158. CDJC, file CCXVI-66: A. Drucker testimony, 15 Feb. 1946.
159. CDJC, file CDXXV-19 (5): "Situation au 15 juillet 1943."
160. CDJC, file XXVIII-182: "Rapport secret sur l'U.G.I.F.," 30 July 1943.
162. Eichmann Trial, sess. 32, p. Wl.
164. Eichmann Trial, sess. 32, p. Wl.
165. CDJC, file DLVI-63: Temoignage d'un revenant," 15 Oct. 1943.
166. RSHA cable, 29 Apr. 1943, in Rutkowski, "Les deportations des Juifs," p. 42; idem, "Documents sur l'hypocrisie Nazie A l'egard des Juifs de France," Le Monde Juif 71 (July-Sept. 1973): 31.
167. YlVO Archives, UGIF Collection, file 4.4: p. 0112: UGIF Minutes, 30 June 1943.
168. Cynthia Haft, The Bargain and the Bridle: The General Union of the Israelites of France, 1941-1944 (Chicago, 1983), p. 83.
169. Eichmann Trial, sess. 32, pp. R1, S1, W1.
170. CDJC, file XXV111-184a: Minutes of UGIF meeting with Brunner, 30 July 1943.
171. Leon Poliakov and Jacques Sabille, Jews Under Italian Occupation (Paris, 1955), p. 31.
172. Ibid., p. 106: Röthke to Amt. IVb, 21 July 1943.
173. Ibid., pp. 119-21: Röthke to Hagen, 4 Sept. 1943.
174. CDJC, file XXVA-338: Röthke to Sipo/SD Berlin, 25 Sept. 1943.
175. Eichmann Trial, sess. 100, pp. 01, Ul: Eichmann testimony.
176. CDJC, files CCXVIII-55, CCXVIII-58.
177. Zanvel Diamant, "Jewish Refugees on the French Riviera," YIVO Annual 8 (1953): 278.
178. CDJC, pamphlet file 10.143: Union des Juifs pour la Resistance et l'Entraide, "Cinq Mois de Persecutions Anti-juives A Nice," Nice, ca. Feb. 1944. See also Leon Poliakov, "Le lieu du crime," Le Monde Juif 52 (Oct.-Dec. 1968): 25, and Philippe Erlanger, La France sans etoile: Souvenirs de I'avant-guerre et du temps de l'occupation (Paris, 1974), p. 289.
179. Erlanger, La France sans etoile: p. 289. See also Poliakov, "Lieu du crime," p. 26.
180. CDJC, file CCXVIII-19: "Rapport confidentiel sur le Gestapo de Nice," [19431.
181. CDJC, file CCXVI-66: A. Drucker testimony, 15 Feb. 1946.
182. Poliakov and Sabille, Jews Under Italian Occupation, p. 43.
183. CDJC, file XCVI-9: Statement by G. Edinger, 27 June 1946.
184. CDJC, file XXVIII-184a: UGIF Minutes, 30 July 1943; file XXVIII-182: "Rapport secret sur l'U.G.I.F.," 30 July 1943.
185. YlVO Archives, Collection OSE-20: OSE [Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants] Geneva to American OSE, 6 Jan. 1944.
187. CDJC, file CCXVI-66: A. Drucker testimony, 15 Feb. 1946.
188. CDJC, file CDXXV-19 (5): "Situation au 15 juillet 1943"; file CCXVIII-8: "Mesures d'intemement" [1943].
189. CDJC, file CDXXV-19 (5): "Situation au 15 juillet 1943."
190. Nuremberg Doc. NO-1411: Order signed by Brunner and Knochen, 14 Apr. 1944.
192. CDJC, file XXVII-16: BdS Paris, Amt IVB, 14 June 1943.
193. Nuremberg Doc. NO-1411: Order of 14 Apr. 1944.
194. TMWC 7: 41: Memorandum of Theodor Dannecker, 21 July 1942 (Doc. RF-1233).
196. YIVO Archives, UGIF Collection, file 11.77: pp. 005-006: Israelowicz (UGIF) to Brunner, 15 July 1943.
197. JDC Archives, box 516: Cable, AJDC Lisbon to AJDC New York, 3 Nov. 1943.
198. YIVO Archives, Collection OSE-20: "The Fate of Jewish Children in France" (Report on Conditions in 1943).
200. YIVO Archives, Collection OSE-20: "The Fate of Jewish Children."
201. TMWC 7: 42: US Lyon IVb to BdS Paris IVb, 6 April 1944. See also Serge Klarsfeld, Les enfants d'Izieu: une tragedie juive (Paris, 1984).
202. TMWC 7: 42. Facsimile in Klarsfeld, Les enfants, p. 89.
203. CDJC, file CCXVIII-7: "Recit du rescape de Drancy," [M. Etlin].
205. Darville, Drancy, pp. 92-93.
206. CDJC, file CCXVIII-7: "Rescape de Drancy."
207. See, for example, TMWC 7: 40: Röthke memorandum; Eichmann Trial, sess. 94, p. Nnl: Eichmann testimony; Holocaust: Selected Documents 17: 138: Wisliceny interrogation, 15 Nov. 1945.
208. CDJC, file CCXXI-27: Kurt Schendel, "Rapport concernant les entretiens ayant eu lieu A l'occasion de I'arrestation des enfants," 31 Aug. 1944. See also Beate Klarsfeld, Wherever They May Be! (New York, 1972), pp. 231-34.
210. CDJC, file CCXVI-50: testimony of Gaston Kahn, 20 Jan. 1945.
211. JDC Archives, box 516: Report, Sept. 1943.
212. Nuremberg Doc. NO-1411: Order of Brunner and Knochen, 14 Apr. 1944.
213. CDJC, file CLXVI-66: testimony of A. Drucker, 15 Feb. 1946; Nuremberg Doc. NO-1411.
214. Darville, Drancy, pp. 98-99; Vormeier, Deportierungen, p. 65; CDJC, file CCXVII-26; "La liberation du Camp de Drancy," Aug. 1944.
215. CDJC, file CCXXI-27: Schendel, "Rapport," 31 Aug. 1944; Vormeier, Deportierungen, p. 65; Jacques Adler, Face 4 la persecution: les organisations juives d Paris de 1940 d 1944 (Paris, 1985), p. 211.
216. Darville, Drancy, p. 117.
217. Eichmann Trial, sess. 100, p.Ul: Eichmann testimony; Adler, Face a la persecution: p. 145.
218. Georges Wellers, "Birkenau, qu'est-ce que c'est?" Le Monde Juif 68 (Oct.-Dec. 1972): 25-36.
219. Idem, "Vichy et les Juifs," ibid. 81 Uan. 1976): 21.
220. Serge Klarsfeld, Memorial to the Jews Deported from France, 1942-1944 (New York, 1983), p. xxvi.
221. Holocaust: Selected Documents 17: 136: Wisliceny interrogation, 15 Nov. 1945.
222. See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1963), pp. 185-86.
223. Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, 2 vols. [continuously paginated] (New York, 1981), p. 694; Josef Lettrich, History of Modern Slovakia (New York, 1955), p. 184; Victor Mamatey and Radomir Luza, A History of the Czechoslovak Republic, 1918-1948 (Princeton, 1973), p. 291.
224. Eichmann Trial, sess. 84, p.Wl: Ludin to German Foreign Ministry, 11 Aug. 1944; Holocaust: Selected Documents 8: 92: Wisliceny interrogation, 15 Nov. 1945.
225. Eichmann Trial, sess. 16, p. DI; NCA 5: 324: Kastner affidavit, 13 Sept. 1945.
226. Holocaust: Selected Documents 8: 93: Wisliceny interrogation, 15 Nov. 1945.
227. Andres Biss, A Million Jews to Save: Check to the Final Solution (London, 1973), p. 135. Biss, like Rudolph Kastner, was a Jewish rescue leader active in Slovakia and Hungary.
228. Braham, Politics of Genocide, p. 917. Calculations of Jewish participants in the Slovakian national uprising range from 1,566 Jews (Ladislav Lipscher, "The Jews of Slovakia: 1939-45," in The Jews of Czechoslovakia: Historical Studies and Surveys, ed. Avigdor Dagan and others, 3 vols. [Philadelphia, 1968-1984]; 3: 233) to 4,653 Jews (Erich Kulka, "The Annihilation of Czechoslovak Jewry," ibid., p. 314); the Gestapo claimed to have caught 9,653 Jewish insurgents (Lettrich, History, p. 190).
229. Nuremberg Doc. NO-4824: Rudolph Kastner affidavit, 4 Aug. 1947; Nuremberg Doc. NO-5921: Hans Gmelin affidavit, 13 Aug. 1948; German Foreign Ministry correspondence, quoted in Eichmann Trial, sess. 84, p. XI.
230. Holocaust: Selected Documents: 8: 93: Wisliceny interrogation, 15 Nov. 1945.
231. Eichmann Trial, sess. 51, p. MmI: Adolf Rosenberg testimony.
232. Kulka, "Annihilation," p. 314.
233. Holocaust: Selected Documents 8: 93: Wisliceny interrogation, 15 Nov. 1945.
234. Order of 20 Nov. 1944, quoted in Lettrich, History, p. 189.
235. On the Europa Plan, see Leon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate: The Nazi Program for the Destruction of the Jews of Europe, rev. ed. (New York, 1959), p. 160; Lipscher, "Jews of Slovakia," pp. 222-23; NCA 8: 614-615: Wisliceny affidavit, 29 Nov. 1945.
236. CDJC, File LXX-85: Gisi Fleischmann report, 1 Sept. 1943.
237. Nuremberg Doc. NO-4824: Kastner affidavit, 4 Aug. 1947; Hilberg, Destruction, pp. 1133-34.
238. Eichmann Trial, sess. 49, pp. Vvl, Bbbl: testimony of Ernst Abeles.
239. Yirmeyahu Oscar Neumann, Im Schatten des Todes: Ein Tatsachenbericht vom Schicksalskampf des slovakischen Judentums (Tel Aviv, 1956), p. 243.
240. Lipscher, "Jews of Slovakia," p. 234; Georges Dunand, Ne perdez pas leur trace!, p. 229.
241. Holocaust: Selected Documents 8: 94: Wisliceny interrogation, 15 Nov. 1945.
243. Biss, A Million Jews, pp. 135-37.
244. Dunand, Ne perdez pas leur trace!, p. 148-50.
245. On Gisi Fleischmann's activities, see Livia Rothkirchen, "Slovakia II, 1918- 1938," in fews of Czechoslovakia 1: 97, 112; Yirmeyahu Oscar Neumann, Gisi Fleischmann: The Story of a Heroic Woman (Tel Aviv, 1970), pp. 24-26.
246. Biss, A Million Jews, p. 140.
247. Neumann, Im Schatten des Todes, pp. 246-47.
249. Kastner, Der Kastner-Bericht, p. 188.
250. Kurt Becher affidavit, 7 Feb. 1946, in Braham, Destruction, p. 905; Holocaust: Selected Documents 8: 94: Wisliceny interrogation, 15 Nov. 1945; Eichmann Trial, sess. 103, p. Hhl; and Kastner, Kastner-Bericht, pp. 188,276.
251. Eichmann Trial, sess. 51, p. Ool; Kastner, Kastner-Bericht, pp. 189, 276.
252. Neumann, Im Schatten des Todes, p. 253.
253. Eichmann Trial, sess. 51, pp. Mml, NnI.
254. Neumann, Im Schatten des Todes, p. 254.
255. See ibid., pp. 265-67, 274; Eichmann Trial, sess. 51, pp. Mml, NnI, Ppl.
256. Kastner, Kastner-Bericht, pp. 305-06.
257. Neumann, Im Schatten des Todes, p. 277.
258. Kastner, Kastner-Bericht, p. 310; TMWC 4: 363: Wisliceny testimony, 3 Jan. 1946.
259. Eichmann Trial, sess. 50, p. XI: testimony of Bedrich Steiner. Steiner's figures also quoted in Lipscher, Die Juden im Slowakischen Staat, p. 179; these figures do not include the transport to Bergen-Belsen described by Neumann, Im Schatten des Todes, p. 266. In addition, 3,500 Jews were executed within Slovakia at the time of the insurrection (Lipscher, "Jews of Slovakia," p. 234). Ludovit Holotik claims 58,000 were deported after 1944 ("The 'Jewish Problem' in Slovakia," East European Quarterly 1 [19671: 37) but took this figure from a source on deportations in 1942: Lubomir Liptak, "Slovensky Stat a Protifasisticke Hnutie v Rokoch 1939-1943," Historicky Casopis 14 (1966): 195. 1 have chosen the figure of 14,000 as a conservative estimate.
260. NCA 5: 324: Kastner affidavit, 13 Sept. 1945; Kastner's figure also quoted in Braham, Politics of Genocide, p. 918.
261. Holocaust: Selected Documents 17: 131-32; Wisliceny interrogation, 15 Nov. 1945; TMWC 4: 363: Wisliceny testimony, 3 Jan. 1946.
262. Eichmann Trial, sess. 50, p. XI. Kulka calculates that 94 percent of the Jews deported from Slovakia perished (Kulka, "Annihilation," p. 315).
263. NCA 8: 611: Wisliceny affidavit, 29 Nov. 1945.
264. Pre-trial interrogation in Eichmann par Eichmann, pp. 291, 315; Eichmann Trial, sess. 62, p. Dddl; sess. 103, p. WI.
265. Wisliceny deposition, in Friedman, The Hunter, p. 163. Most historians do not include Brunner in the Eichmann Special Commando for Hungary (see e.g. Braham, Politics of Genocide, p. 396; Robinson, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, p. 267).
266. Holocaust: Selected Documents 8: 91: Wisliceny interrogation, 15 Nov. 1945.
267. See the popular German weekly Bunte 45 (30 Oct. 1985): 16-27; Simon Wiesenthal to Mary Felstiner, 7 Aug. 1985.
268. Bunte 46 (7 Nov. 1985): 30-34.
269. Tuviah Friedman in Haifa and Simon Wiesenthal in Vienna have gathered information on Brunner over the years. See Dokumentationszentrum des Bundes judischer Verfolgter des Naziregimes, Bulletin of Information 6 (June 1967). In 1982 Serge Klarsfeld of Paris went to Syria to protest Brunner's presence and raised new interest in the case. Recently reporters have verified Brunner's protected position in Damascus: see Robert Fisk, "Syria protects Eichmann aide," London Times, 17 Mar. 1983; Bunte 45-46 (30 Oct. and 7 Nov. 1985).
270. Bunte 46 (7 Nov. 1985): 30-34.
271. judgment against Alois Brunner, in absentia, Tribunal Permanent des Forces Armees de Paris, 17 May 1954.
272. Arrest warrant in Vienna Search Book: Alois Brunner (Schmaldienst), 1938-45, for crimes in Greece, Hungary, Austria (CDJC, file DLVI-61). This arrest warrant is still in effect, and criminal proceedings are pending before the Landesgericht in Strafsachen in Vienna. An extradition request from Austria to Syria has long been on the books.
273. At present, the Frankfurt prosecutor is handling the charges against Brunner concerning Berfin-RSHA, Greece, and Czechoslovakia; the charges concerning France are being handled by the Cologne prosecutor (Alfred Streim to Mary Felstiner, 23 July 1985).
274. Holocaust: Selected Documents 8: 91: Wisliceny interrogation, 15 Nov. 1945.
