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German Intelligence Service Destroys its File on Alois Brunner [Eichmann’s Deputy and Postwar German Intelligence Agent]

 

 

 

COMMENT: Fol­low­ing close­ly on its refusal to effect com­plete dis­clo­sure of its files on Eich­mann, the BND (the Ger­man intel­li­gence ser­vice), has destroyed its files on Eich­man­n’s deputy Alois Brun­ner.

As dis­cussed in AFA #3, evi­dence is strong that Brun­ner worked for the BND after World War II. Recall that the BND sprout­ed from the World War II Ger­man East­ern front intel­li­gence out­fit For­eign Armies East, run by Gen­er­al Rein­hard Gehlen. (Eich­mann him­self, accord­ing to author Glenn Infield, worked for the BND and CIA on con­tract.)

“Ger­man Cov­er-Up Furore after File on Nazi is Delet­ed” by Tony Pat­ter­son; The Inde­pen­dent [UK]; 7/23/11.

EXCERPT: Ger­many’s intel­li­gence ser­vice has been rocked by rev­e­la­tions that its staff mys­te­ri­ous­ly destroyed a 500-page file on Alois Brun­ner, one of the world’s most want­ed Nazi war crim­i­nals, amid sus­pi­cions that he worked for them as an agent after flee­ing to Syr­ia in the ear­ly 1950s.

Brun­ner, who if he is still alive is 99, col­lab­o­rat­ed close­ly with Adolf Eich­mann, the Nazi offi­cer who mas­ter­mind­ed the Holo­caust. He is said to have sent more than 128,000 Jews from through­out Nazi-occu­pied Europe to the death camps dur­ing the Sec­ond World War. An Aus­tri­an cit­i­zen, Brun­ner fled to Syr­ia in the ear­ly 1950s from where he gave inter­views to Ger­man and Amer­i­can news­pa­pers. In one, giv­en in 1987, he stat­ed: “The Jews deserved to die. They were garbage. If I had the chance I would do it again.” . . . .

. . . The agen­cy’s in-house his­to­ri­ans have revealed that staff ordered the Brun­ner file to be wiped off its com­put­ers at some stage between 1994 and 1997, when it was under the con­trol of the for­mer con­ser­v­a­tive chan­cel­lor Hel­mut Kohl’s gov­ern­ment.

Sus­pi­cions of a delib­er­ate cov­er up have been raised, not least because Brun­ner is thought to have worked for the BND as its Dam­as­cus agent after he fled to Syr­ia. Bodo Hechel­ham­mer, the BND’s chief his­to­ri­an, told Der Spiegel mag­a­zine: “I would like to have seen the whole Brun­ner file. It would have helped clear up all the spec­u­la­tion.”

The claim that Brun­ner worked for Ger­man intel­li­gence is borne out by a hand­writ­ten BND doc­u­ment from 1997 which records a con­ver­sa­tion with the ser­vice’s head of secu­ri­ty, Volk­er Foertsch, in which he states that he “knew per­son­al­ly” that Brun­ner was a BND infor­mant in Syr­ia. . . .

Discussion

5 comments for “German Intelligence Service Destroys its File on Alois Brunner [Eichmann’s Deputy and Postwar German Intelligence Agent]”

  1. A reaf­fir­ma­tion that the BND is a sack of shit. And an evil one at that. Intel­li­gence ser­vices, such as the BND & CIA, are pur­vey­ors of evil and wrong­do­ing in the world. They are excel­lent spec­i­mens of how NOT to act or behave as human beings. They mar the entire image and his­to­ry of humankind. One look at the human race from an out­sider’s per­spec­tive, and it’s no won­der that extrater­res­tri­al life has decid­ed to not make con­tact with earth. I have a stick­er that reads ‘Beam Me Up Scot­ty, There’s No Intel­li­gent Life Down Here.’

    Posted by Joshua Laudermilk | July 30, 2011, 10:56 am
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15968698

    Ger­man intel­li­gence files on ex-Nazis shred­ded

    30 Novem­ber 2011 Last updat­ed at 10:12 ET

    An esti­mat­ed one in 10 BND recruits had pre­vi­ous­ly served in Hitler’s SS

    Inves­ti­ga­tors have found that in 2007 the Ger­man Intel­li­gence Ser­vice (BND) destroyed files of 250 BND employ­ees who had been in the Nazi SS or Gestapo.

    The BND con­firmed the loss, call­ing it “regret­table and annoy­ing”.

    Four inde­pen­dent his­to­ri­ans are inves­ti­gat­ing the BND’s old links with the Nazis. They say some of the miss­ing papers con­cern sus­pect­ed war crim­i­nals.

    The his­to­ri­ans did not allege a delib­er­ate cov­er-up, but they urged the BND not to destroy any more files.

    They said the BND should con­sult them before shred­ding any more doc­u­ments, and called for a full inves­ti­ga­tion into the 2007 inci­dent.

    One of the his­to­ri­ans, Dres­den Pro­fes­sor Klaus-Diet­mar Henke, said “it is not the case that the BND some­how delib­er­ate­ly destroyed the files of all those with Nazi links”.

    Accord­ing to the BND, the destroyed files relate to about 2% of the archive cur­rent­ly being inves­ti­gat­ed by the his­to­ri­ans. The files were destroyed because they were not deemed to be worth keep­ing, the BND said.

    The inves­ti­ga­tion into the BND’s Nazi roots began in Feb­ru­ary.

    Rein­hard Gehlen, who set up the BND after World War II, spied on the Sovi­et Union for the Nazis dur­ing the war.

    About 10% of BND recruits dur­ing the Cold War had pre­vi­ous­ly served in the SS, the Ger­man news web­site Spiegel reports.

    Spiegel says the BND told it that in the 1990s doc­u­ments about a top want­ed Nazi, for­mer SS Capt Alois Brun­ner, were destroyed.

    Posted by R. Wilson | November 30, 2011, 9:00 pm
  3. Dear sir/madam the nine­teen forty two trip alois brun­ner took to autzwitz was a very effec­tive p.r. Pre­sen­ta­tion of how to ..make mon­ey and trade out of death­cams inmates.he was reput­ed to have tak­en the then Mufti of Jerusalem On his pow­er­point presentation,showing of gross prof­it from tor­tur­ous prac­tices. This very same mufti then is reput­ed to have been a founder of the cur­rent moslim­broth­er­hood.

    Posted by The memoires of simon wiesenthal are still by far the most revealing as regarde live and wokks of alois brunner. | October 27, 2012, 3:11 am
  4. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/188049#.VHt3iclNdcA

    Nazi Alois Brun­ner ‘Taught Assad How to Tor­ture’
    Efraim Zuroff of the Wiesen­thal Cen­ter says he has reli­able infor­ma­tion that Eich­man­n’s ‘best man’ is dead and buried in Syr­ia.
    By Gil Ronen
    First Pub­lish: 11/30/2014, 3:36 PM

    Dr. Efraim Zuroff of The Simon Wiesen­thal Cen­ter says that the cen­ter has received reli­able infor­ma­tion accord­ing to which Alois Brun­ner, a top Nazi fugi­tive whom Final Solu­tion archi­tect Adolf Eich­mann called his “best man,” is dead and buried in Dam­as­cus. Brun­ner advised for­mer Syr­i­an dic­ta­tor Hafez Ass­sad on tor­ture tech­niques and repres­sion, said Zuroff.

    British news site Sun­day Express quot­ed Zuroff, who directs the Wiesen­thal Cen­ter’s Israel office, as say­ing: “We have received infor­ma­tion from a for­mer Ger­man secret ser­vice agent who had served in the Mid­dle East who said that Brun­ner was dead and buried in Dam­as­cus.

    Zuroff added: “Giv­en his age it would not be sur­pris­ing and the infor­ma­tion came from some­one who we con­sid­er reli­able. There is much evi­dence of what he (Brun­ner) did and no lack of clar­i­ty about his huge guilt in four dif­fer­ent coun­tries.

    “We are talk­ing about some­one who helped send 128,500 Jews to the death camps, the major­i­ty were mur­dered... The vic­tims’ fam­i­lies are a very large group and it’s fair to say the peo­ple who suf­fered at his hands would have want­ed him to be pun­ished and would be dis­ap­point­ed, but he is not the only Nazi war crim­i­nal who got away, far too many got away.”

    Brun­ner was respon­si­ble for the depor­ta­tion of thou­sands of Jews from Aus­tria, Greece, Slo­va­kia and France to con­cen­tra­tion camps. He was com­man­der of the Dran­cy intern­ment camp out­side Paris from June 1943 to August 1944, from which near­ly 24,000 peo­ple were deport­ed, and was con­demned to death in absen­tia in France in 1954 for crimes against human­i­ty. In 1961 and in 1980, Brun­ner lost, respec­tive­ly, an eye and the fin­gers of his left hand, as a result of let­ter bombs sent to him by the Mossad.

    In a 1985 inter­view with the Ger­man mag­a­zine Bunte, Brun­ner said that he escaped cap­ture by the Allies imme­di­ate­ly after World War II because his iden­ti­ty was mixed up with that of anoth­er SS mem­ber, Anton Brun­ner.

    Alois Brun­ner said that he “received offi­cial doc­u­ments under a false name from Amer­i­can author­i­ties,” and found work as a dri­ver for the Unit­ed States Army in the peri­od after the war. He was report­ed­ly linked to the Gehlen orga­ni­za­tion of for­mer Nazi gen­er­als, which was set up by the US to spy on the Sovi­ets. He fled West Ger­many in 1954 on a fake Red Cross pass­port, first to Rome, then Egypt, where he worked as a weapons deal­er, and then to Syr­ia, where he took the pseu­do­nym of Dr. Georg Fis­ch­er.

    Accord­ing to Zuroff: “He was involved in the harsh treat­ment of the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty of Syr­ia and was an expert in ter­ror and tor­ture... He said him­self his one regret was he did not kill more Jews. He was unre­pen­tant.”

    Posted by Vanfield | November 30, 2014, 12:04 pm
  5. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/07/hitler-s-henchmen-in-arabia.html?

    Hitler’s Hench­men in Ara­bia
    Nazi Alois Brunner’s con­firmed death in Dam­as­cus reveals an uncom­fort­able truth: Egypt and Syr­ia have long ties to Nazi Ger­many and long pro­vid­ed sanc­tu­ary to fugi­tive war crim­i­nals.

    When most of us think of the pre­mier retire­ment des­ti­na­tion for unre­pen­tant Nazis, our minds imme­di­ate­ly turn to South Amer­i­ca. We think of Josef Men­gele hid­den on a lone­ly estancia in Paraguay, or Adolf Eich­mann ensconced in a two-bit sub­urb of Buenos Aires.

    This per­cep­tion was mag­ni­fied by a slew of sen­sa­tion­al books that were pub­lished in the ear­ly 1970s, many of which pro­mot­ed a very iffy the­sis that for­mer Nazis were using the con­ti­nent as a launch­pad for a “Fourth Reich” that would, yes, take over the world.

    This cul­mi­nat­ed in Ira Levin’s 1976 thriller, The Boys from Brazil, in which fiendish Nazis hatch a dia­bol­i­cal plot to unleash sev­er­al cloned Hitlers onto the world. The book was made into a film in 1978, and starred no less than Gre­go­ry Peck and Lau­rence Olivi­er, who were pre­sum­ably behind on the rent.

    But as the recent dec­la­ra­tion of the death of the for­mer SS offi­cer and Eich­mann hench­man Alois Brun­ner reveals, the boys didn’t just go to Brazil. For Brun­ner, like so many oth­er Nazis, found the Mid­dle East an equal­ly hos­pitable loca­tion, and far less out-on-a-limb than a chalet in Patag­o­nia, no mat­ter how gemütlich.

    Brun­ner, who sent an esti­mat­ed 130,000 Jews to their deaths, made his home in Dam­as­cus, Syr­ia, where he found the con­di­tions much to his lik­ing. Although there has been much guff ped­dled about Brunner’s post­war activ­i­ties over the past few days—some of which may be true—there is no doubt that he worked in cahoots with the Assad regime, or at least cer­tain­ly enjoyed its pro­tec­tion.

    How­ev­er, Brun­ner was not the only per­pe­tra­tor of the Holo­caust mooching around the streets of the Syr­i­an cap­i­tal. In terms of grue­some num­bers, Franz Stan­gl, the for­mer com­man­dant of Tre­blin­ka exter­mi­na­tion camp, had some 800,000 mur­ders on what remained of his con­science, and he arrived in Dam­as­cus in Sep­tem­ber 1948 with the assis­tance of a Roman Catholic bish­op.

    Although Brun­ner is said to have var­i­ous­ly worked as an intel­li­gence agent, an arms deal­er, and a secu­ri­ty advi­sor, Stan­gl took more menial posi­tions in tex­tile firms. Life was some­what fru­gal, but man­age­able. Unfor­tu­nate­ly for Stan­gl, the local chief of police took a fan­cy to his 14-year-old daugh­ter and want­ed to add the child to his harem. Stan­gl didn’t tar­ry, and packed his bags and shep­herd­ed his entire fam­i­ly to—you guessed it—Brazil.

    Stan­gl seems to have been one of the few Nazis who didn’t find the air pleas­ing in Syr­ia. Most, such as Major-Gen­er­al Otto-Ernst Remer, pros­pered on Arab Street. Remer was, frankly, a real piece of work, and hav­ing found­ed the swift­ly-banned Social­ist Reich Par­ty in West Ger­many in the ear­ly 1950s, decid­ed that work­ing as an arms deal­er with the likes of Brun­ner more reward­ing.

    Unlike Brun­ner, Remer was itin­er­ant, and spent much time in that oth­er nest of post­war Nazis—Cairo. If any­thing, the Egypt­ian cap­i­tal was even more appeal­ing than Dam­as­cus, and had been play­ing host to Nazis imme­di­ate­ly after the war, when King Farouk opened his arms to scores of for­mer SS and Gestapo offi­cers.

    That hos­pi­tal­i­ty con­tin­ued even after Farouk was deposed by the Free Offi­cers Move­ment in 1952, as Nass­er regard­ed Ger­man sci­en­tif­ic and intel­li­gence exper­tise as being an essen­tial com­po­nent of his regime. No less a fig­ure than Joachim Daum­ling, the for­mer head of the Gestapo in Düs­sel­dorf, was tasked with estab­lish­ing Nasser’s secret ser­vice.

    In fact, the list of some habitués of Cairo in the 1950s and the 1960s reads like a who’s who of Nazi Ger­many, fea­tur­ing as it did the res­cuer of Mus­soli­ni, Otto Sko­rzeny; the ace Stu­ka pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel; the leader of a noto­ri­ous SS penal unit, Oskar Dirlewanger; and the par­tic­u­lar­ly odi­ous and vio­lent­ly anti-Semit­ic stooge of Goebbels, Johannes von Leers.

    What made the rela­tion­ship between these for­mer Nazis and the Egyp­tians and Syr­i­ans so suc­cess­ful was that it was a gen­uine­ly two-way deal. The Arabs offered the Nazis a haven, as well as a mar­ket for all their nefar­i­ous deal­ings in arms and black mar­ket cur­ren­cy. The Nazis, mean­while, were able to pro­vide tech­ni­cal and mil­i­tary experts, as well as the knowhow of estab­lish­ing the instru­ments of repres­sion.

    How­ev­er, below the back scratch­ing lay a deep and dark under­pin­ning to the rela­tion­ship between the cres­cent and the swasti­ka. That was, of course, a hatred of the Jews, and in par­tic­u­lar, a desire to see the erad­i­ca­tion of Israel.

    That shared exter­mi­na­tion­ist desire had been born dur­ing the war itself, when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husayni, had made his home in the lux­u­ri­ous Hotel Adlon in Berlin in 1941, and had impressed Hitler with his hatred of the Jews. The Mufti lob­bied the Nazis hard to kick the British out of the Mid­dle East, and he was instru­men­tal in rais­ing recruits for a large­ly Mus­lim unit of the SS called the 13th Armed Moun­tain Divi­sion of the SS Hand­schar.

    In addi­tion, through­out the war in North Africa, Ger­man intel­li­gence had worked close­ly with the Egyp­tians, and the Mufti is thought to have been a key inter­me­di­ary between King Farouk and Hitler him­self. If fur­ther evi­dence were need­ed that the roots of the Nazi-Arab affair were required, then it is worth con­sid­er­ing the fact that both Nass­er and his suc­ces­sor, Anwar Sadat, had been wartime agents for the Ger­mans.

    Through­out the late 1960s and 1970s, many old Nazis man­aged dis­creet­ly to trick­le back to what they regard­ed as the Father­land. How­ev­er, oth­ers such as the for­mer SS “doc­tor” in Mau­thausen, Arib­ert Heim—and indeed Alois Brunner—would end their days in the Mid­dle East, dying lone­ly deaths in obscure dusty back streets of Cairo and Dam­as­cus.

    It is hard to feel sor­ry for such lone­ly demis­es, but in the end, those Nazis who escaped to the Mid­dle East found per­ma­nent sanc­tu­ary. Remem­ber­ing that may seem inflam­ma­to­ry when the West strug­gles with its rela­tion­ship with that part of the plan­et, but it is nonethe­less the awk­ward truth.

    Posted by Vanfield | December 7, 2014, 8:56 pm

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