Investigation Ends on Brunner, Leaving Prosecution Empty-handed

Authorities finished taking testimony last week from witnesses submitting evidence against Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner.

The hearings, initiated in Salonika at the request of the district attorney of Frankfurt, West Germany, ended with no tangible results.

They were conducted with hope of facilitating the West German effort to get Brunner extradited from Syria, where he reportedly has been living for over 30 years.

The Syrians have flatly denied this fact, to West Germany in 1986 as well as to France, which asked for Brunner’s extradition last year as a result of the efforts of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld.

The Salonika investigation, conducted by Greek District Attorney Athanassios Smilis and West German Prosecutor General Walter Griebel, bore no new fruit, because the six Greek Jewish survivors questioned testified that they did not have any first-hand information about Brunner’s brutalities.

The most productive testimony given came from one Jew who said he once saw Brunner, Outside of this, the only testimony against Brunner came from a book, “In Memoriam,” written by representatives of the Jewish community of Salonika, in which Brunner was described as a beast.

GREEK GOVERNMENT BLAMED

The United Nations War Crimes Commission archives lists at least four files on Brunner. The file submitted by Czechoslovakia, for example, shows that he is wanted for murder. He is listed as having served as an SS captain in Athens and Salonika in 1943 and 1944.

The U.N. War Crimes Commission, formed in 1943 in London by the Allied Powers, gave Brunner an “A” rating, indicating that he should stand immediate trial for murder. Other files are from France and Belgium.

Brunner, a chief deputy to Adolf Eichmann, is responsible for deporting thousands of Jews from France; supervising the deportation of some 50,000 Greek Jews of Salonika; and deporting Jews from Berlin, Vienna and Slovakia.

Much of the blame for the lack of evidence has been placed on the various Greek governments since World War II, which never deemed it necessary to collect existing evidence on the Jewish Holocaust in Salonika.

The West Germans and French, however, have attempted to bring Brunner to justice.

Last month, French government officials asked visiting Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa about Brunner, to which Sharaa testily repeated the often heard phrase that Brunner was not in Syria.

“The whole story has been totally made up to hurt Syria’s image,” he said.

Sharaa responded to a series of questions on the Middle East, but when asked about Brunner, he became irritated and terminated the meeting.

Serge Klarsfeld, visiting New York last week, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that France “will continue to ask Syria for Brunner until either they agree to extradite him or he appears in a different country.”

(JTA staff writer Susan Birnbaum in New York contributed to this report.)