Alois Brunner

Alois Brunner (born 8 April 1912) was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer. Brunner was Adolf Eichmann's assistant, and Eichmann referred to Brunner as his "best man". As commander of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris from June 1943 to August 1944, Brunner is held responsible for sending some 140,000 European Jews to the gas chambers. Nearly 24,000 of them were deported from the Drancy camp. He 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 Israeli Mossad.

In 2003, The Guardian described him as "the world's highest-ranking Nazi fugitive believed still alive". Brunner was last reported to be living in Syria, whose government had long rebuffed international efforts to locate or apprehend him. The government of Syria under Hafez el-Assad was close to extraditing Alois Brunner to East Germany, before this plan was halted by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.