Alois Brunner sent at least 129 000 Jews to the death camps. Serge Klarsfeld, the French lawyer who helped track down Klaus Barbie, is determined to bring him to trial. Jo Glanville reports
Many people remember Alois Brunner. Philip Vock saw him yelling in the yard of Drancy transit camp, on the outskirts of Paris, the day he was sent to Auschwitz. Elliot Welles has not forgotten how Brunner slapped his face just before he deported him to Latvia from Vienna, when he refused to hand over the gold watch which had been a present from his father. Andreas Sefiha escaped when Brunner deported the entire Jewish community of Salonica from Greece. At 14, he realised it was unlikely the trains were heading for a labour camp with children on board.
Brunner specialised in deporting Jews and is the last high-ranking Nazi still believed to be at large. He was the top aide of Adolf Eichmann, and a roving SS captain who sent at least 129 000 Jews to the death camps. When Eichmann dispatched him to Paris in June 1943 to speed up the final solution in France and take over Drancy transit camp, among the thousands he deported was my mother’s cousin, Theo Meyer. He arrived in Auschwitz on September 4 1943. No one ever saw him again.
A French court is examining a 12-year investigation into Brunner’s crimes. The case is expected to be handed over to the criminal court within a couple of months and the trial of Alois Brunner for crimes against humanity is likely to take place early next year.
But he will be judged in absentia: no one can say for sure where he is or if he is even still alive. Der Spiegel claimed earlier this month that he was living in the Hotel Meridien in Damascus. He is said to have lived in Syria since the Fifties, but the Syrians deny it and have refused to allow French investigators into the country. Last year, President Hafez Assad said drily: “I wonder how I, who am in Syria, do not know where he is, while the French judge knows his whereabouts.”
Brunner was born in Austria in 1912. Thanks to historian Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, a detailed portrait of the man and his deeds exists. While researching her book on artist Charlotte Salomon, who was deported to Auschwitz by Brunner, Felstiner uncovered the significant role he played in the final solution.
A picture emerges of a man who set about deporting Jews as though he were carrying out a vital job. In Vienna, he began clearing the Reich of Jews in the Nazis’ first mass deportation programme; in Salonica, he destroyed one of Europe’s most illustrious Sephardi communities in six weeks, deporting 43 000 Jews on a nine-day journey to Auschwitz in sealed wagons. Before he arrived in France, the Vichy regime, while all too willing to arrest foreign Jews, had managed to stall handing over French Jews to some extent. Brunner allowed no exemptions.
On Theo Meyer’s transport, Brunner included inmates from psychiatric hospitals and when one became hysterical he had her chloroformed. Witnesses describe him as “a dark nightmare”, and a “mad sadist”. At the Nuremberg trials, his own deputy called him a “Schweinhund … an extremely unscrupulous individual”.
The stories of Brunner’s career since the war read like a spy thriller: escaped from Europe with false papers in the name Georg Fischer; recruited by an organisation of former Nazis in the pay of the CIA; helped Syria set up its intelligence services; planned to rescue Eichmann from the Israelis; brought rocket scientists from East Germany to the Middle East; and received two parcel bombs from Mossad, which maimed and blinded him in one eye.
The German magazine Bunte published an interview with him in 1985 in which he was unrepentant. He has also been rumoured to be dead or to have fled to Argentina.
Most of those who have been looking for him are convinced he is alive. Some believe that everyone is chasing a phantom and that the man interviewed by Bunte was not in fact Brunner at all. Martin Bormann, they point out, was spotted in a number of countries before it was revealed that he had been dead since 1945.
Nevertheless, there are witnesses who claim Brunner is in Syria – though it seems unlikely he is in the Hotel Meridien, a popular spot for journalists and diplomats who just might recognise him in the lobby. A further clue could be provided by the German government. A law was passed last year stopping the payment of war pensions to Nazi war criminals. There is one person in Syria receiving a German war pension.
Serge Klarsfeld, a French lawyer and historian, and his wife, Beate, have been to Syria many times to protest at Brunner’s presence. The Syrians have thrown them out on each occasion. The Klarsfelds are also behind the impending trial of Brunner in France. For 30 years, they have been exposing and pursuing the Nazis and Vichy officials responsible for deporting Jews from France, and who have since settled down to respectable, bourgeois lives.
The Klarsfelds’ son, Arno, was one of the prosecution lawyers in the trial of Maurice Papon, the Vichy official and minister who was condemned for complicity in crimes against humanity last year. When Papon made his dramatic attempt to flee to Switzerland last month, on the eve of his appeal, Serge and Arno Klarsfeld attacked both the government and the judiciary for having allowed him to remain at liberty.
The Klarsfelds are courageous activists. They tracked down Klaus Barbie, the head of the Gestapo in Lyon, and succeeded in bringing him to trial in France in 1987. They also attempted to kidnap Kurt Lischka in Cologne. As deputy head of the Gestapo in Paris, Lischka had shown a particular enthusiasm for deporting Jews. The Klarsfelds were each sentenced to two months in prison. They have been arrested on many occasions and attempts have been made on their lives. They also campaign against contemporary war criminals: Serge Klarsfeld was thrown out of Pale in Bosnia after trying to persuade Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic to surrender to the International War Crimes Tribunal.
As he fought to bring Nazis to justice, Serge Klarsfeld began researching the history of the Jews deported from France. “I am a historian by education,” he told me, “so I could not go to the trial of these people without having a history of the Jews or without their names. I couldn’t go and accuse in the name of a statistic.” At the time, the basic facts were still unknown – including how many had been deported and how many died. Many documents had only survived because of the prescience of Isaac Schneerson, who had created an underground archive in 1943, the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine.
In the Seventies, Serge Klarsfeld began a process of painstaking, arduous documentation. It took 40 hours to decipher each deportation list of the 80 convoys that left France for the death camps. The resulting book, The Memorial to the Jews Deported from France, is the size of a telephone directory and includes the name of every Jew who was deported. It was used as evidence in the trial of Lischka in 1979 along with SS leaders Herbert Hagen and Ernst Heinrichson. The Klarsfelds packed the courtroom in Cologne with French Jews, each of whom carried a copy of The Memorial.
Thanks to the Klarsfelds’ work I have been able to trace the course of my relative’s end. The story of my mother’s cousin had been part of family mythology. Theo Meyer was a German Jew, living in Paris with his parents when the Nazis occupied northern France. He was a year older than my mother, who had spent part of her childhood with his family in Berlin. His father, a banker, was murdered by the Gestapo. His mother, my great-aunt Mea, escaped to the south.
Theo Meyer had, in the meantime, disappeared. Mea Meyer saw him by chance for the very last time in Marseilles, as she was fleeing the country, and he cut her dead in the street. After the war, she heard he had been in the Resistance and died in Auschwitz, but no one had verified the story and I doubted whether it really had been Theo Meyer she had seen that day. When I visited Serge Klarsfeld, he found Theo Meyer’s camp registration card for me and I discovered he had been living in Marseilles and that he had been arrested there.
Although these details may be of no interest to anyone other than my family, for Klarsfeld the identity of every one of the 75 721 Jews deported from France is significant. It is evidence which has a practical purpose, not only in the trial of Nazi war criminals, but in making France face up to the part it played in sending Jews to their deaths – more than 80% of the Jews deported were arrested by the French police.
Yet it is equally important to Klarsfeld to rescue the Jews who died from oblivion. His book is reminiscent of the Memorbchen which catalogued the Jews massacred in medieval Europe, whose names would be read out in the synagogues once a year. It has become an obsession for Klarsfeld to amass as much information as possible and he is working on another edition of The Memorial which will include the place where every Jew was arrested.
Klarsfeld has a very personal reason for his interest: his father was deported by Brunner and died at Auschwitz. The Klarsfeld family was in Nice when Brunner orchestrated one of his most brutal round- ups. Under the Italian occupation, the Riviera had been one of the last places of refuge, but when Italy signed the armistice with the Allies in September 1943, the Germans invaded and Brunner arrived with a special squad to arrest the Jews in the area.
Historian Leon Poliakov, who was also an eyewitness, described it as a “human hunt”: men were forced to pull down their pants to show if they were circumcised, anyone considered to look Jewish was in danger of arrest.
Klarsfeld’s father hid his family in a closet, behind a false partition. Serge Klarsfeld could hear the neighbours’ children being beaten by the Nazis. He was eight years old. When the Germans knocked on the door, his father let them in. They looked in the closet, saw only the clothes behind which Serge was hiding with his mother and sister, and took his father away.
Brunner was condemned to death in absentia by two French tribunals in the Fifties. By 1974, the sentences had lapsed and Brunner would technically have been free to enter France. This was when Klarsfeld began investigating. He found evidence that Brunner was living in Syria under the name Georg Fischer and put pressure on Germany and France to extradite him. But Klarsfeld needed to find a charge which had not been included in the original sentences.
He had faced the same problem with Barbie; in both cases, the crimes he uncovered concerned children. In the summer of 1944, Brunner organised the mass arrest of 250 children whose parents had already been deported. The Jewish organisation Union Gnrale des Israelites de France (UGIF) had set up homes to keep the children out of Drancy transit camp. Brunner demanded information about the children. When a UGIF official tried to persuade him to spare them, he replied that they were future terrorists.
All the children were deported on one of the last convoys, along with a newborn baby, a few weeks before the liberation of Paris. Only 32 survived. Once Klarsfeld realised that Brunner had never been charged for this act, he filed a suit for crimes against humanity.
More than 11 000 children were deported from France. Vichy leader Pierre Laval volunteered to round up stateless Jewish children in his zone and declared he had no interest in what happened to the Jewish children in occupied France. He told his ministers he was acting out of humanity: he did not want to separate families.
The truth was that the French authorities did not want thousands of orphans on their hands. Moreover, if children were included in the deportations, then the French police would not have to round up so many adults to fill the transports. After one of the most infamous mass arrests, in Paris, at the sports stadium Vel d’Hiv on July 16 and 17 1942, the French police insisted the 4 000 children in the round-up also be deported. They were. None survived.
France has had a fairly intense reckoning with its past during the Nineties: from the revelations about Franois Mitterrand’s Vichy career, to the trial in 1994 of Paul Touvier, former head of the Lyon Militia and the first Frenchman to be found guilty of crimes against humanity. Mitterrand was opposed to putting Vichy officials on trial, but with his passing and the election of Jacques Chirac as president there has been a sea change.
In 1995, on the anniversary of Vel d’Hiv, Chirac acknowledged the French state’s responsibility for the crimes of Vichy. He was the first president to condemn the regime and shatter once and for all the myth which had buried France’s collaborationist past and glorified the Resistance. The impact of his statement cannot be underestimated and there are those who believe it will go down as the single most important act in Chirac’s career. Klarsfeld has been a significant influence on the president and has dedicated his latest book to him.
In the continuing watershed, the French Catholic Church has apologised to the Jews of France for its silence during the war, the Vichy archives have been opened and a commission has been set up to investigate the seizure of assets. Prime Minister Lionel Jospin has just announced that the children of orphaned Jews deported from France will shortly receive compensation.
But not everyone is impressed. Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, has recently locked horns with France over its reluctance to pay restitution for bank accounts seized during the war. Class-action suits have been filed in New York against seven French banks. French Jewish organisations and the French government have not welcomed the United States meddling in what they see as their own concern. Steinberg questions how far France is truly confronting its past and believes the trial of Brunner will only reconfirm Nazi rather than French responsibility for rounding up the Jews. “There’s a willingness to go after Brunner, but is there this willingness to go after French war criminals? With exceptions, the answer is no.”
Perhaps the most striking symbol of France’s ambivalence towards its recent history is the site of Drancy transit camp, La Cit de la Muette. It was from here that most of the Jews in France were sent to the death camps, yet it has never been designated a national monument – unlike the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, which was left as a ruin to commemorate the massacre of its inhabitants. The small museum and memorial do not receive a state subsidy. People are even living in the rooms where Jews were crowded before being deported to their deaths. For what became a camp was initially part of a socialist-modernist housing scheme. The project ground to a halt in the economic crisis of the Thirties and in 1939 the unfinished buildings were turned into an internment camp.
After the war, collaborators were imprisoned there and within a few years, in the face of a housing shortage, the buildings were used for the purpose for which they were originally intended – low-income housing.
Before Brunner took over the camp, it was administered by the French police and the inmates starved in appalling conditions. Brunner’s arrival actually improved daily life. He ordered UGIF to supply provisions, a lawn was planted, the stairs were whitewashed, rooms were painted and showers were installed. This was mostly for propaganda purposes – Brunner also subjected many prisoners to brutal interrogations.
Above all, he wanted as little trouble as possible from the thousands he was deporting. He did not split up families, which had been the French authorities’ practice; he used Jewish inmates to police Drancy; and he went to great lengths to engineer the fiction that they were heading for a labour camp. When Brunner left Drancy on August 17 1944, the day before the Red Cross took over, he was deporting Jews to the last – he took 51 prisoners on his train.
The museum of the camp is tucked away, at the end of one of the blocks, and occupies a room once used by Brunner. Schoolchildren visit and survivors of the deportations come to tell them about their experiences. There are photographs, some documents and a block of cement, covered with prisoners’ graffiti.
The curator, Alain Kremenetzky, says the residents are not bothered by the history of the place. He is not particularly enthusiastic about the trial of Brunner: “It will be like a history lesson,” he says. “It changes nothing.”
This sentiment is echoed by others who have an interest in the subject and might be expected to be pleased about the prosecution. For without Brunner in the dock, the trial will merely be a matter of reading out the investigation.
Shimon Samuels, director for international liaison at the Wiesenthal Centre in Paris, thinks that trying Brunner in absentia is an act of desperation. “If the trial is construed as the be all and end all and removes the pressure to obtain habeas corpus then we’ve lost it.”
Klarsfeld, however, sees it as making a stand. “It’s France’s reply to Syria, saying, ‘We do not believe you and we judge you because we believe that he is in Syria.'”
Yet despite France’s close relations with Syria, despite extradition requests and investigations, no one is closer to getting him and it seems that ultimately no government has the political will to do so. Israel has no interest in putting the issue on the agenda of its talks with Syria. Just before he was assassinated, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was asked to look into Brunner and did not know who he was.
Germany has offered a DM500 000 reward for information about Brunner. However, Esther Schapira, whose documentary about Brunner was shown on German television last year, believes that the reward amounts to no more than public relations. When she went to Cologne to see the state attorney who is investigating Brunner, and offered information on his whereabouts, she was greeted with a distinct lack of interest. “When we talked to the BND [German intelligence], they said of course they could trace Brunner if they had the order to, but no government has ever done so.”