Since word came last summer that Dr. Josef Mengele was dead, a man named Alois Brunner, once top aide to Mass Murderer Adolf Eichmann, has headed the list of living Nazi war criminals. Brunner has long been rumored to be living in Damascus, Syria, and last week the Munich-based magazine Bunte disclosed that its reporters had found him there. At age 73, it said, Brunner is missing most of his fingers and is half blind as a result of two letter bombs sent to him by unknown parties in 1961 and 1980. He boasted to Bunte of his war crimes, referring to the hundreds of thousands of Jews he sent to the gas chambers as “that rubbish.” Brunner is still being sought by half a dozen countries and is under two death sentences in France. Syria has ignored requests to extradite him. Bunte quotes Brunner as saying he is willing to stand trial so that “Israel won’t get me.” But Brunner apparently would not be allowed to leave Syria if he wanted to: having served for years as an adviser to the Syrian secret service, says Bunte’s managing editor, the fugitive “knows too much.”
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