France jails absent Nazi officer

Brunner held responsible for sending 140,000 Jews to death camps

PARIS, France (CNN) -- A Paris court has sentenced a senior Nazi SS officer being tried in absentia to life in prison on charges of crimes against humanity.

Alois Brunner, believed to be hiding in Syria, was found guilty of arresting and deporting 345 Jewish children from France to Auschwitz death camp in German-occupied Poland in 1944.

Serge Klarsfeld, a French Nazi hunter who has pursued the case since 1987, said: "We regret that the dock is empty but this is a case in which the criminality of the criminal does not have to be proven.

"He was careful to take refuge in an anti-Jewish state."

Several dozen people held banners outside the Palais de Justice in the French capital accusing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of harbouring Austrian-born Brunner, who would be 88 if still alive, as his accusers suspect.

The protesters also held up photographs of some of the 345 children that Brunner, who was deputy to the Gestapo "technician of death" Adolf Eichmann, sent on the last convoy to leave France for the World War II death camps.

But Syria denies playing any role in Brunner's refuge.

Cattle trains

Shimon Samuels, director for international liaison at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre said: "Until Damascus produces the man or evidence of his demise, the trauma of his victims' families will not find closure."

Klarsfeld, who started court action against Brunner in 1987, has travelled several times to Damascus to demand that Brunner be handed over. He was thrown out every time.

Between 1943 and 1944, Brunner commanded the Drancy detainment camp outside Paris -- where Jews rounded up in France awaited deportation to Auschwitz.

He is held responsible for sending 140,000 European Jews, nearly 24,000 from France, to the gas chambers.

The trial focused only on the arrest and deportation of the orphans from the Paris region, who were packed into cattle trains bound for Auschwitz -- one week before the Allies liberated Paris.

A French newspaper reported in December 1999 that a senior official close to Bashar al-Assad had said Brunner had died three years earlier and was buried in Damascus.

This was never confirmed and relatives of the victims say they would expect his daughter, who is reported to be living in Vienna, to announce his death when it occurs.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Nazi officer Brunner tried in absentia
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Mideast, missing Nazi highlight France-Syria talks
July 17, 1998

The Alois Brunner file
Simon Wiesenthal Center
Auschwitz Museum

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