Nazi officer Brunner tried in absentia

Brunner: One of the world's most-wanted Nazi war criminals

PARIS, France -- Former Nazi officer, Alois Brunner, will stand trial in absentia in Paris on Friday for sending Jewish children to Auschwitz death camps.

The Austrian-born SS officer will be charged for arresting and deporting 340 orphans from the Paris region, via packed cattle trains on August 7, 1944.

Nazi hunters believe, the 88-year-old former deputy to the Gestapo "technician of death" Adolf Eichmann, is hiding in Syria if still alive.

French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, who started court action against Brunner in 1987, feels that the trial for crimes against humanity is above all symbolic.

"Brunner is the ghost of a criminal. There is no hope of seeing him return to France," he said.

"What counts are the victims. We have kept this case alive for them."

Klarsfeld's own father died of exhaustion in a concentration camp after being arrested by Brunner's SS henchmen in 1943.

Klarsfeld, who engineered the capture in Bolivia of former Lyon Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, has travelled several times to Damascus to demand that Brunner be handed over. They were thrown out every time.

"We don't know anything about Brunner," a Syrian official said this week. Despite denying knowledge of his whereabouts, Damascus bars French investigators from entering the country.

The Jewish rights group, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, accused Syria of hiding the truth.

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

Brunner is held responsible for sending 140,000 Jews from across Europe to the gas chambers, including close to 24,000 from France.

The court is expected to give Brunner the maximum sentence, life in prison, after reading out a list of his crimes and the names of his victims. Lawyers for the civil plaintiffs and the prosecutor will also make statements.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Alois Brunner
Directory of French Government

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