Nazi Criminal Who Went Into HidingThe Secret Service Files on Alois Brunner

First he helped organize the Holocaust, later he lived a happy life in exile. We publish files of the German Secret Service which show how early the German state knew about the whereabouts of the war criminal.

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Alois Brunner –

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Alois Brunner is considered a Nazi perpetrator by conviction. He commanded SS special commandos, was Adolf Eichmann's deputy and in this role was instrumental in the industrial extermination of millions of people. Unlike Eichmann, who was sentenced to death in Israel in 1962 as an organizer of the Holocaust, Brunner never had to answer for his actions before a court. He lived in Germany under a false name until 1954, then fled abroad and is believed to have died in Damascus around 2001.

A file of around 400 pages from the German Internal Secret Service (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV), which we are publishing, shows that German intelligence services had known for decades where Brunner had gone into hiding, what he was doing there and who had supported him in his escape. The file was released after a request under the Federal Archives Act.

A file that was not supposed to become public

The intelligence files on Alois Brunner are themselves a political issue. In 2020, the Bild newspaper already reported on contents of the documents. Before that, the tabloid had to fight in court for more than eight years to be allowed to see the file. The legal dispute led all the way to the Federal Administrative Court.

The then president of the secret service, Hans-Georg Maaßen, said before the ruling that he would "ensure that the Federal Archives Act is amended" if the Brunner files had to be released. That is what happened later.

Only 129 pages, dating from 1984 to 1991, were released by the secret service to the Bild newspaper after the verdict. Older files had been destroyed due to deletion deadlines. A short time later, however, the BfV surprisingly released further documents on Brunner, which had "suddenly appeared" and dated back to 1960. We are now publishing the entire 396-page file that has been released so far.

What the secret service knew about Brunner

The documents show that as early as 1960, indications of the war criminal's whereabouts and cover identity were known to the German secret service.

Brunner is said to have been involved in arms deals with German right-wing extremists in Damascus. Among others, he was in contact with Otto Ernst Remer, a former Wehrmacht officer who became a well-connected player in the far-right scene in the postwar period.

A letter from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution to the Frankfurt Prosecutor General's Office, which was investigating Brunner at the time, also shows that there had been "further findings about an activity of Brunner in Damascus" as early as 1960, but that these were under source protection.

But although German authorities knew where Brunner was shortly after he fled, the German government did not submit an extradition request to Syria until 1984. In that year, the intelligence service documented that Brunner was living in Damascus under the pseudonym Georg Fischer. A handwritten note adds, "In order to prevent a broader dissemination of the report," only a single department was to be informed.

As the source further reports in the note, "Georg" also comes into contact with employees of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution due to an alleged activity for the Syrian secret service. He was always "up to date" in terms of intelligence, he said.

Prominent escape helpers

The parts of the files from the 1960s also show absurd details of how Nazi criminals on the run were dealt with at the time - and how well they were networked into the highest circles in the postwar period. Even back then, there were indications that Rudolf Vogel, then a CDU member of the Bundestag, had provided financial help to escape for Nazi criminal Brunner. In an interrogation by the secret service, the politician at least admitted, according to the minutes in the files, to having contributed money to support Brunner's wife. However, he denied actively helping Alois Brunner to escape. It was not until 2017 that Der Spiegel finally reported on the politician's escape assistance on the basis of further archive documents. By then, both Vogel and Brunner had been dead for years. Both remained untouched until the end.

Former SS Hauptsturmführer and Reich student leader Georg Fischer, who provided his identity for Brunner's escape and under whose name Brunner is said to have lived until his death, had a "large circle of acquaintances and good relations with influential people" in Bonn, the federal capital at the time - for example, in the Interior Ministry and the Foreign Office.

First BND chief Reinhard Gehlen

To this day, Alois Brunner's most important escape helper is believed to be a man who was at the head of another intelligence service at the time: Reinhard Gehlen was the first president of the Federal Intelligence Service until 1968. A former major general in the Wehrmacht, he set about building up an intelligence service after World War II with financial support from the United States. In 1956, this "Gehlen Organization" was absorbed into the BND. However, there is no obvious evidence in the files that the former intelligence chief Gehlen facilitated the escape of the war criminal Brunner. The BND itself destroyed a 581-page file on Brunner in the 1990s.

We are now also publishing documents from the U.S. intelligence service FBI on ex-BND chief Gehlen. We obtained the files on the basis of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the USA. They consist of 76 pages created between 1956 and 1972 and were formerly classified as secret or confidential. They essentially cover several U.S. visits by Gehlen, during which he attended conferences, some of which were secret, visited the FBI, or traveled after his term for a reading of his memoirs.

There is nothing about Brunner's connection to Gehlen in the FBI documents either. However, these pages provide a glimpse into the tangled web of intelligence work during the Cold War. In a memo on the occasion of a visit by Gehlen to FBI headquarters, several individuals are cited as allegedly being involved in espionage activities. According to the memo, the BND allegedly received information that Karl-Heinrich Kappstein, then German ambassador to the U.S., had passed on diplomatic information in exchange for payment. This knowledge had then reached the East German Stasi via two intermediaries. Gehlen had also stated that this could be a case of double espionage conducted by the Soviet secret service.

All this was "top secret," Gehlen emphasized. Neither other foreign intelligence services nor any other German agency outside the BND had access to this information - until now.

→ The BfV file on Alois Brunner

→ The FBI file on Reinhard Gehlen

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