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Local woman eluded grip of Holocaust enforcer

5 min read

The news item — the story of a death, actually — caused me to shiver.

Oh, not right away. I had never heard of Alois Brunner — dead in Damascus, Syria, probably as long as four years ago.

But then I read further, and Brunner’s story made my skin crawl. It hit close to home.

The story was datelined December 2014, but it really originated in the spring of 1938 in Vienna, Austria.

Brunner was an Austrian Nazi, a dedicated anti-Semite, and a chief enforcer of the Holocaust, the extermination of over six million innocent men, women, and children.

Brunner was Adolf Eichmann’s glowering bully boy who got a second stab at cruelty in the decades following his escape from Europe and Allied justice after the war: he advised the Damascus government in its persecution of Syrian Jews.

And he was also the man who, had she remained in Vienna, would have been responsible for rounding up Lisa Burger, 14 years old in 1938, who managed to leave the country of her birth that year for the United States, just as Alois Brunner was crawling out of the sewers to play his monstrous role.

Lisa and her mother eventually settled in Uniontown. Fourth in her class academically, she graduated from Uniontown High School in 1942, 73 years ago this spring.

In her senior essay, she wrote of the nation’s founding refugees, “Onward … they marched, those pioneers of freedom and equality. … Such was the way of our forefathers.”

She was a good and valuable citizen. A patriot.

Brunner was scum.

Speaking to a reporter in 1987, he said, “The Jews deserved to die. I have no regrets. If I had the chance, I would do it again.”

In 1943, while Lisa was studying at Indiana State Teachers College (later, IUP), Brunner was appointed by his boss Eichmann to run a so-called transit camp outside Paris. The camp funneled Jews and other prisoners of the state to Nazi death camps.

Infamously, Brunner was responsible for dispatching 345 orphaned French children to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen just weeks before the Allies liberated Paris in 1944. Only 61 survived.

Brunner signed death warrants for a total of 128,500 unfortunate individuals. For these hideous acts, he was tried in absentia by a French court in 2001 and sentenced to death.

While Brunner was living free and clear in Damascus, Simon Wiesenthal said of him, “Among Third Reich criminals … Alois Brunner is undoubtedly the worst. In my eye, he was the worst ever.

“While Adolf Eichmann drew up the general staff plan for the extermination of the Jews, Alois Brunner implemented it.” (Eichmann was tried by the Israelis following a trial that riveted the world; he was executed in 1961.)

Brunner’s woeful story intersects with Lisa Burger’s story of triumph in that both were in Vienna when Germany, under Adolf Hitler, marched in, crushing Austrian democracy and incorporating Austria into the “thousand year” Reich.

Years later, Lisa recalled for me that the day after the German invasion teachers and students at the school she attended in Vienna donned Nazi arm bands. As a vulnerable Jewish girl, Lisa felt abandoned and forlorn.

Her mother, Elsie, related hiding behind the shuttered windows of the shop where she worked on one of Vienna’s fashionable retail boulevards and seeing, through the tiny openings in the slats, the man responsible for the sudden transformation of her country, Hitler himself.

Cheered by hundreds of thousands of ecstatic Austrians, Hitler paraded through Vienna to claim his prize.

Brunner became a Nazi party member in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. In 1938, with Hitler screaming of the need for German “living space”, Brunner joined the dreaded S.S., Hitler’s private army of fanatical goons.

A year later he was installed by Eichmann to head the Central Office of Jewish Emigration in Vienna. As Megan Lewis of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., told me, “When the Nazis took over Austria in 1938, the policy was to strip Jews of their assets and force them to emigrate.”

As many as 155,000 Austrian Jews managed to clear a myriad of official obstacles to emigrate (barriers erected both by Germany and host countries, including the U.S.) before the hammer came down. Lisa lost grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in the Holocaust.

Both Lisa and her mother are gone now, having lived full, productive lives. Lisa was a mother and a school teacher. She loved her adopted country, living with her husband Leonard and a generous helping of contentment in a handsome brick residence on Union Street while resisting the understandable human impulse to hate those who brought such suffering to the world.

By the grace of God, she and Elsie escaped the fate that befell millions of European Jews. Plot as he might, Brunner failed to snare them in his awful net. Brunner’s obituary was a chilling reminder of how close they came as well as how evil the world was, and is.

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books – Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.

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