"The Jews deserved to die. I have no regrets. If I had the chance I would do it again..."

And now Simon Wiesenthal, who devoted his life to tracking down so many Nazi war criminals, is dead -- and Brunner lives:

Apart from Eichmann, hanged in Israel in 1961, Wiesenthal was instrumental in the capture of Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps, Karl Silberbauer, the policeman who arrested Anne Frank, and Hermine Brasunsteiner, who supervised the murder of hundreds of children in Majdanek camp.

Wiesenthal died regretting the failure to capture others. Heinrich Muller, the Gestapo chief for Berlin, and Alois Brunner, Eichmann's secretary, remained unpunished. But Pick said Wiesenthal's greatest sadness was not being able to prosecute Josef Mengele, the doctor who devised and supervised medical experiments on adults and children at Auschwitz. He drowned in Brazil in 1979.

Wiesenthal was a child of 20th century Europe: born in Buczacz, a Jewish town of the Austro-Hungarian empire annexed by Poland in 1918 and now part of Ukraine.

His first experience of discrimination came when he was excluded from training as an architect in Lvov because the polytechnic had exceeded its Jewish quota. His stepfather was murdered by Stalin's thugs, his mother by Hitler's.

But, unlike 89 members of their families, Wiesenthal and his wife Cyla survived and his photographic memory and a desire not to betray the Holocaust victims motivated him.

He said once: "You can forgive crimes committed against you personally, but you are not authorised to forgive for others."

As many have observed, there are few important Nazis left to catch. Brunner is one of them.

This mass murderer lives in Syria, where he has helped the government:

The arrest and conviction of Alois Brunner remains the top priority of leading Nazi hunters and war investigators but Brunner has successfully eluded justice. During his many years hiding out reportedly in an apartment on Haddad Street in the Syrian capital of Damascus, he openly assisted the Syrians in establishing their own secret police.

The Syrian authorities have covered and continue to cover Alois Brunner and he may never pay for his crimes. Germany, Austria, Slovakia, France and Poland currently seek his extradition, but the Syrians have been totally uncooperative in response to all these requests.

Or is that asking too much of the UN?

At least one online site has posted a recent picture of Brunner and is asking for help:

The Macedonian Press Agency asks all on-line users throughout the world to provide any information they may have on the whereabouts of Alois Brunner.

He is the German former SS officer who not only is the perpetrator of the destruction of Thessaloniki's Jewish community -having organized 19, in all, missions to the crematoriums- but he also led 24,000 Jews in France's Drancy concentration camp during World War II.

Bastards.

For many years, Hafez Assad (father of the present dictator) denied Brunner was in Syria, and he was known to utilize the call of nature to wear down his questioners:

A nagging issue between Paris and Damascus has been the alleged presence in Syria of Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner, and Syria's refusal to respond to French requests to make a judicial inquiry.

Mr Assad denied knowledge that Brunner, 87, is in Syria. Brunner is blamed for the deaths of thousands of French Jews.

According to insiders Mr Assad shrugged off the protest as insignificant. His patient and long-term style of diplomacy is designed to make him outlive many demands and conditions during a 28-year career. One aid to Former Secretary of State James Baker said yesterday that President Chirac would at least escape Mr Assad secret weapon to win negotiation:' Bladder diplomacy.' President Assad places his guest next to him on the couch, thus he has to turn his head getting ' pain in the neck', while he is endlessly greeted by cups of drinks as the talks go on for hours. Having been briefed by his ambassador that it is impolite in Arab etiquette to refuse drinks or to leave for the bathroom, the negotiating guest eventually finds a great relief in giving in to President Assad's point of view.

The dead (and now Wiesenthal) cry out.

UPDATE (09/25/05): Solomonia quotes a relative of Alois Brunner on the contrast between Wiesenthal and Austrian authorities towards the Brunner case:

I want to publicly thank this impressive personality, Simon Wiesenthal, for his persistence in searching for war criminals and Nazi perpetrators like Alois Brunner.

I want to do so not only as a relative of one of the criminals he was trying to bring to justice, but also as an Austrian citizen who had often wondered why it was he and not official bodies that were occupied with such cases. What he did was needed not only from a juridical and political point of view; his mere presence and intervention also constituted a most important contribution to public discourse and private concern...