Alois Brunner was born in Austria in 1912 and joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1931 at the age of 19. His anti-Semitism was considered to be so extreme that he was swiftly tapped to be Adolf Eichmann’s private secretary. As head of the Nazi’s Jewish affairs office in prewar Vienna, he organized persecution that forced thousands of Jews to flee to other European countries and the United States.

When World War II started, he sent 47,000 Austrian Jews to concentration camps. After organizing mass roundups in Berlin, he transferred to Greece, where he was responsible for deporting all 43,000 Jews in Salonika within just two months.

In June 1943, he was sent to France to take over the Drancy transit camp near Paris from its French administrators. During 14 months in France, Brunner sent an estimated 25,000 men, women and children to their deaths.

A survivor, Georges Appel, later recalled that Brunner's mean, cruel demeanor was matched only by his immoral behavior: "He would beat elderly women, and ordered the inmates to prepare Postcards saying that all was well with them." These were mailed after they had been sent to the gas chambers ..

Brunner often sought after young Jewish women, either pregnant or with infants, to join the deportation to the Nazi death camps. As he said: "I can't let children live. They will be future terrorists."

Once Brunner ordered the arrest and deportation of more than 200 French Jewish children. They were loaded aboard the crude cattle cars without any adults to accompany them and were never seen again, according to author Didier Epelbaum in his 1990 book Alois Brunner.