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Anton Brunner
Anton Brunner served as head of ‘commissioning’ in Vienna's assembly camps and employee of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, known as ‘Brunner II’. The profile reconstructs the person’s function in Vienna, Prague, Budapest and Auschwitz through documented office, decisions, supervision or operational conduct. It does not assign every crime committed by an institution or region to one individual.
Confirmed findings
- The Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance and research by the University of Vienna confirm that Anton Brunner—‘Brunner II’, a person distinct from Alois Brunner—worked at the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna from 1939.
- From mid-1941 to March 1943 he headed at least 48 ‘commissionings’ in Vienna's assembly camps: he decided who was to be included in transports, collected documents and participated in procedures for taking over property; survivor testimony also documented the humiliation and beating of deportees.
- The inventory of the Vienna People's Court files describes him as an employee responsible for organising the deportation of approximately 48 thousand people from Vienna to Auschwitz, Riga, Minsk and Theresienstadt. That number concerns the scope of the trial and the deportation system, not killings carried out individually.
- The Vienna People's Court sentenced Anton Brunner to death on 10 May 1946; the sentence was carried out on 24 May 1946.
Place in the chain of responsibility
Anton Brunner illustrates the administrative and coercive link in deportation that preceded transport to ghettos and extermination centres, including to occupied Poland. His role was not merely clerical: it encompassed selecting people, confiscating documents and property, and violence in assembly camps. At the same time, he must not be confused with Alois Brunner or assigned all of his superior's operations.
Key events and mechanisms
- beginning work at the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna in 1939
- heading ‘commissionings’ preceding deportations from mid-1941 to March 1943
- transfer to the Jewish affairs office in Prague in March 1943
- service in the Eichmann Special Detachment in Budapest in 1944
- trial before the Vienna People's Court and death sentence on 10 May 1946
The circle records authority, function and agency. Several profiles may describe different parts of the same persecution chain, so profile-level totals must not be added together.
Postwar accountability
After the war, he was arrested and tried by the Vienna People's Court on the basis of extensive evidence, including survivor testimony and documentation of the ‘commissionings’. He was sentenced to death on 10 May 1946 and executed by hanging on 24 May 1946.
Limits of the evidence
Anton Brunner (‘Brunner II’, 1898–1946) was not Alois Brunner (‘Brunner I’, 1912–probably 2001/2010). Two University of Vienna studies give different days of birth—8 March and 8 August 1898—so the canonical record retains only the secure year. The trial formula referring to responsibility for approximately 48 thousand deportees describes his role in the deportation apparatus and does not mean that he personally killed all the victims. The role family ‘ss_police’ describes the office's institutional subordination to Eichmann's section; sources indicate that Brunner himself was not a member of the SS.
Sources
The source set combines institutional, archival, trial or scholarly material from at least two independent publishers.