Alois Brunner: The Last Nazi film Screening

Is Eichmanns Best Man the Mentor of Murder in Syria?

The man who made the mass deportation of Jews to death as Eichmanns Best Man is the subject of the documentary film  Alois Brunner: The Last Nazi, to be screened at Hollywood Temple Beth El, at 1317  N Crescent Heights Blvd, West Hollywood, CA, on Sunday, April 27, at 4:00 PM. Following the screening, Lynda Goldman, executive producer, and Rabbi Norbert Weinberg, author and rabbi of Hollywood Temple Beth El, will lead a discussion with the audience.

Alois Brunner was a widely known Nazi war criminal, a former SS commander, who was Adolf Eichmanns protégé  and was called Eichmanns Best Man. He began the process of the mass deportation of Jews by train  and was himself responsible for sending more than 128,500 European Jews to their deaths. After the war,  Brunner with the help of anti-Semitic elements in the Catholic Church escaped to Egypt. He was even put on the payroll of the CIA to spy on the Soviet Union until he was eventually spirited to Damascus, Syria, with the help of the notorious Nazi war-criminals gang ‘Odessa. In Damascus, he mentored the Assad regime in the tactics of mass oppression and it is rumored that he may still be alive today under Assad protection.

The Last Nazi includes interviews with many of the people most closely involved in the case, including Gunther Deschner, the last journalist to have interviewed Brunner; Serge Klarsfeld, a Nazi hunter whose father was murdered by Brunner; and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Lynda S. Goldman was CNN producer in Jerusalem in the 1980s  and produced and co-wrote the documentary with her colleague, Jay Bushinsky, former CNN Jerusalem Bureau Chief. They currently operate MGI News which specializes in news and programming from and about the Middle East. 

Rabbi Weinberg, who will moderate the evening, has just published a book on his fathers experience during the Holocaust, Courage of the Spirit. His father was on one of the first freight trains used to haul Jews out of Czechoslovakia, a project managed by Brunner under Eichmanns direction, in 1939.

This screening is part of a weekend of commemorations for Yom HaShoah. There will be a joint memorial Service on Saturday morning, April 26, at 10:00 AM, with the members of the Temple and the Iranian American Jewish Federation. That Saturday evening, the Iranian Jewish American Federation will host an interfaith program Holocaust: Past, Present, Never Again on contemporary dangers of Genocide at 8:30 PM Honorable Consul General of Israel, David Siegel, Rabbi David Wolpe, Dr. Ardeshir Babaknia,Dr. Majid Mohammadi, and Mrs. Renee Firestone, a Holocaust survivor. Iran, during the Holocaust, actually served as a refuge for many Jews.Sunday, at 2:00 PM, there will be a community wide commemoration at Pan Pacific Park sponsored by the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

For more information, please call Hollywood Temple Beth El, 323 656 3150