Life & Mortality Quote by Alois Brunner

Brunner’s line isn’t provocation or “belief” in any abstract sense; it’s a performance of annihilatory certainty. The bluntness is the point. By choosing the collective noun “The Jews” and the moral verdict “deserved,” he collapses millions of distinct lives into a single target and recasts mass murder as righteous judgment. That’s the rhetorical alchemy of genocide: strip personhood, then claim ethics.

“I have no regrets” does more than deny remorse. It’s an assertion of continuity, a refusal of the postwar moral order that tried to name these acts as crimes against humanity. Brunner is staking out identity - not as a man who committed atrocities, but as someone who wants to be read as consistent, unbroken, unrepentant. “If I had the chance I would do it again” turns history into a standing invitation; it’s conditional tense used as threat. The subtext is that the only tragedy, from his vantage, is that the project wasn’t completed or couldn’t be repeated.

Context sharpens the intent. Brunner was an SS officer deeply involved in deportations - logistics, paperwork, trains - the bureaucratic machinery that made industrial murder scalable. In the decades after the war, he reportedly lived as a fugitive in Syria while survivors aged, evidence accumulated, and the world debated justice and memory. This quote functions as ideological self-exculpation and as intimidation: a message to victims that their suffering won’t even be granted the dignity of recognition. It’s also a reminder that denial isn’t the only post-atrocity posture; sometimes the real danger is pride.