The release of thousands of people imprisoned in Syrian jails has brought into focus the abuses committed by the Assads during their almost five decades in power. Their regime of terror was established in the 1970s at the start of Hafez al-Assad’s reign, which made use of the experience of Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner – once the right-hand man of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution during World War II.
A 2017 investigative report by France’s Revue XXI magazine traced the links between the Syrian regime and Brunner, accused of having sent 128,500 Jews to extermination camps.
Brunner was in charge of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris from 1943 to 1944 and was responsible for the deportation of 24,000 French Jews – or Jews residing in France – to Nazi death camps. He was convicted in absentia by a French court in 1954 for crimes against humanity and sentenced to death.
But by the early 1950s, Brunner is thought to have fled to Egypt and then to Syria, where he was known as Georg Fischer and worked as an arms dealer in Damascus.
Syria had already provided refuge to Franz Stangl, former commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps.
From Damascus, Brunner plotted – with Syrian support – to free his former superior, Eichmann, who had been captured by Israel’s spy agency Mossad in Argentina in 1960 before being tried in Israel and hanged.
Despite the Syrian authorities’ denials, Brunner’s presence in Syria was an open secret in the early 1960s. He was the target of at least two assassination attempts; in 1961, he lost his left eye after opening a letter bomb. Almost 20 years later, another letter bomb tore off several of his fingers.
Read moreMost-wanted Nazi war criminal ‘died in Syria’
Adviser to the Syrian secret services
Despite international pressure to extradite him, Brunner remained a protégé of successive regimes in Damascus in the years before the 1963 coup d’état carried out by leaders of the Syrian Ba’athist party.
By 1966, Brunner had managed to gain a powerful ally, Hafez al-Assad, father of Bashar al-Assad.
Brunner became a confidant of the elder Assad, who had just been appointed defence minister. When Assad seized power in a 1970 coup, Brunner helped the new regime set up an effective system of repression, inspired by the practices of the Third Reich.
“Complex, divided into numerous branches which all monitor and spy on each other, operating on the basis of absolute compartmentalisation, this apparatus is built on one principle: to hold the country by the use of unlimited terror,” write the authors of Revue XXI’s investigation, Hedi Aouidj and Mathieu Palain.
The authors of the Revue XXI investigation, Hedi Aouidj and Mathieu Palain, describe the state apparatus of the time as “complex, divided into numerous branches that all monitor and spy on each other, operating on the basis of absolute compartmentalisation, this apparatus is built on one principle: to hold the country by the use of unlimited terror”.
During his new life in Syria, Brunner shared his expertise in surveillance, interrogation and torture techniques, drawing on his experience with the Gestapo.
The brutal methods he taught the Syrian secret services were to have a lasting influence on the way the regime repressed political dissent.
One of the means of torture used by the Syrians, drawing on Brunner’s expertise, was the “German Chair”, a medieval-style rack used to stretch the victim’s spine.
Unknown burial site and date of death
Brunner was convicted a second time by a French court in absentia in 2001 for sending an estimated 345 Jewish children from the Drancy internment camp to their deaths in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Requests to have Brunner extradited by Germany and several other countries were always refused by the Syrian authorities.
Although Brunner was never handed over to be tried, he gradually lost influence with the authorities until he became a mere bargaining chip for the Syrian regime. Careful to promote his image as a moderniser, Bashar al-Assad, who came to power in 2000, eventually abandoned his father’s former Nazi adviser.
According to Revue XXI’s investigation, Brunner ended his life in dismal circumstances, confined by the Syrian state to the basement of a residential building in Damascus. There were reports that he died in 2001 and was buried in the Al-Affif cemetery in Damascus.
In 2014, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which tracks down Nazi war criminals, announced that it was taking Brunner off its list of the most wanted Holocaust perpetrators. Its then director, Efraim Zuroff, said that the former SS officer had died four years earlier.
“I am almost certain that he (Alois Brunner) is no longer alive,” Zuroff told AFP, adding that he believed Brunner died four years earlier in Damascus, where he had sought refuge. Zuroff said information from a former agent of the German intelligence services indicated that Brunner had died and the Centre had decided to remove him from its active search list of Nazi war criminals and their collaborators.
Brunner remained an unrepentant Nazi until the end of his life. In one of the rare interviews he gave from Damascus, he told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1987 that the Jews “deserved to die because they were the devil’s agents and human garbage”.
“I have no regrets and would do it again.”
This article was translated from the original in French.
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