Millions took to the streets in Syria celebrating the overthrow of the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship in December. Thousands were freed from jails, especially from the notorious Saydnaya Prison, known as the “Human Slaughterhouse,” where as many as 15,000 people were executed without trial between September 2011 and December 2015, Amnesty International reports. Huge unmarked burial sites were discovered.
This torture and slaughter were a continuation of what was put in place by Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria with an iron fist from 1971 until his death in 2000. A number of forces in the region collaborated with Assad — including the reactionary and expansionist regime in Tehran and its ally, Hezbollah, which sent in combatants from Lebanon.
Part of the mix was a number of Nazi officers who fled to Syria after World War II. Most prominent among them was Alois Brunner, the right-hand man of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” — the extermination of the Jews.
Brunner, a commanding officer in the Nazi paramilitary SS, “was responsible for the deportation to the death camps of 128,500 Jews,” reported Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office. These included 47,000 from Austria, 44,000 from Greece, 23,500 from France and 14,000 from Slovakia.
Brunner took charge of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris in 1943, where Jews in France were held before being sent to the death camps.
After the defeat of Hitler’s regime in Germany in 1945, Brunner, using a fake Red Cross passport, fled to Egypt, along with a number of other Nazi cadre. Then, in 1954, Amin al-Husseini, the former Mufti of Jerusalem and Nazi collaborator, helped Brunner get to Syria.
He joined a number of other Nazi fugitives living there, including Franz Rademacher, former “expert for Jewish affairs” of the Nazi Foreign Office, and Franz Stangl, former commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps. Like Brunner, many of these former SS members were employed advising the Syrian military.
Brunner, now identifying himself as Georg Fischer, joined the thriving trade of Nazi arms runners in Damascus in 1955. Four years later, he was arrested by the then-head of one of Syria’s secret services on suspicion of spying and drug smuggling.
‘I was Eichmann’s assistant’
Brunner told his interrogator, “I was Eichmann’s assistant, and I’m hunted because I’m an enemy of the Jews.” The interrogator “rose up and shook Brunner’s hand,” saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Danny Orbach, an associate professor in history and Asian studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote in New Lines magazine. Brunner then became an adviser to Syrian intelligence.
He began to play a more central role after the Arab Baath Party seized power in March 1963, and the Assad family consolidated its dictatorial rule.
He became an adviser to Hafez al-Assad, training his henchmen in spying, interrogation and torture techniques. Brunner “knew exactly how to extract and use information, how to manipulate people,” wrote Didier Epelbaum, who authored a biography of Brunner. “He knew more than any Syrian officer. As a result he was involved in restructuring the secret service.”
The brutal methods he taught Assad’s officer corps had a lasting influence on the way the regime repressed political dissent over the family’s 50-year rule.
Brunner was also involved in promoting the government’s reign of terror against the 25,000 Jews in Syria. They were forbidden to work for the government, nationally owned enterprises and banks. When the head of a Jewish family died, his property was forfeited to the state. Syrian Jews were not allowed to leave the country. They were the only minority to have their religion highlighted on their passports.
Both Austria and West Germany formally demanded Brunner’s extradition from Damascus, but the Syrian regime claimed the Austrian-born Nazi wasn’t there.
Though told by Syrian officials to keep a low profile, Brunner gave interviews to German, Austrian and other media, making clear that he still staunchly believed in what the Nazis set out to do in the Holocaust. In a 1987 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Brunner said of the Jews, “All of them deserved to die because they were the devil’s agents and human garbage. I have no regrets. If I had the chance I would do it again.”
Israeli Nazi-hunters spent years tracking Brunner to Syria. Deciding they wouldn’t be able to get an extraction team there to seize him and bring him back to Israel, as they had done with Eichmann, they sent two letter bombs to his home in an effort to kill him. Neither succeeded, though one took out an eye and another a few fingers.
Toward the end of his life, when he was no longer playing a role for the Assads, Brunner and his interviews became troublesome to the regime. It is believed he died as a captive sometime in the 2000s. The regime continued to use the Nazi-inspired methods he taught them until it fell in December 2024.