The Nazi who helped build Assad’s torture regime: SS monster died in Damascus after decades of freedom despite killing more than 100,000 Jews for Hitler
It was a fitting end for a monster that sentenced more than 100,000 Jews to death.
Alois Brunner, once the most wanted Nazi in the world, spent his last years in a cell in Damascus, where he was given the choice every day between an egg or a tomato.
But in the decades he spent as a guest of the Assad regime in Syria after fleeing post-war Germany, Brunner proved his worth before being sentenced to prison.
As deputy to Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann, Brunner had overseen the deportations of Jews from France and Austria, among other places, and conducted interrogations that reportedly left bloodstains and bullet holes in the walls of his office.
The war criminal, who may have survived until 2010, advised the Syrian dictatorship on torture methods he had learned in positions as commander of the Drancy internment camp, outside Paris.
In return, he was protected from extradition by Hafez al-Assad, the father of deposed Syrian President Bashar, who fled to Russia after the collapse of his regime.
But it was under Hafez – who ruled until his death in 2000 – that Brunner’s fortunes turned after he ignored orders not to give interviews and was therefore locked up in the 1990s.
By then he had survived two bombs sent by Israeli intelligence in which he lost an eye and all the fingers of his left hand.
Alois Brunner, once the most wanted Nazi in the world, spent his last years in a cell in Damascus, where he was given the choice every day between an egg or a tomato. He was imprisoned after initially proving his worth to the Syrian regime by transferring his knowledge of the SS’s torture methods
He advised the Syrian dictatorship on torture methods he had learned, including as commander of the Drancy internment camp, outside Paris. Above: prisoners in the Drancy camp
Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff said in 2014 that he was “99 percent certain” that Brunner lived until 2010 before being buried at a now unknown location in Damascus.
The war criminal was once described by Eichmann – who was executed in Israel in 1962 after being captured by the Mossad in Argentina – as one of his best men.
Eichmann sent him to supervise the deportations when he felt they were proceeding too slowly.
He spent much of his time tracking down Jews who had fled to the relative safety of Italian-occupied territory on the French Riviera.
It is believed that he sent 47,000 Jews to camps in Austria, 44,000 in Greece, 23,500 in France and 14,000 in Slovakia. Most were murdered.
Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal wrote in his memoirs in 1989: ‘Among the surviving criminals from the Third Reich, Alois Brunner is undoubtedly the worst. In my eyes he was the worst ever.
‘While Adolf Eichmann drew up the general staff plan for the extermination of the Jews, Alois Brunner carried it out.’
Brunner, who was sentenced to life in absentia by a French court in 2001, left Germany for Egypt in 1953 with a passport in the name of Georg Fischer.
In a 1987 telephone interview with the Chicago Sun Times, Brunner stated that he had no regrets about his part in the Holocaust.
“They all deserved to die because they were agents of the devil and human waste. “I don’t regret it and I would do it again,” he said.
Brunner’s crimes came to light when Eichmann was on trial in Israel.
Brunner was protected from extradition by Hafez al-Assad (left) and then by his son Bashar, who was deposed this weekend
Brunner was in charge of the Drancy internment camp (photo) outside Paris
It also emerged that he had attempted the kidnapping of Dr. Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress, so that he could be exchanged for Eichmann.
But the plan collapsed when former Nazi commanders refused to participate and the plan was leaked to Wiesenthal.
Brunner lived in Damascus at 22 George Haddad Street, where other Germans in exile also lived, including Fanz Stangl, the former commander of the Treblinka concentration camp.
However, Brunner’s movements became increasingly restricted in the 1980s and 1990s, after he gave several interviews in defiance of Assad Senior’s orders to maintain a low profile.
In 1996, Assad ordered that he be jailed indefinitely. One guard said the “door was closed and never opened again.”
A Syrian commander reportedly ordered prison guards: “Don’t kill this pig, but don’t try to keep him alive either.”
But Brunner outlived Hafez himself, who died in 2000.
Adolf Eichmann (left in SS uniform and right during his trial), the man considered the architect of the Holocaust, was Brunner’s boss. He described Brunner as one of his best men. Eichmann was kidnapped from Argentina by the Mossad and tried in Israel before being executed in 1962
There had been high hopes that former NHS ophthalmologist Bashar would be different, but he continued his father’s reign of terror and failed to transfer Brunner.
New videos shared by rebels in Syria have revealed an ‘iron press’ allegedly used to crush and execute prisoners at the infamous Saydnaya prison near Damascus.
Amnesty International claims that dozens of people were secretly executed in Saydnaya every week, and estimates that around 13,000 Syrians were killed between 2011 and 2016.
Images of what appears to be some sort of large hydraulic press inside the prison have yet to be verified, but stories of torture, deprivation, starvation and executions in Saydnaya have been extensively documented.
Syrian rebels are now locked in a race against time to free thousands of prisoners reportedly held in secret cells deep beneath the prison, despite the collapse of the Assad regime this weekend.