On my first trip to Damascus in 2009, during a morning coffee with a local diplomat, I was told one of the darker secrets of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. Not far from the café, in the upscale neighborhood of Kafr Sousa, lived the most wanted Nazi war criminal in the world at the time—a former top aide to Adolf Eichmann. His name was Alois Brunner.
Today, as Syrians and human rights organizations sift through Assad’s prisons and torture chambers, his regime’s atrocities are being compared to the depravity of the Nazis war crimes. But these parallels are no coincidence, three outside investigators told me this week. They say that Brunner played a direct role in developing the Assad regime’s police state during its early years, advising on surveillance, interrogation, and torture methods, including tools like the “German chair,” a stretching rack used to torture a victim’s spine.
“Brunner was Eichmann’s right-hand man, and he didn’t get justice. . . . He lived a long, long, long, long, too long of a life,” Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a U.S.-based group that is investigating Assad’s crimes, told The Free Press. “Brunner was advising [Bashar’s father] Hafez al-Assad, the architect of the system that his son used to kill a million people.”
Brunner, born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1912, helped Eichmann send more than 100,000 European Jews to Nazi death camps during the Second World War from Austria, France, Slovakia, and Greece. The former SS commander escaped Germany in the 1950s, first to Egypt, historians believe, and then Syria, from where he helped Arab states wage their wars against Israel.
He eventually became an adviser to the security forces of Hafez al-Assad, who took power in Damascus in 1971 following a military coup five years earlier. The Assads shielded Brunner from prosecution for decades, despite the efforts of France, Israel, and the Nazi hunters at the Simon Wiesenthal Center to capture him. Brunner reportedly lost an eye and fingers as a result of letter bombs sent by Israel’s Mossad spy service.
Moustafa and other outside investigators who’ve entered Syrian prisons in recent weeks say the systematic way the Assads tortured and imprisoned their political enemies—and then documented it—is reminiscent of the Nazi death camps. Deep dungeons have been found in Damascus’s most notorious prison, Sednaya, along with interrogation centers equipped with drills, mallets, acid, and other tools of torture. Most disturbing for those who entered the prison was an industrial compression machine that investigators fear may have been used to flatten bodies before their disposal in mass graves.
The Assads and their ruling Ba’ath Party took inspiration from other authoritarian regimes over the years. Chief among these was the Soviet Union—and its KGB intelligence service and military—who became Syria’s closest ally during the Cold War. Bashar al-Assad’s alliance with the Kremlin only deepened after rebels took up arms against his government beginning in 2011. Vladimir Putin sent in the Russian air force to bomb hospitals and other civilian facilities and supported Syrian chemical weapons attacks on political opponents. Iran’s elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and its Lebanese proxy force, Hezbollah, also entered Syria over the past decade to support Assad.
“[Brunner] certainly advised. . . and the Soviets had a fair amount to do with it, too,” Stephen Rapp, who served as U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes from 2009 to 2015, told me this week. He’s in Syria investigating Assad’s prison system. “Certainly this [fed] the idea of state terror, and then this whole machinery where these security and intelligence agencies, just, you know, work around the clock to make everyone fear even making a joke.”
Moustafa and Rapp are working with Syrian nongovernmental organizations and transitional authorities to document the regime’s crimes in the hope that Assad and others will eventually be tried in a revitalized Syrian court system. Following the Nazis’ fall in 1945, many of its leaders were charged—and some executed—in trials staged by the Allied countries in Nuremberg, Germany. But those proceedings were independent of the German court system.
Moustafa has worked closely in recent years with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., to document Assad’s crimes. This included staging an exhibit of thousands of photos secretly taken of Syria’s prison chambers by a former army officer, code-named Caesar, who defected to the West. “The museum recognized in our files what was happening in Syria, the clear parallels of pure evil against civilians,” perpetrated by both Nazis and Assad, Moustafa told me.
Stories of Brunner’s life in Syria appeared in news articles in recent decades from Damascus. He went by an alias, “Dr. Georg Fischer,” and was seen taking walks in a park near his apartment on the Rue Haddad, a prominent Damascus thoroughfare, accompanied by Assad’s security guards. European journalists also reported seeing Brunner at Damascus’s Le Méridien Hotel, a favorite for visiting businessmen and diplomats. (I stayed there during my 2009 trip but don’t remember seeing an elderly European guest.)
In the 1980s, both Germany’s Bunte magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times published short interviews with Brunner in which he appeared unrepentant over his Nazi past. “All of them [Jews] deserved to die because they were the devil’s agents and human garbage,” Brunner told the Sun-Times. “I have no regrets and would do it again.”
There’s uncertainty about exactly when Brunner died. Some reports have it as early as 2001, but most cite 2011, which means he was alive during my first Damascus visit. The Simon Wiesenthal Center noted two years later that “until conclusive evidence of his demise is obtained,” the search for Brunner would continue. Some reports said he had a falling-out with the Assad family and was imprisoned in his later years.
Bashar al-Assad sometimes spoke in the language of the Nazis. I interviewed him in early 2011, just as the Arab Spring revolts were starting to sweep the Middle East. He appeared confident and portrayed himself as a young reformer set to ride the political tide of change. He took joy in the uprisings that were destabilizing some of Syria’s staunchest regional rivals, including Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and former prime minister Saad Hariri of Lebanon.
Still, the way Assad described the revolutionaries was disturbing, and I heard echoes of the way Brunner and the Nazis viewed the Jews. Assad didn’t describe the rebels and protesters as humans, but as a disease.
“If you have stagnant water, you will have pollution and microbes,” Assad told a colleague and me as we sat in the reception room of his presidential palace overlooking Damascus. “So, what you have been seeing in this region is a kind of disease. That is how we see it.”
For a look inside Assad’s infamous Sednaya prison, watch Tanya Lukyanova’s video report, “Inside Assad’s ‘Human Slaughterhouse’. ”