The overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has emptied the country's jails.
Many of those who have emerged after years or decades of confinement are pale and starving. Frequently they bear the marks of Assad’s torturers.
Few places are worse than the sprawling Sednaya Prison, around 30km north of Damascus, where thousands are believed to have been executed in what was known as the “Human Slaughterhouse".
The methods employed by Bashar are a continuation of those of his father Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria between 1970 and 2000.
Such practices were in part learned from Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner, who lived in Syria for more than half his life and who served as an adviser to the state on repressing dissent and establishing a regime of torture.
Alois Brunner and the Holocaust
Brunner was born in April 1912 in Vas, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the end of the 1920s he was a member of the Nazi Party, before joining the SS in 1938 following Germany's annexation of Austria.
He was the righthand man of Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust and responsible for implementing the mass murder of Jews throughout Europe. Brunner's postings included as commandant at the Drancy internment and transit camp in northwestern Paris; and at the Breendonk internment camp along the Antwerp-Brussels highway in Belgium.
According to Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Brunner "was responsible for the deportation to the death camps of 128,500 Jews". These included 47,000 from Austria, 44,000 from Greece, 23,500 from France, and 14,000 from Slovakia. "He was a fanatic antisemite, a sadist and a person who was totally dedicated to the mass murder of European Jewry."
The Drancy internment and transit camp in northwestern Paris during World War Two (Creative Commons)
") rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5); top: -15px; left: 0px;">Several interviews published during the 1980s appeared to show Brunner unrepentant about his role during the Holocaust. “All of [the Jews] deserved to die because they were the Devil's agents and human garbage,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1987. “I have no regrets and would do it again.”
Earlier, in an interview with a German magazine in 1985, Brunner is reported as having said: “My only regret is I didn’t murder more Jews.”
Brunner arrives in the Middle East
After the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, Brunner fled using a fake Red Cross passport, heading first to Egypt and then to Syria in 1954, where he would remain for the rest of his life.
Syria at the time was fertile ground for Brunner. After the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the Nakbah ("Catastrophe") that saw more than 700,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes and land, Jewish residents of neighbouring states faced intense scrutiny and persecution.
Crowds in Damascus mob an Israeli armoured vehicle, seized by the Syrian army during Israeli-Syrian tensions in March 1962 (AFP)
") rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5); top: -15px; left: 0px;">Syrian Jews, whose population once numbered around 25,000, faced some of the harshest treatment in the region. They were forbidden to work for the government, nationally owned enterprises, and banks. When the head of a Jewish family died his property would be forfeited to the state while members of the family could only stay by paying rent to the state. Some confiscated Jewish property was handed to Palestinian refugees.
With a few notable exceptions, Syrian Jews were not allowed to leave the country, amid fears they would bolster Israel. They were the only minority to have their religion mentioned on their passports and identification papers.
In addition, post-war Syria was a highly unstable entity that regularly underwent coups, including four violent changes of power between 1949 and 1954.
Brunner initially stayed at George Haddad Street in Damascus as a sublease of Kurt Witzke, a German officer and adviser to the Syrian government. But the new arrival was later to denounce his landlord, leading to the arrest and torture of Witzke and leaving Brunner as the property's only resident.
During the 1950s, Brunner worked with fellow Nazi fugitives in Damascus, smuggling weapons, including between the Soviet Union and the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria's fight against French colonialism.
Eventually Brunner's work was noticed by Syrian intelligence, who arrested him for interrogation. “I was Eichmann’s assistant,” he reportedly told his interrogators, “and I’m hunted because I’m an enemy of the Jews.” He was promptly hired.
Brunner's fortunes fluctuated during the late 1950s and early 1960s. His position was eventually secured with the rise of the Arab Ba’ath Party, which seized power in March 1963, and the subsequent Assad dynasty which would govern Syria until December 2024.
Brunner and the Assad dynasty
Brunner was reportedly “spoiled” by the Baathist leaders who carried out the coup, according to Danny Orbach, an associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Brunner's benefits included a generous salary, a driver and regular contact with senior regime officials.
The new leadership also included eventual defence minister Hafez al-Assad, who was introduced to Brunner by Colonel Abd al Hamid Al-Sarraj.
It was while living in Syria under the pseudonym "Dr Georg Fischer" that Brunner taught Hafez Assad "how to torture", according to Zuroff. "He was involved in the harsh treatment of the Jewish community of Syria and was an expert in terror and torture."
The extent and exact details of Brunner’s status and influence on Assad remain hard to verify due to the secrecy surrounding it (new information may come to light with the overthrow of the Assad dynasty).
Syrian President Hafez al-Assad pictured in 1972 (AFP)
") rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5); top: -15px; left: 0px;">But one torture method attributed to Brunner is the technique known as the "German Chair", whereby a detainee has their hands and feet tied underneath a flexible metal chair which can then be bent to apply pressure to the neck and spine, resulting in paralysis or death.
Defence lawyer Andreas Schulz outlined the method at the trial of alleged Syrian war criminals in Koblenz, Germany, in December 2021. He said that Brunner was likely to have been responsible for the technique, although the Communist government of East Germany had also had links with Syria.
In a report of proceedings by the Syrian Center for Legal Studies and Research, Schulz said that Brunner “established a suppression apparatus to ensure the future of the Baath Party and the Alawites”. He managed this, according to Schulz, through mention of his relationship with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, thereby securing the post of presidential adviser to Assad, training intelligence officials and testing torture techniques.
Brunner's first work was at an intelligence base specialising in torture in Syria’s southwest Wadi Barada valley region, the SCLSR reported Schulz as saying. But the relationship eventually soured and he fell out with Assad.
In 2017, the French magazine Revue XXI reported three Syrian security sources as stating that Brunner "trained all the leaders" of the Assad regime at Wadi Barada.
"With the help of Alois Brunner, the new Syrian president sets up a repressive apparatus of rare efficiency," wrote Hedi Aouidj and Mathieu Palain. "Complex, divided into numerous branches which all monitor and spy on each other, operating on the basis of absolute compartmentalization, this apparatus is built on a principle: to hold the country by the use of limitless terror."
The hunt for Brunner
But Syria was not the only Middle Eastern government with an interest in Brunner: he had also attracted attention from Israel, which in May 1960 had drugged and kidnapped his former boss Eichmann, ahead of a trial and eventual execution in Israel in June 1962.
Brunner survived at least two Israeli intelligence assassination attempts while in Syria in 1961 and 1980 that reportedly cost him three fingers and an eye. During the 1985 interview, he was reported to have pulled a poison pill from his pocket, swearing that he would never allow the Israelis to take him alive like they did Eichmann.
Since the end of World War Two, Nazi war criminals had always been on the radar of those who wanted to bring them to justice: during the 1950s, Brunner himself had been found guilty in France in his absence and sentenced to death.
Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s ambassador to the UN, holds up a file on Nazi Alois Brunner at the UN in November 1987 (AFP)
") rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5); top: -15px; left: 0px;">But towards the end of the 20th century, concerted international efforts were made to track down elderly Nazi war criminals before they died and escaped justice.
Brunner was one of those still on the list: at the launch of the UN Nazi War Crimes Commission in New York in November 1987, Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s ambassador to the UN, held up a file about Brunner's activities.
In March 2001, a French court again found him guilty in his absence, this time for the arrest and deportation of 345 orphans from the Paris region.
By July 2007, Austria was prepared to pay €50,000 for information that led to his arrest and extradition. Six years later, the Annual Simon Wiesenthal Center Report on The Status of Nazi War Criminals stated that Brunner was the “most important unpunished Nazi war criminal who may still be alive” while conceding that the “chances of his being alive are relatively slim”.
But Syria had always rebuffed attempts by France and other nations to investigate Brunner or even admit he was in the country.
The mystery of Brunner's death
By the 1990s, Brunner's high-profile interviews had made him a liability for his hosts in Damascus.
Revue XXI magazine suggested that Brunner died in 2001 in Damascus, aged 89, living in a squalid basement under a police station where he was quietly stowed by the authorities in 1996. The report quoted one of Brunner's guards as saying that he "suffered and cried a lot in his final years, [and] everyone heard him".
A second guard testified that the door to his cell was closed “and never opened again”, similar to the fate dealt to numerous prisoners in Sednaya. “We are satisfied to learn that he lived badly rather than well,” Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld told the AFP news agency at the time. Another report by a German intelligence official suggested to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 2010 that he was dead.
Inside the Sednaya prison, scene of some of the worst torture and human right abuses committed under the Assad dynasty, on 9 December 2024 (AFP)
") rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5); top: -15px; left: 0px;">The opaque nature of the Syrian state, combined with the chaos of the recent civil war, means that the true extent of the influence of Brunner and other Nazi war criminals on the Assad dynasty is still unknown.
In the years following the downfall of Nazi Germany, war crimes trials followed to ensure that those responsible faced justice. In a statement on Monday, the International Federation for Human Rights called for similar accountability for the violence inflicted on the Syrian people since 2011.
“The brutal repression unleashed on the Syrian population since March 2011 has led to nearly 500,000 deaths, displaced over 6 million refugees, and caused more than 150,000 disappearances,” it said. “These atrocities cannot go unpunished, and those responsible must be held accountable.”
The case of Alois Brunner proves that the legacy of repression in Syria originated before 2011, and in many respects can be traced back to World War Two and earlier.
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