The Nazi of Damascus

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.”