Alois Brunner, the Nazi ‘butcher’ who trained Syrian security

Torture in Syria has unsettling roots. At its core is Alois Brunner, a Nazi SS officer once known as the “Butcher of Salonika,” who fled to Damascus. His story is pieced together from the accounts of a few journalists, Nazi hunters, and alleged Mossad assassins.

Though incomplete, the story vividly depicts a man who sent over 128,000 European Jews to Nazi death camps, including 345 French children who were deported just weeks before the liberation of Paris. Under Adolf Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Holocaust, Brunner oversaw the deportation of Jews from Austria, Greece, France, and Slovakia. He was sentenced to death in absentia by France in 1954.

That same year, he fled Germany for Egypt and then Syria. Nazi hunters claim the Syrian government harbored him. He later reportedly taught torture techniques to President Hafez al-Assad’s intelligence services. Brunner’s secret hideout did not go unnoticed. In 1961, a letter bomb, believed to be the work of Israeli Mossad agents, blinded his left eye. In 1980, a second Mossad bomb attack reportedly blew off three of his fingers.

In 1985, two German journalists traveled to Damascus and photographed the then 73-year-old Brunner with a hidden watch camera. French President Jacques Chirac reportedly inquired about Brunner during a 1996 visit to Syria. Assad denied knowing him, but journalist Hedi Ouejdhi says Assad then placed Brunner under house arrest to avoid being caught out. In 2000, Assad's son Bashar became president, and Brunner "likely" died the following year, around the age of 89.

Yet, torture in Syria persists. In 2014, a government photographer leaked over 53,000 photos documenting the latest Assad regime’s torture and killing of people. Since the start of the war in 2011, it is estimated that tens of thousands have died in Syrian prisons. Today, we cannot know the extent of Alois Brunner’s influence on Syria’s vast torture network. But with each discovery of mass graves, the scale of the Assad regime’s killings becomes clearer… and more disturbing.