TABOO 4: THE NAZI FILES OF THE GERMAN INTELLIGENCE SERVICE

New York City, September 11, 2001: Two airliners crash into the World Trade Center, and a few days afterward President George W. Bush declares a war on terror. That makes an event that took place in December of that year seem like a footnote: the burial at Al-afif cemetery in Damascus of “Dr. Georg Fischer,” a pseudonym meant to hide the identity of one of the 20th century’s worst mass murderers: the former SS officer Alois Brunner, nicknamed “the Bloodhound.”

As Adolf Eichmann’s right-hand man, Brunner had been responsible for the murder of more than 120,000 Jews during the Nazi regime. But while Israel’s intelligence agency hunted down Eichmann and brought him to Israel for trial and execution, Brunner spent the autumn years of his life in Damascus. How was that possible? In exploring that question, author Christian Springer discovered

a taboo no one wanted to address: Brunner had powerful friends after the war—some of them in such high places as the Foreign Ministry, the Federal Intelligence Service, and the German media. He’d evaded arrest warrants, extradition requests, and even convictions in absentia with the help of other Nazis who worked in the German government after the war. In 1954 he left Germany and came to Egypt, where he worked as an arms dealer, and later fled to Syria where he assumed the name Georg Fischer.

In Damascus he was believed to be an adviser to the secret police, helping the Syrian president, Hafez al-assad, set up a police state and training operatives in the torture and interrogation methods the Nazis had developed. During the last decade of his life he resided at an apartment in the diplomatic quarter of Damascus. He had nothing to fear from German diplomats in the Middle East: The German consul general in Damascus was believed to have participated in the Holocaust in Bratislava, while the ambassador to Lebanon was alleged to have persecuted Jews in Monaco. Those who sought to locate Brunner through official channels were likely to be met with silence, but secret files later suggested the Foreign Ministry maintained contact with him over the years. In 2001 Der Spiegel magazine reported that the Federal Intelligence Service had earlier destroyed its file on Brunner. When Christian Springer paid a visit to the German embassy in Damascus in search of the truth, he was reportedly told: “Brunner is dead. It’s time you accepted that!”

“Brunner is dead. It’s time you accepted that!”