Death Camps Inc. How the Syrian dictatorship outsourced the construction of torture prisons to fugitive Nazis

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Undefeated

In August 2017, 20-year-old ultra-right American James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a peaceful antifascist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Journalists and law enforcement officials began to scrutinize the attacker's social media activity, and in addition to the expected conspiracy posts about the inevitability of a looming race war, they discovered that Fields' feed featured a portrait of Bashar al-Assad in military uniform bearing the caption “Undefeated.”

Fields is far from the only member of the Western far right to come out as an admirer of the former Syrian dictator. Among his associates who gathered in Virginia in the summer of 2017 to protest the removal of Confederate monuments, there were countless Americans displaying symbols of the Confederacy, of the Ku Klux Klan, and of the Third Reich. But a smaller minority of the protesters also felt quite comfortable wearing T-shirts that read, for example, “Bashar's Barrel Delivery Co.” — a reference to the “barrel bombs” that the regime in Damascus had used against Syrian civilians in territories outside its control. Footage of that rally is still available online: a man in such a T-shirt justifies Assad’s actions, saying he is fighting against terrorists and globalists and has done nothing wrong whatsoever.

The Western mainstream discovered a fact long known among experts: neo-Nazis sympathize with Assad. Correspondence of the American ultra-right intercepted by anti-fascists suggests that American extremists admired the Syrian dictator as a fighter against Muslims, as an anti-Semite, and as a “real leader.” They also offered positive appraisals of the Baath Party, believing that it was modeled on the most radical elements to come out of Nazi Germany.

Already after Assad's overthrow, the French think tank Egalite et Reconciliation, published an article on the future of Syria. The organization was founded by former Marine Le Pen associate Alain Soral, who previously served a prison term for racist remarks and Holocaust denial. The piece implies that Assad's secular Syria, which supposedly sought happiness for every citizen except terrorists, will be replaced by an “American-Zionist” Syria run by “rootless” Pentagon officials. The authors romanticize Bashar al-Assad as a key fighter against the supposed “American-Israeli conspiracy.”

A wizard, but not of Oz

Incidentally, Assad reciprocated the affable feelings of the Western far-right. Back in 2005, David Duke, one of America's most odious white supremacists and the former leader of the Louisiana chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, visited Damascus. He came at the official invitation of members of the Syrian parliament, which was fully under the control of Bashar al-Assad. Duke's address in a square in the center of the capital was broadcast live by a state channel.

“It hurts my heart to tell you that a part of my country is occupied by the Zionists, just as part of your country, the Golan Heights, is occupied by Zionists. Zionists occupied much of the American media and now control much of the American government,” the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan shouted to a cheering, flag-waving audience. Duke called Bashar al-Assad a “peace-loving president,” complained about black Americans taking jobs away from white people, and, in his usual style, maintained that the Holocaust never happened.

NSDAP, Syrian edition

Around the same time that David Duke was preparing for his trip to Damascus, another landmark development in the relationship between the Assad regime and the neo-Nazi movement occurred. In 2005, the Syrian president lifted the ban on the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. Emerging back in the 1930s, this political force had borrowed not only the name of the German Nazi party, but also its ideology and symbolism — albeit with minor changes.

The Social Nationalists advocate for the creation of a Greater Syria — which in addition to Syria proper should include Lebanon, and ideally also incorporate the Palestinian territories, Israel, Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, and even parts of Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Anti-Semitism and the cult of the leader feature prominently in the party's program. Its flag is a reimagined red swastika, and its members greet each other with the Nazi salute.

But that's not why the party was banned. After all, Assad himself was no stranger to anti-Semitism and autocracy, and his subordinates were no stranger to Nazi aesthetics. At the dawn of Syrian independence in the aftermath of WWII, the SSNP competed with the Baath Party in the struggle for power, with the latter hastily moving to eliminate its rivals after seizing control of the country in 1963. Though formally banned, the SSNP nevertheless maintained its structure and was extremely active in neighboring Lebanon, both as a political force and as a militant group during that country’s civil war (1975-1990).

The legitimation of the Social Nationalists and their inclusion in a unified ruling bloc with the Baath Party was the final stage in the long-standing cooperation between the Assads and supporters of the Greater Syria concept. The two factions began working together back in the late 1970s, when the Syrian army invaded and occupied part of neighboring Lebanon.

Hafez al-Assad was looking for Lebanese citizens willing to cooperate with the occupiers. Quite naturally, his favor fell on a party that opposed Lebanon's independence from Syria. Besides, Assad Sr. was already getting along very well with the Nazis.

Laying low in the Middle East

The well-established notion that most of the Nazi criminals who managed to escape punishment took refuge in Latin America is nothing more than a myth. Argentine historian Uki Goñi, who studies their biographies, believes that only between 180 and 800 officers and officials of the Reich were able to hide in the Americas. Meanwhile, the Middle East and North Africa, according to Goñi's data, accommodated around 4,000 German Nazis and their accomplices from other countries.

In 1967, the famous Israeli “Nazi hunter” Simon Wiesenthal estimated the number of Nazi criminals in Arab countries at 6,000-7,000. Many of them had learned peaceful professions in the host countries, but some continued to do what they had been doing in Hitler's Germany. For example, Johann von Leers, a close associate of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, got a job in the Egyptian government in 1955, spreading anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli propaganda and writing articles glorifying Nazism.

Hundreds of Nazis ended up in Syria. They included Walter Rauff, one of the creators of the Gaswagens — mobile gas chambers that were used to exterminate Jews before the establishment of the death camps. Damascus entrusted Rauff with establishing the intelligence services for the young Syrian state. Rauff's neighbor in his new homeland for some time was Franz Stangl, former commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka concentration camps.

But the most famous of the Nazis who found refuge in Syria was Alois Brunner, a former high-ranking Austrian SS officer. Holocaust ideologue Adolf Eichmann called Brunner “the best of his men” and tasked him with deporting tens of thousands of European Jews to death camps, as well as carrying out operations to find and eliminate enemies of the Reich in occupied France. After the defeat of Germany in 1945, Brunner, “Eichmann's right-hand man but with brains,” as Wiesenthal called him, faced the gallows. But the Nazi officer was saved by chance.

Americans who were actively searching for Brunner arrested and executed his namesake, mistaking him for the wanted criminal. Alois Brunner had prepared false documents so convincing that he even managed to get a job in the American occupation administration before moving on to work in a mine. It was not until the mid-1950s that French authorities discovered the U.S. had executed the wrong man (although Brunner’s namesake, too, had been a Nazi). The Western powers put Brunner back on the wanted list, and even issued him the death penalty in absentia. The Austrian fled to Egypt, where von Leers advised him to try his luck in Syria. In Damascus, Brunner took the name Georg Fischer but was exposed shortly after his arrival.

France, West Germany, the United States, and Austria, Brunner's birthplace, demanded that the Syrian authorities extradite the criminal, but they pretended not to understand who all of the talk was about. Damascus resisted with all its might the demands to extradite the Nazi, even when the Syrian government was offered considerable incentives by both the Europeans and Americans. After all, Brunner had a skillset that greatly interested the new Syrian ruler, Hafez al-Assad.

A teacher of German Nazism

Assad Sr. never enjoyed the people's love. He held onto power using bayonets, propaganda, and repression. For the latter, he needed Brunner. In Nazi Germany, Brunner had been responsible for creating the facilities used in the mass torture and execution of concentration camp prisoners. He was familiar with the inner workings of these camps, organized their logistics, and hand-picked the staff. His expertise was indispensable for the Assad regime. Shortly after Hafez al-Assad came to power, Brunner was appointed as an advisor to his brother Rifaat, the commander of Syria's elite security services.

In his most famous interview, given in 1985 to the Munich-based magazine Bunte, Brunner said nothing about his duties in the Middle East, but he was eager to talk about both his past and his plans for the future. One of the most wanted Nazi criminals at the time, Alois Brunner called the Jews he killed “trash” and said he had no regrets about his involvement in the Holocaust. He also stated that he would be willing to face an international tribunal, but only if Israel was not involved. He said he did not want to become a “second Eichmann” — that is, to repeat the fate of his former commander, who was executed by the Israelis in 1962.

Reporters noted that Alois Brunner always carried a poison capsule with him, and that he was missing one eye and several fingers after surviving an explosion of a letter bomb planted by Israeli agents. There were also rumors that Rifaat al-Assad had fired Brunner and subsequently distanced himself from him, probably fearing that the Israelis would not spare him in their pursuit of the Austrian.

In 2017, French journalists discovered that Brunner was one of the main architects of Assad Sr.'s state apparatus of total terror. He taught Syrians the torture methods used by the SS and the Gestapo — methods that Assad's intelligence services used until the very last day of the hereditary regime's existence.

In addition to Brunner, the authorities enlisted other former SS and Gestapo officers for short-term contracts. As a result, several generations of Syrian intelligence officers have acquired the knowledge and skills mastered by their mentors in European concentration camps and ghettos. The participation of Nazi criminals in the repressive machine of the elder Assad’s dictatorship is even reflected in the language: violent people in Syria are still called “almani” — German.

The pinnacle of Assad's collaboration with the Nazis was the construction of several prisons, designed with the experience of WWII Nazis and East German Stasi agents, who also willingly cooperated with the dictator. The most notorious of these facilities is the monstrous Sednaya in the Christian suburb of Damascus bearing the same name. It held tens of thousands of prisoners on several above-ground floors and at least five underground levels. The building had its own crematorium and press for destroying the bodies of those who were executed or died of torture. According to Amnesty International, at least 13,000 people were hanged in Sednaya in the first five years of the civil war — and hanging was only one mode of execution in use there. In total, at least 1.2 million people suspected of disloyalty or collaboration with the opposition have passed through the regime's prisons and camps since the beginning of the civil war. Upwards of 100,000 did not come out alive.

The new Syrian authorities have already declared their intention to preserve Sednaya prison as a memorial of the regime's crimes, just as Poland preserved the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz. But the creator of the prison will never see it again.

In the early 2000s, Bashar al-Assad sent the old Nazi into honorable exile in the seaside town of Latakia, where he died a few years before the outbreak of the civil war (though according to another version, Brunner died under house arrest in Damascus). Brunner and his compatriots certainly helped the Assads become even more brutal authoritarians at home. But if that story were not shocking enough, his involvement also managed to turn two Middle Eastern dictators into icons for white supremacists in the West.