In October 1985, a 73-year-old man opened his apartment door in central Damascus and invited a West German reporter in for coffee. For thirty years, six European countries had been demanding his extradition. The Syrian government told every one of them the same thing: no such person lived in the country. His name was Alois Brunner, and his road to Damascus began with a war Syria lost.
On May 15th, 1948, Syria was one of five Arab states that crossed into Palestine the day after Israel declared independence. What followed was a military disaster. Syrian forces were pushed back across the Jordan River, and the army returned home exhausted and under-equipped. The country’s leaders spent the next months blaming each other in public.
Syria had been independent for barely two years. Its parliamentary system, inherited from French rule, did not survive the fallout. On March 30th, 1949, Chief of Staff Husni al-Zaim led a bloodless coup against President Shukri al-Quwatli. It was the first military takeover in Syrian history.
Zaim became president on April 11th, 1949, and immediately set out to rebuild the army that had just lost the war. He wanted modern training, hardened veterans, and officers who understood how to fight a European-style conflict. In 1949, only one group fit that description and was willing to take the work: former German soldiers. The problem for a newly independent Arab state was finding them.
The obvious channels—Allied governments, the new West German authorities—would never knowingly supply SS men or Gestapo officers to Damascus. But another network already existed. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, had spent the years from 1941 to 1945 in Berlin as a guest of the Nazi regime. He met Hitler on November 28th, 1941, and helped recruit Bosnian Muslims for the Waffen SS.
After escaping French custody in 1946, he settled in the Arab world and became what historians now describe as a guardian angel for Nazi fugitives looking for refuge. The arrangement that emerged ran almost silently. Al-Husayni provided the contacts. Zaim provided the positions.
And by 1948, the first German officers were already arriving in Damascus. The first significant figure to use the route was Walter Rauff, the SS officer who had designed the gas vans at the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin. Recruited by Syrian intelligence in 1948, he arrived in Damascus as a military adviser and became one of Zaim’s closest foreign confidants. American intelligence reports from November 1949 described him as chief of the German military experts in Syria.
He was wanted across Europe for his role in the deaths of nearly 100,000 people. Then the system nearly collapsed with the man running it. On August 14th, 1949, Colonel Sami al-Hinnawi overthrew Zaim and executed him by firing squad at the Mezzeh fortress outside Damascus the same afternoon. Rauff was expelled within weeks and eventually settled in Chile, where he lived undisturbed until his death in 1984.
The patron was gone. The door stayed open. It stayed open because by the late 1940s, an entire infrastructure existed to move wanted Germans out of Europe. The route through Italy became the most reliable.
At the Pontificio Istituto Teutonico Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome, Austrian Bishop Alois Hudal issued false identity papers and helped fugitives obtain travel documents through the International Red Cross. Hudal’s network moved Adolf Eichmann to Argentina in 1950, Franz Stangl to Brazil shortly after, and would eventually handle the man this story is about. A parallel system operated out of West Germany itself. The Gehlen Organization, founded in June 1946 by former Wehrmacht General Reinhard Gehlen and funded initially by the US Army, hired hundreds of former SS and SD officers.
Declassified files at the US National Archives show the organization facilitated the movement of controversial figures toward Egypt and Syria throughout the late 1940s and 50s. The agency became the official West German foreign intelligence service, the BND, in April 1956. Its staff retained their old contacts. Franz Rademacher used these networks in the summer of 1952.
Between May 1940 and April 1943, Rademacher had run the Jewish desk at the Nazi Foreign Office and authored the 1940 Madagascar Plan. In February 1952, a West German court convicted him of complicity in the murder of 1,300 Serbian Jews and sentenced him to 3 years and 5 months. He was released on bail in July 1952 pending appeal. Within weeks, he was gone.
He surfaced in Damascus in August 1952 under the alias Theo Bartholome Rodella, running an export business under the protection of the Syrian government. Two years later, the man whose shadow would stretch longest over Damascus made his own move. Alois Brunner had spent the immediate postwar years hiding inside Germany, at one point working as a driver for the US Army under false documents. In 1954, he obtained a forged Red Cross passport and left for Rome, where the Hudal network processed him through to Cairo.
Egypt proved a brief stop. According to historian Battis Ben Regeb, President Nasser had no use for deportation specialists, and Brunner was quietly moved on. With al-Husayni brokering the final step, he arrived in Damascus in 1955. He settled into a government-owned apartment at 22 George Haddad Street in the city’s diplomatic quarter under the name Georg Fischer.
The man who took this address was 43 years old and wanted in France, where a military court would convict him in absentia that same year and sentence him to death. Between June 1943 and August 1944, he had commanded the Drancy transit camp outside Paris and deported roughly 24,000 people to the camps. His new Syrian employers knew exactly who he was. George Haddad Street sat in the embassy district, a few minutes’ walk from the foreign ministries and intelligence headquarters that would define Brunner’s new working life.
The apartment itself belonged to the Syrian government. Brunner initially subleased from another German adviser named Kurt Witzka—an arrangement that ended when Brunner denounced Witzka to Syrian intelligence on fabricated charges and took the entire apartment for himself. Witzka was arrested and interrogated. The man who replaced him had been doing this kind of work since 1938.
Brunner’s employment in Damascus operated on two tracks. Officially, he was a business consultant. In practice, he had two functions. The first was advising Syrian intelligence on interrogation methods, drawing directly from his experience running deportation operations in Vienna, Thessaloniki, and Paris.
According to former Syrian intelligence officer Sami Juma, Brunner traveled regularly to Wadi Barada on the outskirts of Damascus, where he trained Syrian officers in Gestapo techniques. The second track was arms trading. Brunner co-founded a company named the Orient Trading Company—Otraco—with Rademacher and a third former SD officer. Throughout the late 1950s, Otraco funneled Soviet bloc weapons to the Algerian National Liberation Front.
He became wealthy. He also became visible. Israeli intelligence was already moving. In 1961, an envelope arrived at 22 George Haddad Street.
Brunner opened it himself. The letter bomb took his left eye and left permanent damage to his face. A second bomb reached Rademacher’s Damascus home in 1962. A third envelope reached Brunner again in 1980, costing him fingers on his left hand.
Israel never publicly claimed any of the operations. None of them were enough. In January 1962, Mossad sent an agent named Eli Cohen into Damascus under the cover identity of a Syrian emigre businessman returning from Argentina. Over the next three years, Cohen built deep relationships inside the Syrian political and military elite.
One of his assignments was to track Nazi fugitives in Damascus, including Brunner. Syrian counterintelligence uncovered him in January 1965. He was publicly hanged in Marjeh Square in central Damascus on May 18th, 1965, in front of a crowd of more than 10,000 people. Whatever intelligence he had gathered on Brunner died with him.
Rademacher’s Syrian years ended differently. Arrested by Syrian intelligence in July 1963 on unrelated espionage charges, he spent more than two years in prison before being released on health grounds in October 1965. On November 30th, 1966, he flew voluntarily back to West Germany. Brunner stayed.
A new party had taken power in Damascus that March, and it had no intention of letting him go. On March 8th, 1963, the Ba’ath Party seized power in Syria in a military coup. The party would rule the country for the next 61 years. Within its leadership was a young Alawite Air Force officer named Hafez al-Assad, who rose through internal factional struggles to become defense minister, then prime minister, and finally head of state after the corrective movement of November 13th, 1970.
Brunner’s protection, which had been informal under earlier governments, became institutional under the Ba’ath. He was moved to a new apartment, issued a state salary, and placed under the personal oversight of Syrian intelligence. The extradition requests started arriving almost immediately and never stopped. By the late 1980s, six countries—France, West Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Greece—had filed formal demands for Brunner to be handed over.
Syria’s response never varied. According to journalist Hermann Scheifer, who tracked the fugitive network from the 1960s onward, officials at Syria’s foreign ministry routinely asked Brunner whether he lived in Syria, took his denial at face value, and informed European governments that no such person resided in the country. Brunner himself broke the silence in 1985. In an interview with German magazine Bunte—the same meeting described at the start of this story—he told the reporter he had no bad conscience about his wartime work.
He was 73 years old and unrepentant. Diplomatic pressure briefly intensified in 1996 when French President Jacques Chirac raised Brunner’s case directly with Hafez al-Assad during a state visit. Assad denied knowing anything about him. According to Tunisian journalist Hedi Aouij, Assad quietly moved Brunner shortly after to prevent further embarrassment.
The man who had spent four decades in a government department was relocated to a basement room where his conditions deteriorated sharply. In a 2017 investigation published by French magazine Revue 21, three former Syrian intelligence officers described Brunner’s final years. He could no longer wash himself. He survived on army rations.
Neighbors heard him crying at night. He remained anti-Semitic to the end. He died in that basement around December 2001, aged 89. The reasons Syria sheltered men like Brunner, Rademacher, and Rauff were never singular.
A defeated army needed European expertise. A broker in Damascus opened the doors, and escape networks in Europe kept sending passengers through them. Rauff died peacefully in Chile in 1984. Rademacher in West Germany in 1973.
Brunner in that Damascus basement in 2001. All three unrepentant. None of them tried.
And once the Ba’ath Party took power, handing over a man who knew Syrian intelligence from the inside became something no government in Damascus was ever willing to do.
