History Illustrated is a series of perspectives that puts news events and current affairs into historical context using graphics generated with artificial intelligence.
Torture in Syria has a nasty origin. At its core, Alois Brunner, the “Butcher of Salonica”, a Nazi SS officer who escaped to Damascus. His story, what there is of it, has been pieced together by only a few journalists, Nazi hunters and, purportedly, Mossad assassins.
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However incomplete, that story still paints a vivid picture of a man who sent more than 128,000 European Jews to Nazi death camps, including 345 children in France, just weeks before Paris was liberated.Under Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, Brunner oversaw the deportation of Jews from Austria, Greece, France and Slovakia. He was sentenced to death in absentia, in France, in 1954.That same year, he fled Germany for Egypt, then Syria, where Nazi hunters say the government hid him. Later, he reportedly taught torture tactics to President Hafez al-Assad’s intelligence service.But Brunner’s guarded hideout did not go unnoticed. In 1961, a letter bomb attributed to Israeli Mossad agents cost him his left eye. In 1980, a second Mossad bomb reportedly blew off three fingers.In 1985, two German reporters travelled to Damascus, where they photographed Brunner, then 73, with a hidden watch-camera.
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French President Jacques Chirac, on a visit to Syria in 1996, reportedly asked about Brunner. Al-Assad denied knowing him, but journalist Hedi Aouidj says al-Assad then confined Brunner, to avoid being caught out. In 2000, al-Assad’s son, Bashar, became president, and Brunner “likely” died the next year. He would have been about 89.Torture in Syria, however, endured. A government photographer, in 2014, leaked more than 53,000 pictures of people tortured and killed by the latest Assad regime. Since the war began in 2011, the number of people killed in Syrian prisons is estimated to be in the tens of thousands.Today, it’s impossible to know the extent of Alois Brunner’s influence on Syria’s vast torture network. But with the discovery of each mass grave, the extent of the Assad regime’s killing becomes more apparent … and at the same time, increasingly incomprehensible.
