COMMENT: Following closely on its refusal to effect complete disclosure of its files on Eichmann, the BND (the German intelligence service), has destroyed its files on Eichmann’s deputy Alois Brunner.
As discussed in AFA #3, evidence is strong that Brunner worked for the BND after World War II. Recall that the BND sprouted from the World War II German Eastern front intelligence outfit Foreign Armies East, run by General Reinhard Gehlen. (Eichmann himself, according to author Glenn Infield, worked for the BND and CIA on contract.)
EXCERPT: Germany’s intelligence service has been rocked by revelations that its staff mysteriously destroyed a 500-page file on Alois Brunner, one of the world’s most wanted Nazi war criminals, amid suspicions that he worked for them as an agent after fleeing to Syria in the early 1950s.
Brunner, who if he is still alive is 99, collaborated closely with Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi officer who masterminded the Holocaust. He is said to have sent more than 128,000 Jews from throughout Nazi-occupied Europe to the death camps during the Second World War. An Austrian citizen, Brunner fled to Syria in the early 1950s from where he gave interviews to German and American newspapers. In one, given in 1987, he stated: “The Jews deserved to die. They were garbage. If I had the chance I would do it again.” . . . .
. . . The agency’s in-house historians have revealed that staff ordered the Brunner file to be wiped off its computers at some stage between 1994 and 1997, when it was under the control of the former conservative chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government.
Suspicions of a deliberate cover up have been raised, not least because Brunner is thought to have worked for the BND as its Damascus agent after he fled to Syria. Bodo Hechelhammer, the BND’s chief historian, told Der Spiegel magazine: “I would like to have seen the whole Brunner file. It would have helped clear up all the speculation.”
The claim that Brunner worked for German intelligence is borne out by a handwritten BND document from 1997 which records a conversation with the service’s head of security, Volker Foertsch, in which he states that he “knew personally” that Brunner was a BND informant in Syria. . . .
A reaffirmation that the BND is a sack of shit. And an evil one at that. Intelligence services, such as the BND & CIA, are purveyors of evil and wrongdoing in the world. They are excellent specimens of how NOT to act or behave as human beings. They mar the entire image and history of humankind. One look at the human race from an outsider’s perspective, and it’s no wonder that extraterrestrial life has decided to not make contact with earth. I have a sticker that reads ‘Beam Me Up Scotty, There’s No Intelligent Life Down Here.’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15968698
German intelligence files on ex-Nazis shredded
30 November 2011 Last updated at 10:12 ET
An estimated one in 10 BND recruits had previously served in Hitler’s SS
Investigators have found that in 2007 the German Intelligence Service (BND) destroyed files of 250 BND employees who had been in the Nazi SS or Gestapo.
The BND confirmed the loss, calling it “regrettable and annoying”.
Four independent historians are investigating the BND’s old links with the Nazis. They say some of the missing papers concern suspected war criminals.
The historians did not allege a deliberate cover-up, but they urged the BND not to destroy any more files.
They said the BND should consult them before shredding any more documents, and called for a full investigation into the 2007 incident.
One of the historians, Dresden Professor Klaus-Dietmar Henke, said “it is not the case that the BND somehow deliberately destroyed the files of all those with Nazi links”.
According to the BND, the destroyed files relate to about 2% of the archive currently being investigated by the historians. The files were destroyed because they were not deemed to be worth keeping, the BND said.
The investigation into the BND’s Nazi roots began in February.
Reinhard Gehlen, who set up the BND after World War II, spied on the Soviet Union for the Nazis during the war.
About 10% of BND recruits during the Cold War had previously served in the SS, the German news website Spiegel reports.
Spiegel says the BND told it that in the 1990s documents about a top wanted Nazi, former SS Capt Alois Brunner, were destroyed.
Dear sir/madam the nineteen forty two trip alois brunner took to autzwitz was a very effective p.r. Presentation of how to ..make money and trade out of deathcams inmates.he was reputed to have taken the then Mufti of Jerusalem On his powerpoint presentation,showing of gross profit from torturous practices. This very same mufti then is reputed to have been a founder of the current moslimbrotherhood.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/188049#.VHt3iclNdcA
Nazi Alois Brunner ‘Taught Assad How to Torture’
Efraim Zuroff of the Wiesenthal Center says he has reliable information that Eichmann’s ‘best man’ is dead and buried in Syria.
By Gil Ronen
First Publish: 11/30/2014, 3:36 PM
Dr. Efraim Zuroff of The Simon Wiesenthal Center says that the center has received reliable information according to which Alois Brunner, a top Nazi fugitive whom Final Solution architect Adolf Eichmann called his “best man,” is dead and buried in Damascus. Brunner advised former Syrian dictator Hafez Asssad on torture techniques and repression, said Zuroff.
British news site Sunday Express quoted Zuroff, who directs the Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, as saying: “We have received information from a former German secret service agent who had served in the Middle East who said that Brunner was dead and buried in Damascus.
Zuroff added: “Given his age it would not be surprising and the information came from someone who we consider reliable. There is much evidence of what he (Brunner) did and no lack of clarity about his huge guilt in four different countries.
“We are talking about someone who helped send 128,500 Jews to the death camps, the majority were murdered... The victims’ families are a very large group and it’s fair to say the people who suffered at his hands would have wanted him to be punished and would be disappointed, but he is not the only Nazi war criminal who got away, far too many got away.”
Brunner was responsible for the deportation of thousands of Jews from Austria, Greece, Slovakia and France to concentration camps. He was commander of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris from June 1943 to August 1944, from which nearly 24,000 people were deported, and was condemned to death in absentia in France in 1954 for crimes against humanity. In 1961 and in 1980, Brunner lost, respectively, an eye and the fingers of his left hand, as a result of letter bombs sent to him by the Mossad.
In a 1985 interview with the German magazine Bunte, Brunner said that he escaped capture by the Allies immediately after World War II because his identity was mixed up with that of another SS member, Anton Brunner.
Alois Brunner said that he “received official documents under a false name from American authorities,” and found work as a driver for the United States Army in the period after the war. He was reportedly linked to the Gehlen organization of former Nazi generals, which was set up by the US to spy on the Soviets. He fled West Germany in 1954 on a fake Red Cross passport, first to Rome, then Egypt, where he worked as a weapons dealer, and then to Syria, where he took the pseudonym of Dr. Georg Fischer.
According to Zuroff: “He was involved in the harsh treatment of the Jewish community of Syria and was an expert in terror and torture... He said himself his one regret was he did not kill more Jews. He was unrepentant.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/07/hitler-s-henchmen-in-arabia.html?
Hitler’s Henchmen in Arabia
Nazi Alois Brunner’s confirmed death in Damascus reveals an uncomfortable truth: Egypt and Syria have long ties to Nazi Germany and long provided sanctuary to fugitive war criminals.
When most of us think of the premier retirement destination for unrepentant Nazis, our minds immediately turn to South America. We think of Josef Mengele hidden on a lonely estancia in Paraguay, or Adolf Eichmann ensconced in a two-bit suburb of Buenos Aires.
This perception was magnified by a slew of sensational books that were published in the early 1970s, many of which promoted a very iffy thesis that former Nazis were using the continent as a launchpad for a “Fourth Reich” that would, yes, take over the world.
This culminated in Ira Levin’s 1976 thriller, The Boys from Brazil, in which fiendish Nazis hatch a diabolical plot to unleash several cloned Hitlers onto the world. The book was made into a film in 1978, and starred no less than Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier, who were presumably behind on the rent.
But as the recent declaration of the death of the former SS officer and Eichmann henchman Alois Brunner reveals, the boys didn’t just go to Brazil. For Brunner, like so many other Nazis, found the Middle East an equally hospitable location, and far less out-on-a-limb than a chalet in Patagonia, no matter how gemütlich.
Brunner, who sent an estimated 130,000 Jews to their deaths, made his home in Damascus, Syria, where he found the conditions much to his liking. Although there has been much guff peddled about Brunner’s postwar activities over the past few days—some of which may be true—there is no doubt that he worked in cahoots with the Assad regime, or at least certainly enjoyed its protection.
However, Brunner was not the only perpetrator of the Holocaust mooching around the streets of the Syrian capital. In terms of gruesome numbers, Franz Stangl, the former commandant of Treblinka extermination camp, had some 800,000 murders on what remained of his conscience, and he arrived in Damascus in September 1948 with the assistance of a Roman Catholic bishop.
Although Brunner is said to have variously worked as an intelligence agent, an arms dealer, and a security advisor, Stangl took more menial positions in textile firms. Life was somewhat frugal, but manageable. Unfortunately for Stangl, the local chief of police took a fancy to his 14-year-old daughter and wanted to add the child to his harem. Stangl didn’t tarry, and packed his bags and shepherded his entire family to—you guessed it—Brazil.
Stangl seems to have been one of the few Nazis who didn’t find the air pleasing in Syria. Most, such as Major-General Otto-Ernst Remer, prospered on Arab Street. Remer was, frankly, a real piece of work, and having founded the swiftly-banned Socialist Reich Party in West Germany in the early 1950s, decided that working as an arms dealer with the likes of Brunner more rewarding.
Unlike Brunner, Remer was itinerant, and spent much time in that other nest of postwar Nazis—Cairo. If anything, the Egyptian capital was even more appealing than Damascus, and had been playing host to Nazis immediately after the war, when King Farouk opened his arms to scores of former SS and Gestapo officers.
That hospitality continued even after Farouk was deposed by the Free Officers Movement in 1952, as Nasser regarded German scientific and intelligence expertise as being an essential component of his regime. No less a figure than Joachim Daumling, the former head of the Gestapo in Düsseldorf, was tasked with establishing Nasser’s secret service.
In fact, the list of some habitués of Cairo in the 1950s and the 1960s reads like a who’s who of Nazi Germany, featuring as it did the rescuer of Mussolini, Otto Skorzeny; the ace Stuka pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel; the leader of a notorious SS penal unit, Oskar Dirlewanger; and the particularly odious and violently anti-Semitic stooge of Goebbels, Johannes von Leers.
What made the relationship between these former Nazis and the Egyptians and Syrians so successful was that it was a genuinely two-way deal. The Arabs offered the Nazis a haven, as well as a market for all their nefarious dealings in arms and black market currency. The Nazis, meanwhile, were able to provide technical and military experts, as well as the knowhow of establishing the instruments of repression.
However, below the back scratching lay a deep and dark underpinning to the relationship between the crescent and the swastika. That was, of course, a hatred of the Jews, and in particular, a desire to see the eradication of Israel.
That shared exterminationist desire had been born during the war itself, when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husayni, had made his home in the luxurious Hotel Adlon in Berlin in 1941, and had impressed Hitler with his hatred of the Jews. The Mufti lobbied the Nazis hard to kick the British out of the Middle East, and he was instrumental in raising recruits for a largely Muslim unit of the SS called the 13th Armed Mountain Division of the SS Handschar.
In addition, throughout the war in North Africa, German intelligence had worked closely with the Egyptians, and the Mufti is thought to have been a key intermediary between King Farouk and Hitler himself. If further evidence were needed that the roots of the Nazi-Arab affair were required, then it is worth considering the fact that both Nasser and his successor, Anwar Sadat, had been wartime agents for the Germans.
Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, many old Nazis managed discreetly to trickle back to what they regarded as the Fatherland. However, others such as the former SS “doctor” in Mauthausen, Aribert Heim—and indeed Alois Brunner—would end their days in the Middle East, dying lonely deaths in obscure dusty back streets of Cairo and Damascus.
It is hard to feel sorry for such lonely demises, but in the end, those Nazis who escaped to the Middle East found permanent sanctuary. Remembering that may seem inflammatory when the West struggles with its relationship with that part of the planet, but it is nonetheless the awkward truth.