‘To survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton’ –Primo Levi
On September 13, 1961, a tall, balding man with “spiteful eyes” (according to a CIA report), collected a large package from a Damascus post office addressed to “Abu Hussein”. He took the parcel home to his luxury apartment on the Rue Georges Haddad in the diplomatic quarter of the Syrian capital and opened it, whereupon the packet exploded, removing his eye and parts of his arm.
The bomb was a gift from Yitzhak Shamir, later prime minister of Israel but then head of Mifratz, the special operations unit of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service.
Hussein’s real name was SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner, one of the world’s most wanted Nazis, a mass-murdering monster nicknamed “the bloodhound” who was personally responsible for deporting 128,500 people to death camps.
In 1980, he lost the fingers on his left hand when a second letter bomb blew up in his hands.
Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner, once the right-hand man of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution during World War II […] was in charge of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris from 1943 to 1944.
By the early 1950s, Brunner is thought to have fled to Egypt and then to Syria, where he was known as Georg Fischer and worked as an arms dealer in Damascus.
Syria had already provided refuge to Franz Stangl, former commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps.
When Hafez al-Assad seized power in a 1970 coup, Brunner helped the new regime set up an effective system of repression, inspired by the practices of the Third Reich.
Brunner shared his expertise in surveillance, interrogation and torture techniques, drawing on his experience with the Gestapo.
The brutal methods he taught the Syrian secret services were to have a lasting influence on the way the regime repressed political dissent.
One of the means of torture used by the Syrians, drawing on Brunner’s expertise, was the “German Chair,” a medieval-style rack used to stretch the victim’s spine.
In the 1990s, he gradually lost influence with the authorities. Things went badly awry when Bashar al-Assad took over from his father in July 2000. Brunner is then locked in a cell. Former security guards in charge of the protection of Brunner said that Brunner “suffered and cried a lot in his final years,” “couldn’t even wash” and ate only “an egg or a potato” a day. He ultimately died in deplorable conditions in December 2001, aged 89.
{ France 24 }
related { French Guiana’s Devil’s Island has witnessed some of humanity’s hardest moments […] Thousands of alleged criminals — some innocent, many not — were sent to Devil’s Island […] It was a sentence that carried with it a high probability of death, whether by the guillotine, tropical maladies, or from barbaric treatment by the prison’s notoriously sadistic guards. The dehumanizing treatment prisoners received on Devil’s Island was, in effect, a continuation of the barbarity long inflicted on French Guiana’s enslaved population. | JSTOR }
