“Outwardly, Brunner led a quiet life… In fact, he was a mercenary and arms dealer.”

By Danny Orbach

IN 1994, an official in the information security department of BND, Germany’s Secret Service, gave an order to shred a large file long kept under lock and key. Outwardly, it was nothing but a drab white folder resembling many others in the organization’s archive. But in fact, it contained explosive material.

The shredding machine devoured page after page, eliminating the German espionage records on Alois Brunner, one of the vilest Holocaust perpetrators and Adolf Eichmann’s key expert on the deportation and extermination of Jews. Brunner, who after the Second World War found refuge in Syria, featured for decades on many countries’ most wanted war criminals lists, including those of West Germany, Israel and France.

The destruction of his personal file, which the BND kept for years, gave rise to numerous conspiracy theories. Was Brunner, in fact, a West German spy? Had the BND destroyed the file to hide its own involvement in sheltering Nazi criminals? Many authors assumed this to be the case, absent any hard evidence. The truth is far more interesting. But to understand it, we must rewind the tale several more decades, and broaden the scope to uncover interlocking clandestine plots, stretching over both sides of the Mediterranean, between Europe and the Middle East, Germany and France, Israel and its Arab enemies – and between the two superpowers as well.

Many towns have places that are known to residents yet missing from official maps. Travellers who visit Damascus will not be able to find George Haddad Street in any tourist guide. This small street, an inconspicuous alley in the Abu Rummaneh neighbourhood, was once described as a tree-lined street “where pensioners come to end their days.” The serene Sibki Park, a pleasant spot of greenery in the Damascene hustle and bustle, is only two minutes away, as are several embassies and consulates. Had one strolled near the inconspicuous alley at any time between the early 1960s to the late 1990s, however, one might have noticed unusually heavy police presence that included both uniformed and plainclothes officers. Foreigners who left the neighbuoring main road into the alleyways, especially George Haddad Street, were often approached by stern looking guards asking about their business. An unconvincing answer could easily end in a beating, an arrest or deportation.

In one whitish-yellow corner building, No.22, there was an apartment belonging to the Syrian government. It housed minor dignitaries, foreign military advisors and other guests. Some of those, we now know, were Nazi war criminals on the run.

Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp, lived there for a while in the late 1940s before escaping to South America. He was replaced by a stiff-necked German named Kurt Witzke, who worked for a while as an advisor for the Syrian Army, then retired to spend his days as a language instructor. To supplement his meagre income, Witzke looked for a sub-lease. One day, probably in 1955, he was approached by a moustached Austrian with dark complexion, who showed interest in the apartment and introduced himself as “Dr. George Fischer.” Witzke admitted him immediately, without realizing that his tenant was in fact Alois Brunner, one of the vilest Nazi fugitives on earth. Outwardly, Brunner led a quiet life, represented the interests of several German firms in Damascus, produced homemade sauerkraut and raised rabbits on his rooftop. In fact, he was a mercenary and arms dealer.

In 1957, teaming up with other Nazis and Neo Nazis in Germany, Syria and Egypt, he became a leading partner in an weapons smuggling racket known as OTRACO (Orient Trading Company), designed to smuggle weapons to the Algerian underground FLN in its fight against French colonial rule. Contrary to the assumptions of many, Brunner did not work for the BND, West Germany’s secret service, and certainly did not serve as its resident in Damascus, as one sensational author once wrote. He was so afraid of extradition, he even avoided contact with the West German consulate. Nor did he work for the Syrian government back then. However, his trajectory would cross that of both German and Syrian intelligence agencies in unforeseen ways.

Brunner should have seen the warning signs as early as spring 1959. In April that year, a German visitor named Hermann Schaefer docked in Beirut’s seaport. A journalist by profession, Schaefer was in fact a dubious information peddler who worked for various spy agencies, including West Germany’s internal security office (the Bureau for Constitutional Protection – BfV), the Israeli Mossad and most probably also French SDECE and various Eastern Bloc intelligence agencies. Based in an elegant Beirut hotel, he visited Damascus several times and mingled easily with the local Nazi expat community. On one occasion he stayed in the apartment of Karl-Heinz Spӓth, Brunner’s partner in the arms trafficking business, and befriended Franz Rademacher, another fugitive mass murderer who served as Eichmann’s counterpart in the Nazi foreign office.

Schaefer used two cover stories. He told certain people that his goal was to open a new anti-Semitic journal dealing with Middle Eastern affairs, and others – that he came to Damascus to collect mitigating testimonies for Max Merten, yet another Nazi criminal responsible for the extermination of Greek Jews, who was at the time a prisoner in Athens. Meanwhile, Schaefer got his hands on a treasure-trove of sensitive information. Among other things, he stole a contemporary photo of Alois Brunner, snatched documents on OTRACO’s arms trafficking business and collected ample intelligence on the exile Nazi communities in Damascus, Beirut and Cairo. On March 16, 1960, the Syrian authorities belatedly deported him from the country too late to prevent him from setting off a firestorm.

Based again in his Beirut hotel, Schaefer moved between clandestine meetings in restaurants, bars and ice cream parlors, and sold his information to anyone willing to pay. Sometimes he also gave it for free to curry favor with powerful people. To the French, he provided incriminating information on the Nazi arms trafficking to Algeria, and especially on one of the leading merchants, Wilhelm Beisner, a former Nazi intelligence official and direct holocaust perpetrator. The French wasted no time, and blew up Beisner’s car, maiming him for life. Declassified Mossad documents show that Schaefer also provided information on Alois Brunner, a top-target on the Israeli hit-list, to Mossad agents, to whom he was known by the codename “Merhavia.”

After exhausting all business opportunities in the world of espionage, Schaefer sold the same story to several German tabloids that happily “outed” the Nazis in the Damascus. One of the articles, titled “And they learnt nothing!” displayed the picture of Brunner and his business partners. In sum, Schaefer’s exposures embarrassed and compromised the Nazi community in the Middle East, whose members began to accuse one another of leaking secrets to enemy agents.

Meanwhile, the publications facilitated by Schaefer also troubled the bigwigs of West German intelligence. At his isolated headquarters in Pullach, a picturesque village near Munich, BND president Reinhard Gehlen perceived it as yet another looming threat. Some of the Nazis in Cairo and Damascus (Brunner not among them), worked for him as agents, and Schaefer’s exposures could associate his service with war criminals and Holocaust perpetrators, especially embarrassing because Eichmann was then on trial in Israel, bringing the Holocaust back into international headlines. Gehlen was furthermore dealing with the fallout from the exposure of a Soviet agent named Heinz Felfe, another former SS spy, in BND headquarters. The investigation was still secret in 1960, but it was clear to all involved that this traitor, who exposed countless CIA and BND operations to the Communists, would soon be arrested. The ensuing scandal could be ruinous to the reputation of Gehlen and his agency, and the BND’s numerous political rivals in Bonn would pounce at the opportunity to dismantle the organization he had built.

Gehlen was certain that Schaefer, too, was a Communist agent who worked for the Soviet Union. To neutralize his exposures and mitigate Felfe’s scandal, he was keen to win gratitude from the BND’s main political patron, State Secretary Hans Globke, Chancellor Adenauer’s Chief of Staff and one of the most powerful people in West Germany.  Globke was also mired in deep trouble at the time. His Nazi past, as the official commentator on the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws, had come home to roost, assailing him on multiple fronts. Eichmann was on trial in Israel, and Globke feared the caged criminal would associate him [Globke] with the Holocaust. At the same time, Hans Merten, who just returned from Greek custody, testified that the state secretary was personally responsible for the death of 10,000 Jews. That was a shameless lie, but it still threatened Globke at the time.

Gehlen, who desperately needed allies to mitigate the incoming Felfe Scandal, offered to help Globke through Alois Brunner, of all people. He proposed that the fugitive mass murderer, Eichmann’s former subordinate and a chief Holocaust culprit, testify that Globke had nothing to do with the extermination, thereby helping the state secretary. Gehlen might have believed that this bold scheme would win Globke’s gratitude and ensure the BND political protection once Felfe was exposed. Nonetheless, it was an extremely foolish idea. Gehlen had no authority to grant legal immunity to Brunner, who was ardently followed by West German prosecutors, especially Fritz Bauer of Hessen, a relentless Nazi hunter.

Any visit of Brunner in Germany might have led to his arrest, to the great delight of the press. However, besieged by Felfe’s treason and Schaefer’s exposures, Gehlen did not think rationally. Fortunately for the president of the BND, Brunner himself put an end to the scheme. In December 1960, he cut all negotiations with Gehlen and declared he was not coming to Germany. Deflecting yet another request from the BND, he also refused to give testimony to the West German consulate in Damascus. Brunner justly believed that if exposed in such a way, his extradition was only a matter of time. The BND, I believe, destroyed Brunner’s file in 1994 precisely to avoid the exposure of this scandalous scheme. The shame of using one of the Holocaust’s chief culprits to cleanse the wartime record of a high West German official was probably too much to bear.

This is, of course, only one of the stories on the Nazi mercenaries in the Middle East. Brunner later became an agent of the Syrian secret service and was involved in several failed and murderous plots. In parallel, the Mossad tried to assassinate him twice in his Damascus abode. In addition, Brunner’s arms trafficking business led Gehlen into additional troubles and complications with the French secret service. But this is already a story for another article.

Prof. Danny Orbach is a military historian from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the author of the upcoming Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries during the Cold War.