The surprising connection of the Syrian secret services with the Nazis and the Stasi

‘The Hound’

Previously, the lawyer Andreas Schulz, in 2021, had already brought up before the German court the figure of Brunner during the trial against Anwar Raslan, a former Syrian colonel who led a unit within the Syrian General Intelligence Directorate.

Schulz even said that Brunner was nicknamed ‘the Hound’, He was co-responsible for the murder of 128,500 Jews and was on the most wanted list. Brunner escaped from Germany and on his journey ended up in Syria, where he began a close relationship with the Syrian authorities and their military.

The French magazine XXI said that after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Brunner took advantage of another Brunner’s death sentence to hide among the mass of refugees. He came to work as a truck driver for American troops.. The historian Danny Orbach detailed to the German media DW that in his book ‘Fugitives’ he recounted how Brunner was sentenced to death in absentia in France in 1953. But he fled to Egypt with a passport in the name of Georg Fischer and managed to enter Syria with a false identity.

At first he dedicated himself to smuggling Western weapons to Arab countries. But his activity caught the attention of the head of one of the Syrian secret services who arrested Brunner for espionage. In exchange for avoiding life imprisonment, he began to collaborate with the Syrian intelligence services. He taught courses on counterespionage techniques and interrogation with torture.

Noura Chalati, from the University of Erfurt who has investigated the relationship between the State Security Service (Stasi) of the GDR and the Syrian secret services, highlighted to DW that Brunner was not the only member of the SS or the Wehrmacht that ended in Syria. «Many of them were directly employed by the Syrian General Staff with one-year contracts and advised the army and military intelligence,” says Chalati. They valued their practical experience.

Torture techniques: the German chair

It is believed that these were German agents who imported the so-called ‘German chair’ torture method to Syria. It was a technique in which prisoners were tied to the back of a chair and their spine and neck were stretched to the breaking point, generating excruciating pain that could lead to paralysis or death.

“The sources are ambiguous, with some claiming that the Nazis introduced it into Syria and others believing that the GDR Ministry of State Security made this method of torture available to a wide group of users and interested members of the security services.” “Syrian intelligence,” Schulz said at the trial. Orbach, for his part, maintains that it was specifically Brunner who “He helped create sophisticated torture instruments,” among them the ‘German chair’.

Schulz detailed that when Hafez al-Assad became Minister of Defense, Colonel Abd al Hamid Al-Sarraj recognized Brunner’s intrinsic value and thought he should contact the future president. And in 1971, Hafez al-Assad and Brunner created an apparatus of repression to guarantee their position in power. In the process, Brunner continued to climb the ranks and use his relationship with Adolf Hitler to thrive. To the point that he was able to apply for the position of presidential advisor to Hafez al-Assad.

Bruner He even had a house in the diplomatic quarter of Damascus and special guards. “He began his strategic mission as an advisor to President Hafez al-Assad in the Wadi Barada valley region, an intelligence base specialized in torture,” he noted.

However, a dispute with Hafez al-Assad earned him his dismissal. «Brunner died at the age of 90, in 2001, in one of the torture prisons that he himself had helped build. YoIt is even rumored that he ended his life in a cell in Section 251 of Al-Khatib.said Schulz.

This section is famous because cases of torture, murder and sexual abuse were recorded there. «Section 251 It was also famous for what they call ‘the beating parties’, in which they brought the recently detained individuals and welcomed them with a reception party in which several members of the branch beat them, tortured and mistreated them,” the Human Rights Watch (HRW) researcher explained to EFE for Syria, Sara Kayyali.

Cooperation of Stasi agents in Syria

Schulz also noted that The German Democratic Republic was preparing to support the Syrian security services in the mid-1960s in the fight against imperialism and Israel and therefore “supported Brunner’s work on torture as a tool of power and control,” he says.

Chalati says that the Syrian leaders sought the knowledge that the state security services of the former GDR could give them. The first contacts in this regard date back to a Syrian investigation in 1966 to cget a closer look at weapons technology, the structure of intelligence services and political institutions. “However, the Ministry of State Security was quite reluctant,” says Chalati. But the evidence for all this is difficult to find since the GDR destroyed the archives in 1989 when it disappeared.

“But the general picture that emerges fits quite well with what we are currently seeing in Syria.” One indication is the extent to which the Syrian secret service was characterized by overflowing bureaucracy. «We know about this phenomenon from the GDR and the Stasi. I cannot say that there is a direct causal relationship. But the phenomenon is surprising.” That is why he urges more research into this.

Schulz indicated that the equivalent of the East German 251st division existed in Syria. “The designations of the security branches in Syria such as 251, 285 and even 40 are nothing more than a clear reflection of the conception of the Ministry of State Security of the German Democratic Republic at that time,” he indicated. ‘The Syrian Center for Legal Studies and Research’ details that both German and Syrian divisions served a single purpose, to combat the hostile forces by all means and possibilities, “making the tortures a national interest.”