Here's an excerpt in case the link goes dead again:
At the end of World War II, thousands of Nazi war criminals found refuge in South America and in Arab countries, including Syria. Damascus welcomed Nazis partly out of ideological sympathy for the Hitler regime, and partly because the German fugitives were useful allies in Syria's war to prevent the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
Israeli military intelligence reports during that first Arab-Israeli war were filled with references to the presence of Nazis, especially as commanding officers, among the Syrian forces attacking northern Israel. Indeed, there were so many Germans in the Syrian ranks that when the Haganah (the Labor Zionist militia that became the Israeli Army) defeated the Arab forces in Haifa in April 1948, its official terms for a truce included a provision that "European Nazis will be delivered to [the British] Military [authorities]."
During the 1950s and 1960s, the names of prominent Nazis living in Syria began to surface. One was SS Captain Theodor Dannecker, who had helped Adolf Eichmann implement Hitler's genocide policy in France, Bulgaria, and Hungary. When the legendary Israeli spy Eli Cohen took up residence in Damascus in 1962, his Syrian acquaintances introduced him to Karl Rademacher, a senior Eichmann aide who had been involved in the mass murder of Jews from Belgium, Holland, Croatia, and elsewhere. After the war, Radmacher had fled to Syria and became an official in the Syrian Secret Service.
The most notorious of the Nazis granted asylum in Syria was another top Eichmann aide, SS Lieutenant Alois Brunner. After being convicted in France in 1954 of responsibility for the murders of more than 100,000 Jews, Brunner disappeared. Two decades later, the famed French Nazi-hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld tracked down Brunner in Damascus, where he was making a comfortable living as an adviser to the Syrian intelligence services.
reply
share
shoobe01-1
9 years ago
Other things to keep in mind, and mentioned by the Nazi in the film, is that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem spent 1941 to 45 in Berlin, at least partly in the company of Hitler. He helped organize Muslim SS units, so not passively but deeply involved in the atrocities.
Aside from the above except showing that ex-Nazis were in the area, it seems eminently plausible some true believers would continue their quest to murder the rest of the Jews. Recent research really pushes home that this really was a (crazy) tenet of the faith, a worldwide extermination, not just a convenient political excuse for nationalism that got out of hand.
reply
share