The Nazi ‘Arab Ratline’: How Hitler’s WWII monsters discovered refuge in Syria and Egypt after escaping Germany
Alois Brunner, Franz Stangl, Gustav Wagner, Aribert Heim – all of them Nazi monsters who deserved the worst of punishments.
But these men were just four of the many war criminals of the Holocaust who found refuge in Syria and Egypt after escaping justice following the Second World War.
Whether it was aiding the missile programme of Egypt’s leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, or advising the Syria’s Assad regime on torture, many proved to be useful.
But there were many other, less talented, apparatchiks who simply benefited from the Middle East’s dictatorial regimes’ willingness to give them a new home.
‘These people helped the regimes in Syria and Egypt to build their capacities for torture, for surveillance, but we shouldn’t exaggerate their contributions,’ Israeli historian Professor Danny Orbach told MailOnline.
He added: ‘All sorts of charlatans could pretend to be experts when they were not. Very few were actually helpful. Most of them were third or fourth grade experts.’
Among those who proved less useful was ‘murderous’ former concentration camp doctor Hans Eisele, who became a ‘wreck’ of a drug addict in Cairo.
But, regardless of whether or not they were helpful to their new benefactors, dozens of Nazis – many of them war criminals – found refuge in the Middle East.
NAZIS WHO FLED TO SYRIA
Alois Brunner
As deputy to Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann, Brunner had overseen the deportations of Jews from countries including France and Austria.
He carried out interrogations and torture of inmates which reputedly left blood stains and bullet holes on the walls of his office.
Brunner is thought to have sent 47,000 Jews in Austria, 44,000 in Greece, 23,500 in France and 14,000 in Slovakia to camps. Most were murdered.
The war criminal is believed to have advised the Syrian dictatorship on torture methods he had learned in roles that included commandant of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris.
Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal wrote in his memoirs in 1989: ‘Among Third Reich criminals still alive, Alois Brunner is undoubtedly the worst. In my eyes, he was the worst ever.
‘While Adolf Eichmann drew up the general staff plan for the extermination of the Jews, Alois Brunner implemented it.’
In return, he was protected from extradition by Hafez al-Assad, the father of ousted Syrian president Bashar, who has fled to Russia after the collapse of his regime.
But it was under Hafez – who ruled until his death in 2000 – that Brunner’s fortunes turned after he defied orders not to give interviews and so, by the 1990s, had been locked up.
Alois Brunner, once the world’s most wanted Nazi, spent his final years in a cell in Damascus, where he was given the choice of an egg or a tomato to eat each day. He was jailed after initially proving his worth to the Syrian regime by imparting his knowledge of SS torture methods
He advised the Syrian dictatorship on torture methods he had learned in roles that included commandant of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris. Above: Inmates at the Drancy camp
He would spend his final years in a cell in Damascus. He may have survived until as late as 2010, but others believe he died in 2001.
After the end of the Second World War in 1945, Brunner had initially lived in West Germany under the name of Alois Schmaldienst.
Incredibly, Brunner made a living as a truck driver for the American army.
He made it that far in large part because another, more minor, former Nazi employee who was arrested had a very similar name to him and the pair were mixed up.
Anton Brunner – who had only worked for Alois – was executed by the Soviet authorities in May 1946.
He had been accused of sending nearly 50,000 Jews to their deaths.
Witnesses had backed up the claims, but only because they confused him with Alois Brunner.
According to Professor Orbach in his 2022 book Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries during the Cold War, as late as 1961 even some analysts in the CIA believed Alois Brunner was already dead.
Brunner was protected from extradition by Hafez al-Assad (left) and then his son Bashar, who was deposed earlier this month
Instead, the real war criminal got a passport in the name of a fellow former SS officer, Georg Fischer.
He used that to go to Amsterdam, and then flew to Rome. From Italy, he flew to Cairo in 1954 on a Tourist visa.
He had a small apartment in the Egyptian capital but proved to be an unwelcome presence.
So he moved on to Damascus. Although he was initially arrested, Brunner was welcomed with open arms when he confessed his true identity.
From 1957, he lived in a two-room apartment on Rue George Haddad 22, in the affluent Abu Rammaneh district of the Syrian capital.
It was the same street on which Franz Stangl, the murderous commandant of Treblinka extermination camp, had lived before he moved on to Brazil.
And a regular visitor to Brunner’s home was his fellow war criminal Franz Rademacher, who lived in Damascus under the false name of Bartolomeo Rossello.
As well as working as a weapons dealer, Brunner came to be valuable to the Assad regime after Hafez took power in 1971.
Brunner was in charge of Drancy internment camp (pictured) outside Paris
But it was his refusal to keep quiet that proved to be his downfall.
In a 1987 phone interview with the Chicago Sun Times, Brunner stated that he did not regret his part in the Holocaust.
‘All of them deserved to die because they were the devil’s agents and human garbage. I have no regrets and I would do it again,’ he said.
In 1996, Assad ordered for him to be jailed indefinitely. One guard said that the ‘door was closed and never opened again’.
A Syrian commander is said to have instructed the jailers: ‘Don’t kill this pig, but don’t try to keep him alive as well’.
But Brunner outlived Hafez himself, who died in 2000.
Franz Stangl
Franz Stangl had been in charge of Treblinka concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. There, one million Jews were murdered on his watch
Stangl had been in charge of Sobibor and then Treblinka, the notorious concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.
At the two camps, more than one million Jews were murdered.
After the collapse of the Nazi regime, the Austrian first fled to his home country, where he was held by American forces.
But he escaped in May 1948 and made his way to Rome, where he was helped to get to Syria. In Damascus, he forged a new identity as a textile worker.
His wife and family later joined him in the city. But Stangl moved with his loved ones after a local police chief made advances on his 14-year-old daughter.
Stangl later moved to Brazil, where he worked in the Volkswagen factory in Sao Paolo.
However, he was tracked down by Wiesenthal in the mid 1960s and he was arrested before being extradited to West Germany in 1967.
He claimed that he had had nothing to do with the murder of Jews, despite admitting that he had been commandant at Treblinka.
At his trial in 1970, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He died in jail in Dusseldorf in June 1971 of a heart attack.
Gustav Wagner
Gustav Wagner handled day-to-day operations at Sobibor, where around 250,000 Jews were murdered
Wagner handled day-to-day operations at Sobibor, where around 250,000 Jews were murdered.
Known as the ‘Angel of Death’, Wagner was regarded as the most hated man at the camp.
Survivors told of how he ‘couldn’t eat his lunch unless he killed two or three Jews daily’.
He was particularly close to his boss Franz Stangl and fled with him to Damascus before moving to Brazil too.
Shortly after Stangl’s death, Wagner visited his widow in Sao Paulo and asked her to marry him. Wiesenthal said the proposal ‘made it easier’ to track him down.
In 1978, Wagner was finally apprehended.
However, the Brazilian authorities repeatedly refused extradition requests.
In 1979, he told the BBC’s panorama programme: ‘We were under oath. We had to obey. One saw people exterminated who were innocent.
‘But after a time I had no feelings. It became just another job.’
He also claimed: ‘Even today I am not an anti-Semite. We knew it was wrong. But what was one to do? It was the Fuhrer’s orders.’
In October 1980, Wagner killed himself.
Known as the ‘Angel of Death’, Wagner was regarded as the most hated man at Sobibor (pictured above in 1943)
Franz Rademacher
During the war, Rademacher – who had been the head of the ‘Jewish Affairs’ office in the German foreign ministry – was directly involved in the execution of 1,300 Serbian Jews.
He also had a role in the liquidation of the Belgrade ghetto in 1941 and the deportation of 1,500 Belgian Jews in 1942.
According to author Uki Goñi in his book The Real Odessa: How Nazi War Criminals Escaped Europe, Rademacher wrote ‘liquidation of the Jews’ when he claimed travel expenses for his trip to Belgrade.
During the war, Franz Rademacher (pictured above in 1968) – who had been the head of the ‘Jewish Affairs’ office in the German foreign ministry – was directly involved in the execution of 1,300 Serbian Jews
At his trial in Nuremberg in March 1952, he was given just three years and five months in prison.
After being released on bail pending an appeal, he fled to Syria.
In Damascus, he was a frequent guest at the home of German businessman Karl-Heinz Spath, where he played bridge with people including Alois Brunner.
In August 1957, he was a co-founder of an arms trading racket which also counted Brunner and other fugitive Nazis among its members.
Israeli spy Eli Cohen attempted to assassinate Rademacher with a letter bomb in 1962.
The following year, he was arrested on spying charges and spent more than two years in prison before being released on health grounds.
After returning voluntarily to West Germany in 1966, he was convicted again of war crimes and sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison.
But, because of the time he had already served, he did not spend any more time in prison.
He died in March 1973, before another war crimes trial had begun.
Walter Rauff
Rauff was the inventor of mobile gas vans, which were used to murder Jews, Communists, Roma people and the disabled.
He is said to have sold intelligence to countries including the US, Syria, Egypt and even Israel, both during and after the war.
By the end of the conflict, Rauff was in northern Iraly, where he oversaw the execution of both Jews and partisans.
Walter Rauff (right) was the inventor of mobile gas vans, which were used to murder Jews, Communists, Roma people and the disabled
Although he was arrested by the Allies, he escaped in 1947 and hid in Italian convents before fleeing to Damascus. There, he was recruited as a military advisor.
He later moved to Argentina and then settled permanently in Chile. The country rejected extradition requests from Germany in 1962, 1973 and 1984, according to author Uki Goñi.
Rauff later suffered from lung cancer and died of a heart attack in Santiago in May 1984.
Goñi recounted how cries of ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘Heil Rauff’ were heard at his funeral.
NAZIS WHO FLED TO EGYPT
Aribert Heim
Known as the ‘Butcher of Mauthausen’ and ‘Dr Death’, Aribert Heim was known for his sadistic penchant for inflicting suffering on his victims
Known as the ‘Butcher of Mauthausen’ and ‘Dr Death’, Heim was known for his sadistic penchant for inflicting suffering on his victims.
As the doctor at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, Heim murdered hundreds of inmates.
According to survivors, he performed operations – including amputations – without anaesthetic.
When he was ‘bored’, he would time victims’ death with a stopwatch.
Another survivor claimed that Heim cut off the head of a murdered Jewish prisoner and then boiled it to remove the flesh, so the skull could be used as an exhibit.
Wiesenthal recounted in his 1989 book, Justice, Not Vengeance how one 12-year-old victim realised after being put on the operating table that Heim was about to kill him.
He told how he ‘prayed aloud and in his prayer said goodbye to his parents’.
Wiesenthal added: ‘Dr Heim listened to him attentively and then, as if convincing a child of the need for a tonsillectomy, he began to explain to him in a friendly voice why the Jews must die: they were the cause of all misfortune in the world and, above all, of this war.
‘Having thus lectured his victim on the moral justification for his execution he killed the boy by injecting poison into his heart.’
Liberated prisoners in the Mauthausen concentration camp cheer U.S. soldiers, May 6, 1945
Emaciated prisoners sit outside the hospital barrack at Mauthausen during the Second World War
After the war, Heim practised medicine in the German town of Baden-Baden until 1962, when he was indicted as a war criminal.
But he fled the country. After travelling through France, Spain and Morocco, Heim eventually settled in Egypt, where he is said to have worked as a doctor for the country’s police force.
According to evidence published in 2009, Heim converted to Islam and changed his name to Taek Hussein Farid.
Known as ‘Uncle Tarek’, he played ping-pong with local children.
Heim was the subject of a huge international manhunt but was never caught. In his later life, he was visited by his son, Rudiger. He died in Cairo in 1992.
Hans Eisele
A doctor at Buchenwald, Hans Eisele was held responsible for murdering at least 200 Jews
In his 2022 book, Professor Orbach describes Hans Eisele as ‘murderous’.
A doctor at Buchenwald, Eisele was held responsible for murdering at least 200 Jews and was known to some as ‘The Butcher’.
After the war, he was twice condemned to death after being convicted of war crimes, but was never executed.
Instead, he served time in prison before opening a medical practice in Munich.
But, in 1958, he fled to Cairo after new allegations were made against him.
Professor Orbach tells how, whilst some officials in Israel believed Eisele was ‘busy developing microbes for biological warheads’ for the Egyptian government, he was in fact an ‘ailing wreck’ who was addicted to drugs.
German courts did ask for his extradition, but these requests were refused by the Egyptian government. He died in Cairo in 1967.
Johann von Leers
Rabidly anti-Semitic propagandist Johann von Leers worked closely with Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels.
He produced several books that propagated Nazi ideology to the masses and heralded fanatical figures such as Julius Streicher, the founder of the anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer.
After the war, von Leers escaped to Argentina via Italy and then settled in Egypt.
There, von Leers became a Muslim and lived under the name of Amin ben Omar.
Rabidly anti-Semitic propagandist Johann von Leers worked closely with Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels
In Cairo, he put his previous talents to good use, working for the Egyptian propaganda ministry and serving as an advisor to the country’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
In Egypt, von Leers met cavorted with Alois Brunner. At a conference in Cairo in 1960, the pair helped come up with the idea of blackmailing Jews who had allegedly collaborated with the SS during the Holocaust.
He also hosted a wild drinking party at his home in Cairo.
The jamboree was attended by Israeli spy Wolfgang Lotz, who told in his memoirs how German scientists working for the Egyptian government joined their host in singing Nazi songs.
Von Leers died in Egypt in 1965, aged 63.
Otto Remer
Otto Remer had served as an infantry officer and was most famous for foiling the 1944 attempt on the life of Adolf Hitler, which was known as the 20 July Plot
Remer had served as an infantry officer and was most famous for foiling the 1944 attempt on the life of Adolf Hitler, which was known as the 20 July Plot.
The Nazi was captured by the US Army towards the end of the war and remained a prisoner until 1947.
He later became involved in West German politics, setting up the Socialist Reich Party.
After an arrest warrant was issued against him, he fled to Egypt.
There, he had close ties with Alois Brunner.
Remer also remained a fervent supporter of Nazism. Until 1989, he headed up the far-right German Freedom Movement.
He fled to Spain in 1994 to escape a 22-month jail sentence for inciting hatred, violence and racism.
Remer died in Marbella in 1997.
