Country That Harbored Nazi War Criminals Shocked At Mass Graves On Its Soil

Syria refused numerous extradition requests from European countries that sought to try Brunner for his hand in the deportation to death camps of 129,000 people.

Raqqa, Syria, February 26 – A nation that gave sanctuary to one of the Holocaust’s most notorious figures expressed horror this week upon discovering yet another site of wholesale execution of minorities in its territory.

Syria, which played gracious host to Adolph Eichmann assistant Alois Brunner from the 1950’s until his death, uncovered a mass grave containing thousands of Yezidi victims of the Islamic State this week, sending revulsion through a country that had no problem providing protection and benefiting from the experience of a man responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 people.

“We stare in horror at thus further evidence of Islamic State depravity,” declared government minister Mustafa Massiqr. “What kind of culture would promote such cover for violence? The world must continue to combat ideological extremism masquerading as religious virtue or there will be many more occurrences of such atrocities.” Syria refused numerous extradition requests from European countries that sought to try Brunner for his hand in the deportation to death camps of 129,000 people, mostly Jews, from Nazi-occupied or Nazi-controlled France, Italy, Greece, Slovakia, and Austria, among others.

Syrian soldiers who have dropped barrel bombs on hospitals and other civilian targets, and who have deployed chemical weapons in indiscriminate fashion, stood in silent shock at the sight of the thousands of bodies, many of which bore indications of torture. “This is impossible to explain,” breathed a sergeant, either unaware of or unwilling to recall Syria’s longtime consultation with Brunner’s on the latter’s violent interrogation techniques, which he used with abandon as commandant of the Drancy internment camp near Paris in 1943-44.

The Baath-led country that worked to keep a man with hundreds of thousands of deaths to his name safe from the efforts of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Serge Klarsfeld, Israeli intelligence, and others to locate him bemoaned the immorality of those who would kill the defenseless en masse. “The Islamic State clearly accelerated its killing of ethnic and religious minorities as it faced greater and greater military pressure and loss of territory. That makes this discovery all the more tragic and horrifying,” observed Syrian Ministry of Defense Director-General Wishtwaz Awrz, whose agency played a central role in harboring a man who deported tens of thousands of Jews, including children, to Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen, and Stutthoff camps in the closing days of the Third Reich.

“These people claimed to be faithful Muslims, but look what that led them to do,” lamented Syrian state television commentator Duwaza Sai. “There is such inconsistency in people’s words versus their behavior.” Syria considered extraditing Brunner to communist East Germany, but Hoenecker’s regime there collapsed and Hafez al-Assad canceled the decision.

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