Arab States Lament Dwindling Supply Of Nazi War Criminals To Harbor

The wanted men commanded units that committed atrocities across Europe during the war.

Damascus, January 3 – Governments across the Middle East are confronting the shrinking number of Nazi war criminals with a mixture of resolve and concern, local sources have reported.

Most of the prominent German Nazis implicated in or convicted of crimes against humanity during the Second World War who found refuge in Arab countries in the 1950’s and 60’s have since died peacefully, leaving barely a handful of elderly war criminals for the countries to harbor. Countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Iraq, which once boasted a rich tapestry of such fugitives and employed them in advisory capacities in an effort to destroy the Jewish State by military means, now host barely a handful of such men. The most wanted of all, Alois Brunner, reportedly died about the year 2010 in the Syrian capital.

While the Cold War was underway and American focus shifted from bringing Nazi criminals to justice to supporting West Germany as a bulwark against Soviet-led Communist expansionism, Western powers nevertheless made occasional efforts to capture the most egregious offenders. The wanted men commanded units that committed atrocities across Europe during the war, or occupied command positions in arms of the Nazi government and military apparatus that oversaw the Holocaust and other war crimes. Allied officials in postwar Germany often turned a blind eye to the movements of many such suspects and allowed them to reach the safety and protection of regimes hostile to the nascent Israel, even when tipped off by Nazi hunters.

Now, however, more than 70 years after the conclusion of the war, few, if any, known Nazi war criminals remain in those countries, challenging the regimes of those states to find alternatives to the ways they have shown open affinity and support for genocide against the Jews. At the same time, notes Middle East history scholar Juden Raus, the Jews of those countries are similarly dying out or have left in massive emigration waves driven by decades of often-violent persecution.

“I think Syria, Egypt, and other welcome postwar hosts to Nazi criminals can take some comfort in the fact that the dwindling supply of Nazi atrocity masterminds has not left in its wake a burgeoning Jewish population, either,” he intoned in a recent interview. “The regimes and the Nazis themselves may ultimately have failed to destroy the Jewish State, but at least these men were able to live out their lives without the crushing, everyday presence of Jews in the vicinity.”

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