West Germany’s minister for economic cooperation, Hans Klein, was scheduled to fly Thursday to Syria to discuss the resumption of Bonn’s financial assistance to Damascus. The assistance had been frozen in 1986 because of Syrian involvement in international terrorism.
A spokesman for the minister said that Klein will review various projects in Syria for which some $87 million in West German aid will be used. In the last 15 years, West Germany has made available to Syria some $445 million for development projects, the spokesman pointed out.
Despite the thaw in German-Syrian relations, Bonn continues to ignore calls, especially from abroad, to pressure Damascus to extradite Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner.
Brunner is accused of sending thousand of Jews and others to concentration camps during World War II. He served as Adolf Eichmann’s deputy when Eichmann was in charge of the notorious “final solution of the Jewish question.”
Brunner lives in Damascus under the names Georg Fischer and Karl Halter. In an interview last year with the Chicago Sun Times, he was quoted as saying: “All the Jews deserve death…I regret nothing and would repeat what I did.”
Brunner’s statement in the Sun Times prompted Justice Minister Hans Engelhard to announce that Bonn indeed intends to have Brunner extradited from Syria to stand trial in West Germany.
But since that announcement, made last November, no known pressure has been applied on Syria to stop protecting Brunner and have him extradited.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
