French Nazi-hunter Beate Klarsfeld was taken into custody in Damascus on Saturday morning and placed under house arrest in her hotel room.
Klarsfeld, who with her husband, Serge, helped bring Klaus Barbie and other Nazi war criminals to justice, was seized by Damascus police outside the Interior Ministry.
She was demonstrating there against the continued haven Syria has given Alois Brunner, one of the last of the major Nazi war criminals still at large.
The German-born Klarsfeld was also protesting Syria’s denial of civil rights to its Jewish community, which is prevented from emigrating.
As of Sunday afternoon, she was still in her hotel room. A ranking Interior Ministry official reportedly promised that he was “trying to get her a meeting with an important Syrian personality,” to whom she could express her concern over Brunner and the treatment of Syrian Jews.
Klarsfeld entered Syria last Thursday with admittedly questionable documents. Her husband has been able to speak to her by telephone from Paris.
The Syrians are reportedly trying quietly to rid themselves of Brunner, who is alleged to have lived in Damascus for more than 30 years.
He occupied a villa on George Haddad Street under the name of Georg Fisher. But on Oct. 15, he was reported to have disappeared.
The Syrian authorities are said to be trying to ease him out of the country in stages, by taking him first to a less visible location. They are said to have already produced a sheaf of forged documents to prove that Brunner, alias Fisher, never lived at the villa.
SYRIAN CONCERN ABOUT IMAGE
Brunner, 79, was sentenced to death in absentia by a French court in 1954 for premeditated murders and torture. As an SS officer, he commanded the Drancy internment center near Nazi-occupied Paris, where Jews and others were kept temporarily before deportation to death camps in Eastern Europe.
He also was responsible for deporting the entire Jewish community of Salonika, Greece, few members of which survived. Brunner continued deporting Jews from France even after the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944.
Like many other major war criminals, he managed to evade punishment after the collapse of the Third Reich a year later and found not only refuge but welcome in Syria.
The Damascus government has persisted, however, in denying his presence, and French requests for extradition have gone unheeded.
But that could change if Syria becomes convinced that it would improve its world standing by cooperating in the Brunner case. The Middle East peace talks have put Syria’s support of terrorism, its dismal human rights record and its treatment of Jews under international spot-light.
In an apparent indication that it is sensitive to the “bad press” it is receiving on these issues, the Damascus government last month released more than 700 people from Syrian prisons. Among those released were four of the six Jews behind bars for allegedly attempting to leave the country.
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