Brunner was convicted a second time by a French court in absentia in 2001 for sending an estimated 345 Jewish children from the Drancy internment camp to their deaths in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

But by the early 1950s, Brunner is thought to have fled to Egypt and then to Syria, where he was known as Georg Fischer and worked as an arms dealer in Damascus.

The regime of Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez al-Assad managed to stay in power for five decades by exercising brutally repressive methods inspired in part by Alois Brunner, a notorious Nazi war ...