"Brunner ended up in Syria, a regime in a place with less than friendly relations towards Jews, with a human rights record that is pretty despicable, and he participated," Lipstadt told me. "He didn't just go fishing for the next 30 years. He participated and apparently advised [former Syrian dictator Hafez] Assad."

In a separate interview, Zuroff noted that while living in Syria under the pseudonym Dr. Georg Fischer, Brunner had taught the elder Assad how to torture. (In the ongoing Syrian Civil War, Hafez Assad's son Bashar has carried on this legacy of terror and torture on an industrial and unfathomable scale.)

Despite the singular-seeming nature of Brunner's story, Lipstadt warns against viewing Brunner as an anomaly. Adding that Brunner was not "an exception to the rule," she noted that serious Nazis war criminals had escaped with the help of the Vatican and United States government and went on to live relatively ordinary lives. (The Mossad did target Brunner twice with letter bombs, causing him to lose an eye and three fingers.)

On a related note, last month Congress announced an agreement that would close a loophole that currently allows alleged former Nazis who made it to the U.S. to continue receiving Social Security payments.

But Brunner's case also matters far beyond reminding us of all the mechanisms by which former Nazis fled and survived after the war. Lipstadt offers Brunner as another vital knock against Hannah Arendt's seminal "banality of evil" theory in which Arendt argued that Eichmann and his ilk were petty bureaucrats, who clinically carried out their work, rather than monstrous murderers.

These weren't banal people who happened to be told to kill Jews and they went and killed Jews, but if they had been told to love Jews, they would have loved Jews. They were committed anti-Semites, committed to the job, committed to doing it, committed to not only killing Jews in large numbers, but to going after individual Jews wherever they could find them.

She proposed that if Eichmann had ended up in Syria instead of Argentina, he "would have been happy to advise Assad as well." While the circumstances might be have been different, "they weren't accidental killers, they weren't accidental anti-Semites. They believed it before, during, and after."

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