THE DEATH THREATS kept coming. A Molotov cocktail was thrown at my sister’s door. There was a hotel opposite our apartment on Avenue de Versailles, from where it would have been easy to shoot at us. We moved to Rue La Boétie, close to the Élysée Palace, where we had a permanent police guard for eighteen months, before moving back to our old building in the Porte de Saint-Cloud. This time, though, we were on the square itself, with no one overlooking us.
On June 23, 1982, I went to Damascus armed with another dossier, comparable to Barbie’s: that of Alois Brunner. Between June 23, 1943, and August 18, 1944, Brunner deported twenty-four thousand Jews from France, many of them arrested by his Austrian SS Kommando, as were the Jews of Nice, my father among them. We’d had this dossier in our possession since 1977. In Vienna, Lisa and I monitored the homes of Anni, Brunner’s estranged wife, and their daughter Irène. Anni’s apartment was much too large for just one person. We deduced from this that her husband was helping her financially. As for Irène, Lisa managed to enter her apartment and to find her father’s address and phone number in Damascus, where he lived under the name “Fischer.” But this information could not be used for five years, because we were too busy with our other campaigns.
In 1982, we returned to the Brunner dossier. I went to Syria in June, just after Israeli planes had shot down dozens of their Syrian counterparts, at the height of the tension between the two countries. I had no visa, but I did have Brunner’s dossier in my briefcase.
Before I went to Syria, we verified one last time that Georg Fischer and Alois Brunner were one and the same. Beate phoned him at his home in Damascus: “I’m calling on behalf of my manager, who is a judge; he’s the son of someone who worked with you during the war. You should be aware that it’s not a good idea to go to Switzerland to get your eyes treated, because there’s an arrest warrant out for you there.”
“I had no intention of going to Switzerland,” “Fischer” replied, “but please thank your manager and tell him I will pray for him.”
At the airport in Damascus, I explained my mission to the border police. I gave them the Brunner dossier so that it could be passed on to the relevant authorities. I had to spend the whole night sitting in a room at the airport. I used the time to work on my book about the Final Solution in France.
In the morning, the police told me that my dossier had been forwarded but that my request to enter Syria had been refused. I hardly expected any other outcome. But at least the Brunner case was now a live international issue, with press coverage all over the world.
Over the next five years, Beate and I did what we could to bring Brunner to justice, but with limited results. The West German government made a demand for extradition in 1984, but only verbally. We asked the East German government, so influential in Syria, to propose that the authorities in Damascus extradite Brunner to East Berlin, with the guarantee that the trial would not dwell on the question of Brunner’s stay in Syria. In the United States, Beate rallied Jesse Jackson to the cause, and the reverend wrote to Hafiz al-Assad, from whom he had obtained the liberation of an American pilot, on the subject. All in vain.
In January 1987, I met Raymond Kendall, the secretary-general of Interpol, and persuaded him to issue an international arrest warrant for Brunner, as well as a wanted notice to all its member nations, including Syria. This was a first for Interpol, which, before this, had not considered itself competent to deal with Nazi war criminals. But again, it made no difference: Brunner was a trusted henchman to the Assad clan, which showed its gratitude by protecting him.
On March 2, 1987, Beate was turned away at Damascus Airport, despite having received her visa in East Berlin.
But we would not give up.