Netherlands seeking extradition of Dutch Nazi

[pjotr]

Netherlands seeking extradition of former Nazi wanted for killing Jews

Former SS soldier Klaas Carel Faber has been hindered by a German law preventing extradition of German nationals for war crimes. Israel joins extradition request.
By Reuters

The Netherlands will use a new legal procedure to seek the extradition from Germany of an 88-year-old Dutchman who was jailed for killing Jewish prisoners at a Nazi transit camp, but escaped from prison in 1952.


Nazi guards at Belzec death camp in occupied Poland in 1942.
Photo by: (AP / Yad Vashem).

The extradition of former SS soldier Klaas Carel Faber has been hindered by a German law preventing extradition of German nationals for war crimes; though Germany itself sentenced another former Dutch Nazi, Heinrich Broere, to life in prison in March this year.

A special Dutch prosecution team, the TES, that seeks to enforce older sentences said on Thursday it had issued a European Arrest Warrant against Faber. That warrant supersedes national regulations and, prosecutors argue, could allow Germany to hand him over for trial.

"Faber escaped from the prison in Breda in 1952, went to Germany and the Netherlands has tried a few times to make sure he sits out his life long sentence...in Germany or to get him back in the Netherlands," prosecutor Reinoud den Haan told Reuters in the town of Zwolle where the TES is based.

"But that didn't work out because the German constitution forbids to extradite people with German passports."

German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger told a German newspaper in September that she would welcome a new Dutch attempt to get Faber to serve out his sentence.

Israel has also requested Germany hand Faber to the Dutch.

A spokesman for the Bavarian general attorney said they had not yet received the warrant but would study it carefully.

Faber joined the Dutch SS along with his brother Pieter Johan. Their father Pieter Faber was killed by the resistance.

Klaas Carel was sentenced to death in 1947 for the killing of at least 11 people in the Westerbork camp in the Netherlands which was a staging post for Dutch Jews on their journey to concentration camps in Germany, Poland and Ukraine.

While his brother was shot by firing squad after the war, the sentence of Klaas Carel was commuted to life imprisonment.

Faber escaped to Germany in 1952 with several others. Extradition attempts so far failed because Faber, due to his SS membership, also has German nationality. A German court ruled in 1957 that it had insufficient evidence to try Faber who, according to newspapers, is living in the Bavarian town of Ingolstadt and worked at local carmaker Audi.

[tufta]

Nov 29, 2010 8:23:31 GMT 1 pjotr said:

Netherlands seeking extradition of former Nazi wanted for killing Jews

Pieter, did Netherland ever succeed in their requests for extradition from Germany?

[pjotr]

Tufta,

Unfortunately former Dutch Nazi war criminals were part of the German war machine, and therefor legal German citizens according to German law.
That is the reason that the German authorities always obstructed the extradition
of Dutch war criminals who are German citizens. This is sad but true.

In the same time the fact that the crimines were comited more than 65 years ago
do not help the case of the Netherlands. The prescription of claims hinders the Dutch call for extradition of these former Nazi's.

The Dutch SS was part of the larger German SS, and therefor a part of the German
army and state insitution of 1933-1945. Members of the Dutch SS in the Netherlands and probably Poland and Russia were punished. Some of them were executed, hanged or got long sentances. The ones that escaped to Germany or Southern-America were safe. Only in the ninetees or early this century (21th century) some Dutch SS men were arrested and put on trail in Germany.

Many escaped their judgement due to their old age and so called health situation.

Here a case of one Dutch SS war criminal:

Dutch SS confesses
Published on : 9 December 2009


Dutch war criminal Heinrich Boere in the Aachen court

Dutch war criminal Heinrich Boere has made a full confession to the three murders for which he stands accused.

The 88-year old told a court in Aachen, Germany, that he had joined the Nazi SS during World War II and killed three Dutch citizens in reprisal for anti-Nazi attacks.

In 1949, two years after escaping from a Dutch prison, Boere was sentenced to death in absentia by a Dutch court for the three murders.

He reappeared in Germany in 1954. Because he had by then acquired German citizenship, he could not be extradited to the Netherlands. A Dutch request to have him serve time in a German prison was denied because his conviction was ruled invalid by a German court. Instead, the German justice ministry began its own case against Boere.

Before he made his confession, the court denied a defence motion to dismiss the case. The motion was filed last Monday, when the Treaty of Lisbon came into effect. The treaty states that a court in the European Union cannot try or sentence an accused for the same crime more than once.

The court ruled that the ban on double jeopardy was insufficient grounds for dismissal, arguing that the rule does not apply if the accused flees the country where he was prosecuted in order to avoid serving prison time.