Tuesday, March 31, 2015 24news.ca
‘Totally unrepentant Nazi murderer’ dies a free man at 93 despite admitted role in Danish editor’s execution

The No. 6 Nazi on the Simon Wiesenthal Center list of most wanted war criminal has died a free man in Germany at age 93.

Soren Kam, a Dane who served with the Nazis and met Adolf Hitler, escaped from Denmark to Germany, which refused to extradite him after he was granted citizenship in 1956.

“The fact that Soren Kam, a totally unrepentant Nazi murderer, died a free man in Kempten is a terrible failure of the Bavarian judicial authorities,” the center’s chief Nazi hunter, Dr. Efraim Zuroff, said in a statement.

“Kam should have finished his miserable life in jail, whether in Denmark or Germany. The failure to hold him accountable will only inspire the contemporary heirs of the Nazis to consider following in his footsteps.”

SS officer Soren Kam was wanted for the 1943 kidnap and murder of anti-Nazi newspaper editor Carl Henrik Clemmensen, whose bullet-riddled body was found on a roadside after he was seized from his home by three men.

“The unarmed Clemmensen was killed by eight gunshots fired simultaneously from three pistols at virtual point blank range,” says the blog Aktive Modstandsfolk.

A Danish court case conducted after the war convicted him in absentia of the murder. Another Danish SS men, Knud Flemming Helweg-Larsen, was convicted for his role in the murder and executed in 1946. A third culprit disappeared after the war.

Denmark also wanted to talk to Kam about the theft in 1943 of a population register, later used to round up and deport 500 Danish Jews to concentration camps.

In 1999 Denmark requested the extradition of Kam, which Germany refused due to his German citizenship, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said. Munich courts in 2007 dismissed attempts under a European Union arrest warrant to deport him to Denmark on the grounds that Clemmensen’s death was not murder but manslaughter, which fell under a statue of limitation.

Kam fought on the Eastern Front with the Waffen SS and was granted the Knight’s Cross medal by Adolf Hitler in 1945 for his leadership of Danish SS men against the resistance of his countrymen.

“He was a fanatical Nazi and one of the highest-profile Danish Nazis during the war,” historian Claus Bundgård Christensen told DR Nyheder. “He was a star that Nazi children and young people looked up to.”

Christensen said that Nazi youth publications often used pictures of Kam as propaganda for recruiting young people to the Eastern Front and he became an international star whose autograph was sought by Nazi sympathizers.

“He was very active, and it was only in recent years when his health began to fail that he began to retreat from the public eye,” he said.

The Daily Telegraph tracked down former SS-Obersturmfuehrer Søren Kam to a peaceful town near Munich in 2007.

In Bavaria, Kam, a man who met Adolf Hitler, lives openly. By his doorbell is a traditional Bavarian clay plaque, made by his grandchildren, and bearing the family name.

Kam responded to knocks on his front door by opening his front window and hiding behind the curtains. All that could be seen was his hand, but the voice of the SS man remained clear and dismissive.

“I know who you are. I don’t want to talk to you. Leave me in peace,” he said, before slamming the window.

Kam died on March 23, about two weeks after his wife, according to a death note in the German paper Allgauer Zeitung

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