ESCHWEILER, Germany -- Heinrich Boere's first victim was a pharmacist. Two more
victims would follow on a single day, one gunned down at
point-blank range in his doorway, the other on the road.
And although the killing spree happened in 1944, a footnote to the far greater
carnage raging across World War II Europe, it still haunts
Germany and Holland, leaving a sense of justice denied
by dueling court systems despite the continent's long
march to unity and harmonized institutions.
Boere was part of a Waffen
SS death squad of mostly Dutch volunteers tasked with
killing fellow countrymen in reprisal for attacks by
the anti-Nazi resistance. His is among more than 1,000
cases worldwide which the Nazi-tracking Simon Wiesenthal
Center says are still open as of last April 1.
Though sentenced to death
in the Netherlands in 1949 - later commuted to life imprisonment
- Boere has managed to escape jail so far. One German
court has refused to extradite him because he might have
German nationality as well as Dutch. Another won't make
him serve his Dutch sentence in a German prison because
he was absent from his trial, having fled to Germany.
Now, The Associated Press
has learned, a German investigator has quietly reopened
the case in a last-ditch attempt to bring charges against
the 86-year-old Boere and see that he faces justice.
Boere volunteered for the
SS only months after Holland fell to the German blitzkrieg
in 1940. After the war he spent two years in an Allied
prison camp where he made the statements later used to
convict him, but he escaped to Germany before the Dutch
could bring him to trial.
Much of what is known about
the case comes from the Dutch file on the 1949 trial
that convicted Boere.
According to Ulrich Maass,
the prosecutor now investigating him, the death squad
is known to have been responsible for 54 killings. Boere
was convicted of three of them, which he detailed, almost
gunshot by gunshot, in statements to Dutch police preserved
in the court file.
The first was in July 1944.
According to Boere's statement,
he and fellow SS man Jacobus Petrus Besteman set off
for the town of Breda, and the local office of the Sicherheitsdienst,
the Nazi internal intelligence agency. There they were
given a list of names slated for "retaliatory measures."
Their target that day was
Fritz Hubert Ernst Bicknese, pharmacist.
Wearing civilian clothes,
Boere and Besteman walked into the pharmacy and asked
the man there if he was Bicknese. When he answered "yes," Boere pulled his pistol from his right coat pocket and fired two or three shots
into Bicknese's upper body, then Besteman moved in and
fired another two or three shots into the fallen man.
The next one, in September,
followed a similar pattern: Boere and an accomplice named
Hendrik Kromhout shot bicycle-shop owner Teun de Groot
when he answered the doorbell at his home in the town
of Voorschoten. They then continued to the apartment
of F.W. Kusters, and forced him into their car. They
drove him to another town, stopped on the pretense of
having a flat tire and shot him.
"Kusters fell against
the garden door of the Villa Constance and sank to the
ground ..." Boere told investigators. "Blood shot out of Kusters' neck."
The SS unit, code-named Silbertanne,
or Silver Pine, consisted of 15 men, primarily Dutch,
who were mustered to exact reprisals for attacks by the
Dutch resistance on collaborators.
It's not certain why all of
Boere's victims were on the death list. De Groot's son
says his father wasn't a member of the armed resistance,
but he helped hide fugitives and his bicycle shop was
a hangout for anti-Nazi activists.
After the war, when the Allied
war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg finished its work, it
fell to the West German government to prosecute remaining
Nazis.
But Boere wasn't among them.
Today he lives in Eschweiler, outside the German cathedral
city of Aachen, in an upscale old-age home with its own
barbershop and caged parakeets tweeting in the lobby.
Staff say he uses a walker but rarely leaves his room.
Telephoned by the reception
desk to ask if he would meet with a reporter, he replied
curtly: "I don't want to be disturbed."
But last year he spoke to
the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, saying of his wartime
deeds: "It was another time, with different rules."
He described ringing de Groot's
doorbell and asking him for his papers.
"When we knew for
sure we had the right person, we shot him dead, at the
door," he said. "I didn't feel anything, it was work. Orders were orders, otherwise it would have
meant my skin. Later it began to bother me. Now I'm sorry."
The Dutch didn't give up,
and sought his extradition. But a German court in 1983
refused on the grounds he might have German citizenship,
and Germany at the time had no provision to extradite
its nationals.
A state court in Aachen ruled
in 2007 that Boere could legally serve his sentence in
Germany, but an appeals court in Cologne overturned the
ruling months later, saying the 1949 conviction was invalid
because Boere was unable to present a defense.
The case continues to stir
Dutch public opinion. Last August, opposition lawmakers
queried Dutch Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin who,
in his reply, named "four Dutch war criminals still alive and in Germany who have not served a Dutch
prison sentence." One of them was Boere.
It was after the Cologne decision
that Maass' office, which is responsible for investigating
Nazi war crimes for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia,
took up the case again.
Efraim Zuroff, Jerusalem-based
director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said Boere may
not be a senior Nazi, but "he is certainly worthy of prosecution."
"The fact that
Germany has spared killers like Boere ... is absolutely
outrageous," he said.
Besteman, Boere's partner
in the first killing, is still alive, living in the Netherlands
after serving jail time for his wartime crimes, and Maass
hopes to be able to call on him if the case goes to trial.
But it's a race against time
as ex-Nazis die of old age. "We haven't had a lot of success in the past years," Maass conceded. "It's resolving itself biologically."
The bike shop owner's son,
also named Teun de Groot, doesn't want to leave it to
biology. He insists Boere should serve his life sentence,
whatever that means nearly 59 years later.
"For him, life
is two years. Ten years is life, five years is life," de Groot told The AP. "He's 86!"
De Groot, the oldest of five
children, was 11 when his father was killed. The murder,
he says, devastated his family. They sold the shop at
a fraction of its value, his mother went to pieces, and
the three older children were sent to live with relatives
and in foster care.
He still has the wallet his
father fumbled for in his doorway to show his visitors
his ID papers. It is torn by a bullet.
heraldtribune.com
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