BERLIN - A German court ruled Wednesday that an elderly former Nazi hit squad
member is medically unfit to stand trial for the World
War II reprisal killings of three Dutch civilians.
Defense attorney Gordon Christiansen told The Associated Press that Heinrich
Boere, 87, suffered a serious heart condition and could
not take the stress of a trial. He said Boere had "almost died" twice since being charged in April.
"This is absolutely
based upon medical facts," Christiansen told The AP.
Aachen state court spokesman Georg
Winkel said in a statement that the decision was based
on a thorough two-day medical exam of Boere.
But the Simon Wiesenthal Center's
top Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff, questioned whether Boere
was truly ill and argued that if Boere had been pursued
more vigorously earlier, his health would not have even
been a factor.
"Boere has been living
in Germany for decades and he should have been put on trial
long ago," Zuroff said by telephone from Jerusalem. "This is a tragedy for the cause of justice."
Though Boere was sentenced to
death in absentia by a Dutch court in 1949 , later commuted
to life imprisonment , German courts have blocked attempts
to extradite him or enforce the verdict here.
The AP was first to report in
March 2008 that Dortmund prosecutor Ulrich Maass had quietly
reopened the case by beginning his own investigation.
He brought charges against Boere
in April for the World War II murders of three men in the
Netherlands when he was a member of a Waffen SS death squad
that targeted civilians in reprisal killings for attacks
by the anti-Nazi resistance.
Maass refused comment on the Wednesday
ruling.
The son of a Dutch man and German
woman, Boere was 18 when he joined the Waffen SS , the
fanatical military organization faithful to Adolf Hitler's
ideology , at the end of 1940, only months after the Netherlands
had fallen to the Nazi blitzkrieg.
After taking part in the invasion
of the Soviet Union, he ended up back in the Netherlands,
part of the Silbertanne, or Silver Pine, which was composed
mostly of Dutch volunteers given the job of killing their
countrymen in reprisal attacks.
The unit is suspected of 54 killings,
and Boere admitted after the war while in an Allied prison
camp that he took part in three slayings, according to
Dutch court documents. After the war, he fled to Germany,
where courts blocked attempts to extradite him or to enforce
the Dutch verdict.
Maass reopened the case in 2006,
relying heavily on statements to Dutch police preserved
in the court file in which Boere details the killings,
almost gunshot by gunshot.
Besides the police statements,
Boere also gave an interview the Dutch Algemeen Dagblad
newspaper in which he recalled slaying bicycle-shop owner
Teun de Groot when he answered the doorbell at his home
in the town of Voorschoten.
"When we knew for sure
we had the right person, we shot him dead, at the door," he said in 2006. "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 slain man's son, who has the
same name as his father, was stoic when he heard the news
that Boere would not go to trial.
"It's a shame, but
we did our best," he told The AP. "I suppose he's lived a few years in fear."
,,,
Associated Press writer Toby Sterling
in Amsterdam, Netherlands, contributed to this report.
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