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The planned trial of an 87-year-old former SS member who confessed to killing
three Dutch civilians collapsed after the court decided
he was unfit to stand trial for health reasons.
Heinrich Boere was due to be tried in Aachen early this year in what would have
been one of Germany's last Nazi war crimes trials.
But the court in the western city
said a medical examination had found his health was too
poor for him to stand trial.
"The defendant is not
in a position to attend the trial as the accused due to
a number of significant health problems," the Aachen court said in a statement.
Boere was captured by U.S. forces
in the Netherlands after World War II and confessed to
killing the Dutch civilians as a member of an SS hit squad
targeting anti-Nazi fighters.
He then escaped and fled to Germany,
before being sentenced to death in absentia in the Netherlands
in 1949.
Germany refused a 1980 Dutch extradition
request because of complications over Boere's citizenship
and other previous efforts to convict him in Germany had
also failed.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which
is hunting for hundreds of suspected Nazis, lists Boere
as one of the top 10 Nazi criminals still at large.
Efraim Zuroff, director of the
Israel office of the Centre, expressed deep frustration
at the decision and criticised the German justice system
for this and other cases.
"The case of Boere
is a typical example for the failings of the German justice
system in the prosecution of Nazi criminals," he said.
"If his case had received
the right attention at the right time, he would have been
in jail long before he could escape justice on health grounds."
abc.net.au
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