Faber
is number 5 of Wiesenthal Center's "most wanted Nazi criminals."
Germany's Justice Ministry says it is looking into the possibility
of jailing an 88-year-old man more than 60 years after his
conviction for Nazi war crimes in the Netherlands.
Spokesman Ulrich Staudigl said Monday that ministry experts think enforcing the
Dutch court's life sentence against former SS officer Klaas
Carel Faber for multiple Nazi-era murders might still be
an option.
He says the ministry has asked
authorities in Bavaria to look into the case again.
Faber is number five of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center's "most wanted Nazi war criminals." He was sentenced to death in Holland for a number of murders carried out when
he was in the SS, but he escaped to Germany in 1952, where
he has lived ever since. The Dutch government requested
that Faber be extradited several times, so that he could
serve his sentence, which had been commuted in the late
1940s to life in prison.
Last week, 150 Israeli lawyers
signed a petition and presented it to Israeli Justice Minister
Yaakov Ne'eman on Wednesday, calling upon the Israeli government
to urge Germany to take legal action against the former
SS officer.
The petition was submitted in
support of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's efforts to enlist
the Israeli government's active assistance in the Faber
case. The organization has also called upon the Israeli
government to urge Germany to cancel the "Fuhrer befehl law," which grants German citizenship to non-German Nazi collaborators and protects
them from extradition to their countries of origin to face
prosecution.
Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal
Center's chief Nazi-hunter said: "Germany's failure hereto to put Faber on trial or return him to Holland are a
travesty which must be corrected as quickly as possible,
while justice can still be achieved."
jpost.com
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