MUNICH, Germany: A German court has blocked the extradition to Denmark of a former member of the Nazi SS wanted in the Scandinavian country for the assassination of a journalist in 1943, it said Monday.
A senior Nazi-hunter in Israel sharply criticized the decision, saying time and old age could not erase guilt for Nazi crimes.
Soeren Kam, an 84-year-old German citizen born in Denmark, was detained at his home in Bavaria in September 2006 on a European arrest warrant. He was released from custody in October pending a ruling on his extradition.
The upper state court in Munich said it blocked his extradition because there was insufficient evidence for murder charges. It said that, under German law, possible charges of manslaughter had expired under the statute of limitations.
Kam and several others are accused of shooting Danish newspaper editor Carl Henrik Clemmensen to death in Lyngby, a suburb of Copenhagen.
Clemmensen was kidnapped Aug. 30, 1943, and found dead the next morning. Kam has acknowledged that he was among the three Danish SS officers who fired at Clemmensen, but said he fired only after Clemmensen was dead. German prosecutors dropped a murder case against him in 1971 for lack of evidence.
However, a Danish court ruled in 2004 that Kam should be charged with murder in the case.
Efraim Zuroff, a Nazi-hunter with the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, urged Danish authorities to keep pressing for Kam's extradition.
"As problematic as the decision is, it would be understandable if Germany itself would take Kam to court," Zuroff said in a statement.
"But the opposite is the case. German justice has investigated Kam for many years without bringing charges," he said.
Zuroff said that the guilt of SS criminals was not diminished by time, and that "old age does not make a benefactor out of a Nazi criminal."
The SS, "Schutzstaffel" or "Protective Squadron" in German, was a vast paramilitary organization that grew from beginnings as a security force for Adolf Hitler. It ran concentration camps and carried out mass killings, while its combat wing, the Waffen SS, became notorious for cruel fanaticism including the killing of prisoners of war.
The SS was declared a criminal organization at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal after the war.
iht.com
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