Klaas
Carel Faber worked from 1943 to 1944 at Westerbork transit
camp, where Dutch schoolgirl Anne Frank was held before being
sent to her death at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
BERLIN (AFP)---Germany's justice minister suggested that
a Nazi wanted by the Netherlands could serve his sentence
in Germany but Bavaria, where the 88-year-old lives, said
it needed significant new evidence.
Dutch prosecutors last week issued a European arrest warrant for SS assassin
Klaas Carel Faber, who has been living freely in Germany
since escaping from a Dutch prison in 1952 where he was serving
a life sentence.
Three previous attempts to bring him
to justice have failed, and German Justice Minister Sabine
Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, amid pressure from Israel, called
Friday on the state of Bavaria, which has jurisdiction on
the
case, "to look for
alternative solutions."
This could include putting Faber,
third on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of wanted Nazis,
in prison in Germany, the minister told the Sueddeutsche
Zeitung daily.
But the justice ministry in the southern
state played down the chances of this latest attempt, following
others in 1954, 1957 and 2004, being successful.
"In 2004 there was a Dutch
attempt for him to serve his sentence in Germany, which was
rejected on the basis of a 1957 court decision dismissing
the case for lack of evidence," spokesman Stefan Heilmann told AFP.
"In order to re-visit this
decision, the Netherlands would have to present new and significant
evidence."
Faber was sentenced to death by a
Dutch court in 1947 for murdering 22 Jews during World War
II although this was later commuted to life imprisonment.
He escaped from Breda prison in the
western Netherlands in 1952 with six other former SS men
and fled to Germany, eventually settling in Ingolstadt in
Bavaria where he worked for automaker Audi.
Faber served in a special SS unit
in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands which killed Dutch civilians
deemed "anti-German" in reprisal for resistance attacks.
He worked from 1943 to 1944 at Westerbork
transit camp, where Dutch schoolgirl Anne Frank, whose diary
became world-famous, was held before being sent to her death
at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler gave all
those serving in the SS German citizenship, and Germany as
a rule does not extradite its own citizens.
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