BERLIN (AFP)---Bavaria has refused to extradite a convicted
Nazi war criminal back to the Netherlands, from where he
broke out of jail in 1952, Germany's justice ministry said.
The ruling comes nearly six months after Dutch prosecutors issued a European
arrest warrant for Klaas Carel Faber, 89, third on the Simon
Wiesenthal Center's list of wanted Nazis, who is living freely
in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt.
A federal justice ministry spokeswoman
said the case had been carefully re-examined, but was now
definitively buried with Wednesday's decision.
Faber, a member of a Nazi SS unit,
was sentenced to death by a Dutch court in 1947 for murdering
22 Jews in the occupied Netherlands 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's unit 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.
Germany recognises the German citizenship
Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler gave to all those serving in the
SS, and does not extradite its own citizens.
Three previous attempts to bring Faber
to justice failed, but German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger,
amid pressure from Israel, had pressed Bavaria, which has
jurisdiction on the case, "to look for alternative solutions."
This could include putting Faber in
prison in Germany, the minister told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung
daily in November
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."
ejpress.org
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