A Norwegian Nazi who served in the SS and was awarded the
Gold Cross by Hitler has been discovered living in Marbella
on the Costa del Sol in Spain
Fredrik Jensen, 93, served in a number of SS units during
the Second World War, including the SS Panzer-Grenadier der
Fuhrer, SS-Panzer-Division -Das Reich, the Panzer-Grenadier
Regiment 9 Germania and the Panzer-Division Wiking.
He fought on the front line, which earned him the rare accolade
of being one of the few foreigners to receive the highest
decoration granted by Hitler to SS troops, the Gold Medal.
He joined the SS after the Norwegian Nazi party seized power
under the puppet-regime of Vidkun Quisling in 1942.
After the war, Jensen spent time in an American military
hospital and was later jailed for 10 years for fighting for
the Nazis.
When he was released, he moved to Sweden were he founded
an industrial machine company.
Jensen was classed as a war criminal according to the archives
of Interpol. In 1994, he was deported to the United States
for his alleged war crimes, but he then went missing and
moved with his wife, Karin, to the Las Belbederes area of
Marbella, a district mainly populated by retirees from Scandinavia
and Germany in which he was able to settle without attracting
unwelcome attention.
In an interview in 1999 with a newspaper catering for the
Norwegian expatriate community, he made no mention, or apology
for, his membership of the SS.
Investigators chanced across Jensen while hunting a much
more important target, Aribert Heim, the so-called Dr Death
of Matthausen concentration camp, the second most wanted
Nazi in the world after Martin Bormann, Hitler's private
secretary.
Heim is said to have been responsible for the deaths of
at least 500 people, many of them Spanish Republicans, in
the Austrian concentration camp. Like Dr Josef Mengele, the "Angel
of Death" of Auschwitz concentration camp, Heim subjected
prisoners to so-called medical experiments.
After the war, he set up a gynaecology clinic but disappeared
in 1962 as Nazi hunters closed in.
German and Spanish police as well as the Simon Wiesenthal
Centre, which tracks down Nazis, have been pursuing Heim
for years. He was at first believed to be living on the Costa
Brava, after German police in Baden-Baden traced money transfers
from his family to an artist's studio in a Spanish town.
But Heim then disappeared from the radar until new clues
suggested he was living in Marbella.
Police watched a home in the luxury Royal Nordic Club development,
believing at first that they had finally snared one of the
world's most wanted Nazis. But the subject of their attentions
turned out to be Jensen, who at 93, is one year younger than
Heim.
German police and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre believe Heim
fled to Chile and was living at the home of his daughter
Waltraud Bosser. But when investigators travelled to Chile
earlier this year, they found that Ms Bosser had moved, perhaps
with her father, to Argentina.
The Spanish newspaper El Mundo posed the question yesterday: "Could
the Nazi Jensen reveal where Dr Death is hiding?
news.independent.co.uk
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