A
Bavarian prosecutor has filed a motion to have a Dutch native
who fled to Germany after being convicted in the Netherlands
of Nazi war crimes serve his sentence in a German prison
— likely the final chapter in decades of efforts to see the
89-year-old jailed.
Klaas Carel Faber — No. 3 on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted
Nazis — was convicted in 1947 of involvement in 22 murders
and for aiding the Netherlands' Nazi occupiers during World
War II. He was handed a death sentence that was later commuted
to life in prison, according to Dutch prosecutors.
But in 1952 he escaped and fled
to Germany, where he has lived in freedom ever since despite
several attempts to try or extradite him.
Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter
at the Wiesenthal Center, applauded the new development
in the decades-old case.
"Under the circumstances
this is the best we can hope for and it's a realistic possibility," Zuroff said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. "It's high time that Mr. Faber ends his peaceful and tranquil life in Ingolstadt
and is incarcerated for his heinous crimes."
Faber was saved by his German
citizenship when Berlin rejected a request from the Netherlands
last year for his extradition on a European arrest warrant
— opening the door to pursuing his incarceration in Germany,
said Ingolstadt prosecutor Helmut Walter.
Walter said he filed the motion
about a week ago with the Ingolstadt state court, but did
not know when to expect a ruling.
The court will not need to reconsider
any of the facts of the Dutch case, however, he said.
The Dutch court decision in 1947 "is
a valid verdict," he said. "This is purely a legal question — if, through the rejection of the European arrest
warrant, the sentence can be enforced here."
Faber's telephone number is unlisted
and Walter said he has not yet been appointed a defense
attorney.
Dutch Justice Ministry spokesman
Wiebe Alkema said his government was "happy and satisfied" with the development, which was based on a request from Amsterdam.
"It coincides with
what the Netherlands saw as a possible option to get Faber
behind bars," he told the AP.
Faber was born in the Netherlands
in 1922 and turns 90 on Friday.
Dutch prosecutors have said he
was convicted for killings at three different Dutch locations
in 1944-1945, including six at the Westerbork transit camp,
where thousands of Dutch Jews, including Anne Frank, were
held before being sent to labor camps or death camps in
eastern Europe.
According to the Wiesenthal Center,
Faber volunteered for Hitler's SS, a paramilitary organization
loyal to Nazi ideology, after Germany overran the Netherlands
during World War II.
He also served with the Sicherheitsdienst,
the Nazi internal intelligence agency, and an SS unit,
code-named Silbertanne, or Silver Fir, which consisted
of 15 men, most of them Dutch, who were mustered to exact
reprisals for attacks by the Dutch resistance on collaborators,
according to the Wiesenthal Center.
Dutch authorities first requested
his extradition in 1954 but Faber had been able to get
German citizenship because of his service to Germany during
the war, so the request was rejected because Germany refused
to extradite its own citizens.
In 1957 a Duesseldorf court rejected
attempts to bring him to trial in Germany, saying there
was not enough evidence against him.
After a Dutch request to have
him jailed in Germany in 2004 failed, Munich prosecutors
in 2006 received new evidence from the Netherlands and
looked into reopening the files. But prosecutors found
that the former SS man may have been guilty not of murder
but only of manslaughter — and the statute of limitations
for that crime had expired.
It was after that — in 2010 —
that the Netherlands again asked for his extradition using
a new European arrest warrant. It was again rejected, because
his consent was still needed to extradite him as a German
citizen, but that paved the way for the new appeal to the
Ingolstadt court. abcnews.go.com
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