Was World War II criminal Klaas-Carel Faber party to the execution of resistance fighter Esmée van Eeghen? Faber, who is number one on the Simon Wiesenthal centre’s ‘most wanted’ list, has always denied he was anything more than a bystander. De Pers says he wasn’t.

Faber (89), who lives in Ingolstadt in Germany, is the last remaining Dutch war criminal to escape justice. The Dutch public prosecution office is currently investigating the role played by Faber in the murder of prisoner of Westerbork concentration camp in 1944 and the Ingolstadt authorities are studying a request to have Faber locked up in his adopted home town under the European arrest warrant.

But De Pers has found clues that point to another crime committed by Faber: the murder of Esmée van Eeghen, the woman who inspired Paul Verhoeven’s film Zwartboek.

Autopsy report

The main burden of proof against Faber can be found in the 1944 autopsy report, writes the paper. The eleven page report contains a detailed description of the diameter of the entry wounds found on Van Eeghen. These point to different calibre bullets and hence to different guns being used in the execution. Faber has always denied there was ever more than one executioner: his SS chef Ernst Knorr. He and his brother Pieter Johan Faber were merely witnesses, he maintained.

The information could lead to the re-opening of the case, something that Van Eeghen’s half-brother Sander Schimmelpenninck van der Oye (80) has asked the justice department for years.

Tall blond Esmée van Eeghen was 26 when she was shot. The daughter of a director of the Amstel brewery and an aristocratic mother, she grew up in well-heeled Aerdenhout. In 1943 she became involved with the resistance movement in Friesland. She helped to find places of refuge for persecuted Jews and escape routes for allied flyers. She participated in raids and became a private courier for resistance leader Krijn van der Helm with whom she had an affair.

Consequences

But Van Eeghen did not want or was unable to ever quite consider the consequences of her actions. She fell in love with a German Wehrmacht officer and was condemned to death for treason by the underground movement. The German intelligence organisation Sicherheitsdienst (SD) didn’t trust her either and had her arrested. Lengthy interrogations did not yield any information and they decided to execute her.

Her final journey began on September 7, 1944. Under cover of darkness she was taken from the SD head quarters in Groningen to a place just north of the city. Witnesses recalled shots ringing out and the next morning Van Eeghen was found in a nearby canal, her head just above water.

More than one gun

The two witnesses, policemen Pieter and Klaas-Carel Faber, declared afterwards that it was Knorr alone who fired the shots, including those which killed another prisoner present that day. Luitje Kremer’s body, like Van Eeghen’s, showed evidence of more than one gun being fired, among which a 9mm, a gun known to have been in the possession of Klaas-Carel Faber.

Pieter Faber always insisted that his brother did not get out of the car until all the shots were fired. It is likely that Pieter Faber, who was responsible for 27 deaths and who knew he would be executed as indeed he was in 1948, wanted to take the blame for his brother’s involvement in the murders.

Klaas-Carel Faber was condemned to life but escaped to Germany where he managed to exonerate himself in 1954 in a Düsseldorf court.

Shot through the heart

He declared that the large number of shots – 13 in Van Eeghen’s case, were meant to suggest an execution by the resistance. Unlikely, says resistance expert Jack Kooistra (81). ‘Treason by one of their own was punished with a shot through the heart. They avoided maiming. And bodies were buried, not thrown into the canal.’

Faber also tried to justify the execution by saying that Van Eeghen was ‘the only female member of a Dutch terrorist movement’ and had admitted to inviting Wehrmacht officers to her room on five different occasions and then shooting them there.

Another lie to cover his own tracks, says Kooistra. ‘I have never heard tell that Esmée van Eeghen ever killed anyone.’

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