German prosecutors said Tuesday they have appealed to a court to jail a Nazi war criminal who was convicted in the Netherlands but has lived freely in the German state of Bavaria for decades.

In the latest twist in an epic legal saga, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office in Ingolstadt, southern Germany said it would now push to have Klaas Carel Faber serve a sentence in Germany that was handed down by a Dutch court.

"We have applied to have the jail sentence carried out here," the spokesman told AFP.

A regional court will now have to rule on the motion.

Faber, now 89 and a former member of the Nazi SS unit "Silver Fir", was sentenced to death by a Dutch court in 1947 for murdering 22 Jews.

He escaped from the Breda prison in western Netherlands in 1952 with six other former SS men and eventually started working for the German car maker Audi based in Ingolstadt.

His sentence was later converted to life in prison.

The Netherlands secured a European arrest warrant for Faber in November 2010 and sought his return to Dutch custody but Bavarian officials have so far refused to execute the warrant.

In 1957, a German court dropped all charges against him for lack of evidence and Bavarian authorities had said the Netherlands must produce new evidence before Faber can be arrested again.

In a further point that has outraged critics, Germany still recognises the citizenship that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler gave to all those serving in the SS, and does not extradite its own citizens.

Faber is third on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of wanted Nazis.

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.

His unit killed Dutch civilians deemed "anti-German" in reprisal for resistance attacks against the Nazi occupation.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre launched a new drive in Germany last month to catch the last Nazi war criminals still at large, based on a major legal precedent set last May with the conviction of former camp guard John Demjanjuk.

In a legal first, it found that simply demonstrating Demjanjuk's employment at the Sobibor extermination camp, rather than his involvement in specific murders, was enough to implicate him in the killings committed there.

expatica.com