THE world’s second most-wanted Nazi war criminal, who murdered Jews at the camp where Anne Frank was held, has died peacefully in his bed in Germany at the age of 90.

It emerged over the weekend that former SS member Klaas Carel Faber died last Thursday in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, where he had lived for decades. He escaped from a Dutch jail after the war, was sentenced to death in absentia by the Netherlands and was shielded by Germany, which always refused to extradite him for a new trial.

Faber was second on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s list of Nazi criminals still at large for gunning down Jews during the Second World War. German prosecutors said in January they had appealed to a court in Bavaria to make Faber serve the life sentence handed down by Dutch authorities for murdering 22 Jews.

Faber had been a member of the Nazi SS unit known as Silbertanne (Silver Fir) and was originally sentenced to death by a Dutch court in 1947. He was also a member of Sonderkommando Feldmeijer, which assassinated prominent Dutch citizens in reprisal for resistance activities in the Netherlands, and at one time served as a bodyguard to Dutch Nazi leader Anton Mussert.

In 1952, while awaiting execution, Faber escaped from Breda prison in the western Netherlands with six other former SS men.

In recent years, Gudrun Burwitz, the only daughter of SS chief Heinrich Himmler and a fervent Nazi to this day, fought to keep him out of jail through her network of former Nazis called Stille Hilfe, or Silent Help.

Faber’s killings were carried out at the Westerbork transit camp, the staging post for Jews en route to the extermination centres in occupied Poland.

He eventually started working for the car maker Audi, based in Ingolstadt, while his sentence was commuted to life in prison after the Netherlands abolished the death penalty.

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

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

Faber, who originally had Dutch nationality, escaped because 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.

This anomaly has allowed thousands of Nazi killers to escape justice over the years, even while modern-day Germany professes that it wants to atone for the crimes of the Hitler regime.

German justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, under pressure from Israel, had long pressed Bavaria, which has jurisdiction on the case, to look for alternative solutions to deal with the Faber case.

Faber worked from 1943 to 1944 at Westerbork transit camp, where 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.

scotsman.com