A
Nazi war criminal who escaped from a Dutch jail and lived
as a fugitive in Germany for 60 years has died at the age
of 90.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre revealed the death of Klaas Carel Faber, number two
on its list of most wanted Nazi criminals, yesterday.
Faber was sentenced to death in 1947
in the Netherlands for killing at least 11 people at a staging
post for Dutch Jews being taken to concentration camps.
His sentence was commuted to life
imprisonment but he escaped in 1952 and fled to Germany,
where he became a citizen and had lived since 1961 in the
Bavarian town of Ingolstadt.
He had long resisted attempts by his
native Netherlands to extradite him and died shortly before
prosecutors in Ingolstadt were preparing to detain him, said
Efraim Zuroff, head of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal
Nazi-hunting group.
'The decision was imminent. We know
the state prosecutors in Ingolstadt supported sending Faber
to jail to serve the rest of his life sentence,' Mr Zuroff
said.
It was the second death this year
of a top Nazi criminal. John Demjanjuk, a retired U.S. engine
mechanic, died in March aged 91 in Germany.
A Munich court convicted him in 2011
for his role in the killing of 28,000 Jews as a Nazi death
camp guard.
Mr Zuroff said Faber, a member of the Dutch SS, had killed at least 24 people,
many of them at the Westerbork transit camp, from where Dutch
Jews were taken to concentration camps in the Netherlands,
Poland and Germany.
Victims included Jews and Dutch citizens who had tried to hide and protect them,
he said.
Faber's older brother Piet, also a
member of the SS, was shot by a firing squad after the war.
Dutch efforts to extradite Faber were
frustrated by a German law from 1943 that prevented extradition
of German nationals for war crimes.
A state court in Dusseldorf ruled in 1957 that it had insufficient evidence
to try Faber. But following the high-profile Demjanjuk trial,
German prosecutors reopened investigations of Nazi-era crimes.
Local media reported that Faber died in a hospital in Ingolstadt on Thursday.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center's most
wanted Nazi war criminal is Hungarian Laszlo Csatary, 95,
who is accused of helping organise the deportation of more
than 15,000 Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp from
the Slovakian city of Kosice in 1944.
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