I am puzzled. The Germans have been trying their own Nazi war criminals but refused to extradite a Dutch war criminal who escaped from prison in the Netherlands after having been convicted of killing at least 11 people at a staging post for Dutch Jews being taken to concentration camps.
It is hard for me to fathom why Germany passed a law that prevented the extradition of German nationals for war crimes.
NAZI HUNTERS’ SECOND MOST WANTED WAR CRIMIAAL DIES 60 YEARS AFTER ESCAPING FROM PRISON TO LIVE AS A FUGITIVE IN GERMANY
90-year old was facing ‘imminent’ extradition case but died shortly before he was due to be detained
By Leon Watson
Mail Online
May 29, 2012
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.
1 comment:
It really seems sad that Germany of all countries has laws that protect war criminals. The German's have no right to do that after all the hurt and destruction they have put on the world as a whole. Two World Wars and the worst Genocide of all time were all started in Germany. This country should have had more of a reason cooperate in getting war criminals extradited to the appropriate countries. I recently watched a documentary called, The Last Nazis, and in the film it clearly shows German law protecting people who helped war criminals escape justice. That is sick and wrong and I wonder why no one seems to care. Why does the media not plaster this all over so the world can see how complicit German Government even today is in helping the murderous war criminals.
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