Wanted Nazi dies aged 90
May 26, 2012
Dutch-born Klaas Carel Faber, who fled to Germany after being convicted in the Netherlands of Nazi war crimes, died in hospital in the southern city of Ingolstadt on Thursday. He reportedly died of kidney failure.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center last year placed Weber at number three on its list of most-wanted Nazi criminals.
According to the Wiesenthal Center, Faber volunteered for Hitler's SS after Germany overran the Netherlands during World War II. He served with the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi internal intelligence agency, and an SS unit code-named Silbertanne, or Silver Fir. The group consisted of 15 men, most of them Dutch, who exacted reprisals for attacks by the Dutch resistance.
He was convicted in 1947 for 22 murders at three different Dutch locations in 1944 and 1945, including six at the Westerbork transit camp, where thousands of Dutch Jews, including Anne Frank, were held before being sent to labor camps or death camps in eastern Europe.
Citizenship granted, extradition rejected
Faber was handed a death sentence that was later commuted to life in prison. Faber escaped jail and fled to Bavaria in 1952. He was given German citizenship because of his service to Germany during the war.
In 1957, a Düsseldorf court rejected attempts to bring him to trial in Germany, saying there was not enough evidence against him.
After a Dutch request to have him jailed in Germany in 2004 failed, Munich prosecutors in 2006 received new evidence from the Netherlands and looked into reopening the files. But prosecutors found Faber may have been guilty only of manslaughter - and the statute of limitations for that crime had expired.
Faber was saved by his German citizenship when German authorities rejected a request from the Netherlands last year for his extradition on a European arrest warrant. In January, Ingolstadt prosecutor Helmut Walter said he had filed a motion to have Faber serve his sentence in a German prison.
Walter said a state court in Ingolstadt would not need to reconsider any part of the Dutch case but decide whether, as a result of the European arrest warrant being rejected, the sentence against Faber could be enforced in Germany.
jm/msh (AP,dpa, AFP)