BERLIN (AP)
-- Klaas Carel Faber, a Dutch native who fled to Germany after being convicted
in the Netherlands of Nazi war crimes and subsequently lived in freedom despite
several attempts to try or extradite him, has died. He was 90.
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| Klaas-Carel Faber |
Faber's
wife, Jacoba, told the Dutch news site de Nieuwe Pers that he died in a
hospital on Thursday. A hospital official in Ingolstadt, the Bavarian city
where the Fabers lived, confirmed that Saturday. The official spoke on
condition of anonymity in keeping with policy.
Faber -
whom the Simon Wiesenthal Center last year placed at No. 3 on its list of
most-wanted Nazi criminals - was convicted in 1947 of involvement in 22 murders
and for aiding the Netherlands' Nazi occupiers during World War II. He was
handed a death sentence that was later commuted to life in prison, according to
Dutch prosecutors.
But in
1952, he escaped and fled to Germany, where he lived in freedom.
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 wouldn't need to reconsider any of the Dutch case
but decide whether, as a result of the European arrest warrant being rejected,
the sentence against him could be enforced in Germany.
Prosecutors
could not be reached for comment on Saturday, the start of a three-day weekend
in Germany.
Faber was
born in the Netherlands on Jan. 20, 1922.
Dutch
prosecutors have said he was convicted for killings at three different Dutch
locations in 1944-1945, 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.
According
to the Wiesenthal Center, Faber volunteered for Hitler's SS, a paramilitary
organization loyal to Nazi ideology, after Germany overran the Netherlands
during World War II.
He also
served with the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi internal intelligence agency, and
an SS unit code-named Silbertanne, or Silver Fir, which consisted of 15 men,
most of them Dutch, who were mustered to exact reprisals for attacks by the
Dutch resistance on collaborators, according to the Wiesenthal Center.
Dutch
authorities first requested his extradition in 1954, but Faber had been able to
get German citizenship because of his service to Germany during the war, so the
request was rejected because West Germany refused to extradite its own
citizens.
In 1957 a
Duesseldorf 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 that the former SS man may have been guilty
not of murder but only of manslaughter - and the statute of limitations for
that crime had expired.
In 2010,
the Netherlands again asked for his extradition, using a new European arrest
warrant. It was again rejected, because his consent was still needed to
extradite him as a German citizen.
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Klaas Carel Faber (NOS screenshot)
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Dutch war criminal dies in freedom
Netherlands calls for arrest of Nazi Klaas-Carel Faber
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