Germany, March 23: Justice finally caught up with an 88-year-old SS assassin today as a German court jailed him for life for shooting dead three civilians in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands in 1944.
Heinrich Boere, who admitted to the cold-blooded killings on several occasions, has spent six decades one step ahead of the law after escaping from a prisoner of war camp in 1947 and returning to his birthplace in Germany.
Boere, sitting in a wheelchair, wearing a striped red and white jumper, grey trousers, socks and sandals, showed no emotion as the verdict was read out in a packed courtroom.
“These were murders that were carried out on a totally random basis,” said presiding judge Gerd Nohl in the western city of Aachen.
The 88-year-old, whose father was Dutch and who grew up in the Netherlands, was sentenced to death in Amsterdam – in absentia – in 1949. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.
He worked as a coal miner in Germany until 1976.
The Netherlands attempted to have Boere extradited in the 1980s, but failed after a German court ruled that there was a possibility he may have German citizenship. Germany as a rule does not extradite its citizens.
His Dutch citizenship was revoked after the war and his application for German nationality – which he claims he was promised when he joined the Waffen SS in 1940 – was refused.
A fresh attempt was made to bring him to justice in 2003 when Dutch authorities made a successful application for Boere to serve out his life sentence in Germany, but the ruling was overturned.
German prosecutors then charged him, only for a court to declare him unfit for trial. But this ruling too was overturned by a higher court, allowing a trial to proceed here in Aachen, Germany.
On several occasions, Boere, now wheelchair-bound and living in a nursing home in Germany, has admitted to shooting in cold blood pharmacist Fritz Bicknese, bicycle shop owner Teunis de Groot and Frans-Willem Kusters.
“Yes, I got rid of them,” he told Focus magazine in 2008.
“It was not difficult. You just had to bend a finger … Bang! Dead!”
But he says that as a member of an SS commando unit tasked with killing suspected resistance members or supporters, he risked being sent to a concentration camp if he refused.
Boere’s defence lawyers had argued that as a result of his 1949 conviction, even though he escaped all punishment, the current trial was null and void because of double jeopardy.
Since the Nuremberg trials after the war, where several top Nazi henchmen were sentenced to death, German authorities have examined more than 25,000 cases but the vast majority never came to court.
But now, as the suspected war criminals approach their nineties, there has been a minor flurry of arrests and court cases.
In the most high-profile, 89-year-old John Demjanjuk went on trial in Munich last November on charges of assisting in the murder of 27,900 people at the Sobibor death camp.
—Agencies