The Ministry of Security and Justice is pleased that the German public prosecutor's office has moved to arrest convicted Nazi war criminal Klaas Carel Faber. The prosecutor submitted a request for the arrest of the 89-year-old former SS officer last week to a court in the southern German town of Ingolstadt.

A spokesperson for the Dutch Justice Ministry called the development a breakthrough: “We are watching with interest what the German court decides”. Urged by the Dutch Justice and Security Minister Ivo Opstelten, the German prosecutor is looking into whether Faber should be made to complete his prison sentence in Germany.

Klaas Carel Faber was sentenced to death in the Netherlands in 1947, though this was commuted to life imprisonment a year later. In 1952 he escaped from prison in the southern town of Breda in 1952 and fled to Germany, which offers citizenship to former SS officers and does not extradite its nationals. He has lived there in freedom for decades. In November 2010, the Dutch issued a European arrest warrant.

According to British paper The Times, Faber is being assisted by Gudrun Burwitz, daughter of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, and the Stille Hilfe group. Stille Hilfe was set up in 1951 to help SS veterans. The group was formed by German neo-Nazis and is not banned in Germany.

Faber originally came from Haarlem and served in Kommando Feldmeijer during World War II. He was a member of the Silbertanne group which was responsible for deaths of around 50 resistance members. He was also part of the firing squad at Westerbork concentration camp, together with his brother Pieter. The two brothers were known to be extremely violent.

In 2010, Heinrich Boere was sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Aachen for the murder of three people in 1944. Klaas Carel’s brother Pieter, who also belonged to the Silbertanne group, was executed in 1948 for war crimes.

(nc/imm)

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