Dutch war criminal Heinrich Boere has made a full confession of the three murders for which he stands accused.  

The 88-year old told a court in Aachen, Germany what he had already publicly admitted: that he had joined the Nazi SS during World War Two and killed three Dutch citizens in reprisal for anti-Nazi attacks.

Before he made his confession, the court denied a defence motion to dismiss the case. The motion was filed last Monday, when the Treaty of Lisbon came into effect. The treaty states that a court in the European Union can not try or sentence an accused for the same crime more than once. Because Boere was convicted in 1949, the defence argued, the current case against him should be dismissed.

Double jeopardy
The court ruled, however, that the ban on double jeopardy was insufficient grounds for dismissal. The court argued that the rule does not apply if the accused flees the country where he was prosecuted in order to avoid serving prison time.

Boere is standing trial for the murder of three Dutch citizens during the Second World War. Two years after his 1947 escape from a Dutch prison, he was sentenced to death in absentia by a Dutch court. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

He eventually turned up in Germany in 1954. Because he had by then acquired German citizenship, he could not be extradited to the Netherlands. A Dutch request to have him serve time in a German prison was denied because the Dutch conviction was ruled legally invalid in a German court. As a result, the German justice ministry began its own case against Boere.

"It wasn't difficult"
Despite his confession, Boere maintains that he was convinced, at the time of the killings, that the people he shot were leading members of the Dutch resistance who had carried out attacks against German occupiers. In 1944, he said, he did not believe he had committed a crime. Two years ago he told a news weekly "it wasn't difficult. All you had to do was bend a finger," and "we thought we were doing the right thing."

"Now, 65 years later, I see that differently," his lawyer quoted him as saying today.