Amsterdam – The Dutch government asked Germany on Wednesday to jail an 89-year-old Dutch Nazi who escaped in 1952 from a Dutch prison where he was serving a life sentence for killing Jewish prisoners at a Nazi transit camp.
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The Netherlands had already tried to extradite former SS soldier Klaas Carel Faber using a European Arrest Warrant — a European Union-wide agreed extradition mechanism — but a court in Munich turned down the application on the grounds that Faber is now a German citizen.
Dutch Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten wrote to his German counterpart on Wednesday saying that under European rules, Germany should impose on Faber the life sentence he had been serving in the Netherlands.
Faber was sentenced to death in 1947 for the killing of at least 11 people in the Westerbork camp in the Netherlands, a staging post for Dutch Jews on their journey to concentration camps in Germany, Poland and Ukraine.
His brother, who was also a member of the Dutch SS, was shot by firing squad after the war, but Faber’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He escaped from the prison and fled to Germany in 1952.
Dutch efforts to extradite Faber have been frustrated by a German law preventing extradition of German nationals for war crimes although Germany sentenced another former Dutch Nazi, Heinrich Broere, to life in prison in March last year.
Another example of German hypocrisy regarding war criminals.
Klaus Carel Faber was convicted, sentenced, and escaped. He’s a fugitive from justice. There is not the issue of misidentification, as was the case with Demjanjuk. So he should be extradited, and serve out the rest of his sentence, his age nonwithstanding.
On the other hand, Demjanjuk, a Ukranian, is being made a scapegoat, even though (1) he served 6 years in an Israeli prison on death row for something he obviously didn’t do, and (2), nobody identified him in his recent trial, a problem when justice is slow in coming, and in this case, 65 years slow in coming. Maybe the same prosecutors in Munich who refuse to hand this other guy over for extradition believe with the sentencing of Demjanjuk, they’ve wiped the slate clean.
I don’t know if Demjanjuk is a vicious anti-Semite who threw Jewish and other prisoners at Sobibor into the gas chambers. Maybe he did, maybe not. The FBI has stated that the second ID card which showed him at Sobibor is likely a forgery. But there’s a strong case of reasonable doubt here, while there’s absolutely no doubt of Klaus Carel Faber’s guilt.