Former Nazi hit man put on trial on Germany

29 October 2009

Sixty-four years after the end of World War II, an 88-year-old German man is being tried for war crimes in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Heinrich Boere, a former SS death squad member, went on trial in Aachen on Wednesday for carrying out revenge killings on three men in 1944. Boere was able to evade prosecution for years, first by fleeing the Netherlands and then because German courts ruled he could not be extradited to the Netherlands. During World War II, the SS announced that for every attempt on the life of a German, or German collaborator, three Dutchmen would die. Boere admitted to killing a pharmacist, a businessman and a bicycle shop owner, but said he acted on orders from his superiors.

The son of a Dutch man and a German woman was in captivity after the war, but then fled to Germany. In 1949, he was sentenced to death in absentia in the Netherlands. This sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. In 1983, a German court refused to send him to the Netherlands because he might have German citizenship as well as Dutch, and back then Germany had no provision to extradite its nationals. Another German court refused in 2007 to make him serve his Dutch sentence in a German prison because he had been absent from his trial and therefore unable to defend himself. Boere lived in an nursing home for the elderly until now.

Together with that of Ivan Demjanjuk, the 89-year-old Ukrainian-born man who is to be tried in Munich next month on charges of complicity to murder in 27,900 cases, Boere’s trial will probably be the last major Nazi war crimes case in Germany.