DUTCH AUTHORITIES have asked Germany to extradite a former SS volunteer who was sentenced to death for murder in 1947.
Authorities in The Hague confirmed yesterday that they had issued a European arrest warrant for Klaas Carel Faber (88), who served in a firing squad at the Westerbork transit camp.
It was from Westerbork that Anne Frank and her family were transferred to Auschwitz.
After the war, a Dutch court dubbed Faber and his brother Pieter “two of the worst criminals of the SS”. Pieter was executed in 1948, while Klaas Faber’s death sentence was commuted to life.
He escaped to Germany with six others in 1952 and settled in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt, where he worked for Audi.
A German court acquitted him of wrongdoing in 1952. Yesterday a Bavarian justice official said the new request would be considered, “but as far as I know, there is nothing new”.
Faber received German citizenship in 1952 under a Nazi-era law, still on the statute books at the time, that granted citizenship to foreign Nazi collaborators. Yesterday’s application is understood to query the legality of this citizenship application, originally made during the war. It is the third application after two failed extradition attempts, in 1954 and 2004.
Faber is the fifth most wanted man on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre list of wanted Nazis.
The centre has called on Germany to extradite him, citing his membership of the Sonderkommando Feldmeijer execution squad, which executed members of the Dutch resistance, Nazi opponents and those hiding Jews.