Netherlands issues warrant for Nazi war criminal

Prosecutors in the Netherlands have issued an arrest warrant for a convicted Nazi war criminal living in Germany. Klaas Carel Faber, 88, worked from 1943 to 1944 at the crematorium at Westorbork transit camp, where celebrated diary writer Anne Frank was held before being transferred to Belsen concentration camp, where she died.

G.Lanting

Germany has turned down two previous extradition requests in 1954 and 2004. Faber was sentenced to death in 1947 by a Dutch court for murdering 22 Jews during the Holocaust.

He escaped from prison in the western Netherlands in 1952, along with six other former SS men.

In 1957, a German court acquitted him. He now lives in Ingolstadt in the southern German state of Bavaria, despite ranking third on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s list of wanted Nazis.

He served in the Netherlands in an SS unit that killed Dutch civilians who resisted the Nazis.

Authorities in Bavaria said in August there was only a theoretical chance of reopening proceedings against Faber after Israeli justice minister Yaakov Neeman asked the German justice minister to review the case.

But the prosecution service in Dutch town of Zwoelle says it is querying the German citizenship granted to Dutch-born Faber by the Nazi regime during the war.

Faber's brother, Pieter Johan, was executed for war crimes in 1948.