Dutch nazi criminal Faber dies

This video is called Nazi Fugitive Lives Cozy Life in Germany.

By Elizabeth Zimmermann in Germany:

Nazi war criminal Klaas Carel Faber dies unpunished

12 June 2012

On May 24, the Dutch war criminal Klaas Carel Faber died in a hospital in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, at the age of 90. After World War II, Faber was sentenced to death for murdering Jews and resistance fighters in the Netherlands. A year later, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

In 1952, he escaped from a Dutch prison in Breda along with six other Nazi war criminals and fled to Germany. He was able to live there for six decades, largely undisturbed. The German judiciary rejected all motions lodged by the Dutch authorities for his extradition to Holland or for him to serve his sentence in Germany.

Klaas Carel Faber and his brother, Pieter Johan, were among the first to join the Nazi security forces as voluntary collaborators, following the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940. They became members of the SS special unit, Silver Pine, led by Johannes Hendrik Feldmeijer. The father of the two brothers had been a member of the Dutch Nazi Party (NSB) since 1933. He was shot by resistance fighters in May 1944.

According to the NiederlandeNet news web site, Klaas Carel Faber and his brother were active as schoolboys in the NSB’s youth organisation, the Jeugdstorm. After joining the Dutch unit of the Waffen-SS, Klaas Carel Faber became the instructor, and in May 1942 the bodyguard, of the NSB leader, Anton Mussert.

Silver Pine was particularly notorious for its brutal and murderous thuggery. It harassed prisoners in various criminal and forced labour camps, led raids into private homes, arbitrarily arrested people suspected of supporting the resistance, threatened family members and looted homes. It was also responsible for the maltreatment and killing of prisoners.

The Faber brothers were commissioned as wardens in the Westerbork transit camp and Groningen prison. The Nazis used the Westerbork transit prison to deport tens of thousands of Dutch Jews to German concentration and extermination camps. Anne Frank and her family passed through Westerbork on the way to their deaths at Auschwitz.

Anne Frank herself died at Bergen-Belsen nazi camp.

Many Jews were tortured and murdered by the SS in Westerbork before they reached Germany.

In 1947, a Dutch court initially sentenced Klaas Carel Faber and his brother Pieter Johan to death. Klaas Carel Faber was found guilty of killing at least 22 Jews and resistance fighters. Pieter Johan Faber was executed, but a court commuted Klaas Carel Faber’s death penalty to life imprisonment in 1948. During the proceedings, Faber admitted to the murder of at least six people.

After Klaas Carel Faber and the six other SS war criminals managed to escape from the Dutch prison in Breda in December 1952, they encountered few difficulties once they had crossed the Dutch-German border. They registered themselves at a German police station. There they had to pay a fine of 10 marks each for illegal border crossing, but were permitted to continue their flight unhindered.

Involved in the escape and its preparation was ex-SS officer Herbertus Bikker, who also lived in Germany virtually unmolested until his death in November 2008. In a 1997 interview with reporters from Stern magazine, Bikker boasted that at the border, “The head customs officer was a real comrade”.

A court order gave each of the seven fugitives 20 marks—10 for the fine and 10 for their travel costs. Commenting on this, Bikker said: “In the court, they were all comrades”.

Immediately after their escape, the Dutch government applied for the extradition of the seven convicts. However, even though they were all quickly apprehended, only one of them was returned to the Netherlands—Jacob de Jonge, who was kidnapped by the British military police, despite protests from the Adenauer government.

All the others, including Klaas Carel Faber, were declared by the Federal Court to be German citizens and thus protected from extradition by the German constitution. The legal basis for this ruling was ascribed to the “Führer decree” of May 19, 1943. This edict had been used by Hitler to grant German citizenship to non-Germans who had joined Nazi or German army units. The decree has never been suspended or abrogated in the more than six decades since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The public prosecutor in Dusseldorf opened proceedings against Klaas Carel Faber in 1954. However, the Dusseldorf district court rejected admission of the indictment in 1957 on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence. At the time, the Dutch government refused to provide legal assistance to Faber, insisting instead on his extradition and rightly considering the German courts to be riddled with former Nazis.

The proceedings against Faber and the other fugitive war criminals from Breda were dismissed. Faber lived undisturbed in the Ruhr region until 1961, and then moved to Ingolstadt in Bavaria. There he worked as an office employee of the Audi car company until his retirement. For more than two decades, he and his wife were then able to enjoy living on his pension in the Pius district of Ingolstadt.