Aachen, Germany: A German court yesterday convicted an 88-year-old man of murdering three Dutch civilians as part of a Nazi hit squad during the Second World War, capping six decades of efforts to bring the former Waffen SS man to justice.
Heinrich Boere, No 6 on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted Nazis, was given the maximum sentence of life in prison for the 1944 killings.
"These were murders that could hardly be outdone in terms of baseness and cowardice — beyond the respectability of any soldier," presiding judge Gerd Nohl said.
Boere sat in his wheelchair, staring at the floor and showing no visible reaction as the verdict was announced. During the trial, which began in October, Boere admitted killing a bicycle shop owner, a pharmacist and another civilian in 1944 as a member of the "Silbertanne" hit squad — a unit of largely Dutch SS volunteers responsible for reprisal killings of their countrymen. He said he had no choice but to follow orders to carry out the killings.
"As a simple soldier, I learned to carry out orders," Boere testified in December.
"And I knew that if I didn't carry out my orders I would be breaking my oath and would be shot myself."
But the prosecution argued that Boere was a willing member of the fanatical Waffen SS, which he joined shortly after the Nazis had overrun his hometown of Maastricht and the rest of the Netherlands in 1940.
Though sentenced to death in absentia in the Netherlands in 1949 — later commuted to life imprisonment — Boere has managed to avoid jail until now.
One German court refused to extradite him because it ruled he might have German nationality as well as Dutch. Another would not force him to serve his Dutch sentence in a German prison because he was absent from his trial, having fled to Germany.
"We welcome the conviction, we welcome the sentence and this is again another proof that even at this point it is possible to bring Nazi war criminals to justice," Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said by telephone from occupied Jerusalem.
