Germany looks into jailing SS officer

Faber is number 5 of Wiesenthal Center's "most wanted Nazi criminals."

By ASSOCIATED PRESS, JPOST.COM STAFF
311_Nazi camp guards (photo credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS)
311_Nazi camp guards
(photo credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Germany's Justice Ministry says it is looking into the possibility of jailing an 88-year-old man more than 60 years after his conviction for Nazi war crimes in the Netherlands.
Spokesman Ulrich Staudigl said Monday that ministry experts think enforcing the Dutch court's life sentence against former SS officer Klaas Carel Faber for multiple Nazi-era murders might still be an option.
He says the ministry has asked authorities in Bavaria to look into the case again.
Faber is number five of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's "most wanted Nazi war criminals." He was sentenced to death in Holland for a number of murders carried out when he was in the SS, but he escaped to Germany in 1952, where he has lived ever since. The Dutch government requested that Faber be extradited several times, so that he could serve his sentence, which had been commuted in the late 1940s to life in prison.
Last week, 150 Israeli lawyers signed a petition and presented it to Israeli Justice Minister Yaakov Ne'eman on Wednesday, calling upon the Israeli government to urge Germany to take legal action against the former SS officer.
The petition was submitted in support of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's efforts to enlist the Israeli government's active assistance in the Faber case. The organization has also called upon the Israeli government to urge Germany to cancel the "Fuhrer befehl law," which grants German citizenship to non-German Nazi collaborators and protects them from extradition to their countries of origin to face prosecution.
Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal Center's chief Nazi-hunter said: "Germany's failure hereto to put Faber on trial or return him to Holland are a travesty which must be corrected as quickly as possible, while justice can still be achieved."