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Europe
Trial Opens for Nazi Death Squad Member
2009-10-28
Never forget, never forgive.
AACHEN, Germany (AP) — Decades after he confessed to shooting three Dutch citizens, a former Nazi death squad member went on trial on Wednesday for their killings in 1944. The defendant, Heinrich Boere, was able to evade prosecution for years, first by fleeing the Netherlands and then because German courts ruled he could not be extradited. He was listed No. 6 on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s most-wanted list.

Mr. Boere, 88, was brought into the courtroom in a wheelchair and had a doctor by his side as the proceedings began. He faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison if convicted of the killings while part of an SS death squad.
Did his victims get life?
Mr. Boere, the son of a Dutch man and a German woman, confessed to the killings to Dutch authorities when he was in captivity after the war, but then he fled. He was sentenced to death in absentia in the Netherlands in 1949; the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

In 1983, a German court refused to send him to the Netherlands because he might have German citizenship as well as Dutch, and Germany then had no provision to extradite its nationals. Another German court refused in 2007 to make him serve his Dutch sentence in a German prison because he had been absent from his trial and therefore unable to defend himself.
So all one need do to stop a legal sentence is abscond. Curious legal system those Y'urp-peons have ...
Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, applauded prosecutors for pushing to bring the case to trial.

“This sends a very powerful message that the passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of murderers, and that old age should not protect the killers of civilians,” he said in a telephone interview. “Boere’s victims and their families are just as worthy of obtaining justice today as they were right after he committed his crimes.”

The trial was suspended Wednesday for several days, before the formal charges against Mr. Boere were read aloud, so the five-judge panel could consider a defense motion to have the lead prosecutor, Ulrich Maass, removed from the trial. The defense argued that Mr. Maass had made statements to the Dutch and German press that called his objectivity into question. Mr. Maass said the allegations were unfounded.

Mr. Boere was 18 when he joined the SS in late 1940, only months after German forces had overrun his hometown, Maastricht, and the rest of the Netherlands. After fighting on the Russian front, he returned to the Netherlands as part of “Silbertanne,” a unit of largely Dutch SS volunteers like himself who were given the task of killing their countrymen for resistance attacks on collaborators.

In statements after the war that are expected to form the basis for the prosecutionÂ’s case, Mr. Boere detailed the killings almost shot by shot.
That would seem to be a problem for the defense ...
His lawyers have declined to say how they will try to counter the confession, but they could argue that their client was simply following orders.
Which is no defense.
In a 2007 interview with the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, Mr. Boere said that he was sorry for what he had done but that it was “another time, with different rules.”
Posted by:Steve White

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