* War criminal was about to be detained by German
authorities
* Faber had avoided extradition to Netherlands
* Fugitive was number two on Wiesenthal Center wanted list
By Erik Kirschbaum
BERLIN, May 28 (Reuters) – A Nazi war criminal who escaped
from a Dutch jail and lived as a fugitive in Germany for 60
years has died at the age of 90, the Simon Wiesenthal Center
said on Monday.
Klaas Carel Faber, number two on the Center’s list of most
wanted Nazi criminals, was sentenced to death in 1947 in the
Netherlands for the killings of at least 11 people at a staging
post for Dutch Jews being taken to concentration camps.
His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment but he
escaped in 1952 and fled to Germany, where he became a citizen
and had lived since 1961 in the Bavarian town of Ingolstadt.
He had long resisted attempts by his native Netherlands to
extradite him and died shortly before prosecutors in Ingolstadt
were preparing to detain him, said Efraim Zuroff, head of the
Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Nazi-hunting group.
“The decision was imminent. We know the state prosecutors in
Ingolstadt supported sending Faber to jail to serve the rest of
his life sentence,” Zuroff told Reuters.
It was the second death this year of a top Nazi criminal.
John Demjanjuk, a retired U.S. engine mechanic, died in March
aged 91 in Germany. A Munich court convicted him in 2011 for his
role in the killing of 28,000 Jews as a Nazi death camp guard.
Zuroff said Faber, a member of the Dutch SS, had killed at
least 24 people, many of them at the Westerbork transit camp,
from where Dutch Jews were taken to concentration camps in the
Netherlands, Poland and Germany.
Victims included Jews and Dutch citizens who had tried to
hide and protect them, he said.
Faber’s older brother Piet, also a member of the SS, was
shot by a firing squad after the war.
Dutch efforts to extradite Faber were frustrated by a German
law from 1943 that prevented extradition of German nationals for
war crimes.
A state court in Duesseldorf ruled in 1957 that it had
insufficient evidence to try Faber. But following the
high-profile Demjanjuk trial, German prosecutors reopened
investigations of Nazi-era crimes.
Local media reported that Faber died in a hospital in
Ingolstadt on Thursday.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s most wanted Nazi war criminal
is Hungarian Laszlo Csatary, 95, who is accused of helping
organise the deportation of more than 15,000 Jews to the
Auschwitz concentration camp from the Slovakian city of Kosice
in 1944.
(Reporting By Erik Kirschbaum; Editing by Pravin Char)
