Berlin: Klaas Carel Faber, a Dutch native who fled to Germany after being convicted in the Netherlands of Nazi war crimes and subsequently lived in freedom despite several attempts to try or extradite him, has died. He was 90.
Faber`s wife, Jacoba, told the Dutch news site de Nieuwe Pers that he died in a hospital on Thursday. A hospital official in Ingolstadt, the Bavarian city where the Fabers lived, confirmed that today. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with policy.
Faber, whom the Simon Wiesenthal Center last year placed at No. 3 on its list of most-wanted Nazi criminals, was convicted in 1947 of involvement in 22 murders and for aiding the Netherlands` Nazi occupiers during World War II. He was handed a death sentence that was later commuted to life in prison, according to Dutch prosecutors.
But in 1952, he escaped and fled to Germany, where he lived in freedom.
Faber was saved by his German citizenship when German authorities rejected a request from the Netherlands last year for his extradition on a European arrest warrant. In January, Ingolstadt prosecutor Helmut Walter said he had filed a motion to have Faber serve his sentence in a German prison.
Walter said a state court in Ingolstadt wouldn`t need to reconsider any of the Dutch case but decide whether, as a result of the European arrest warrant being rejected, the sentence against him could be enforced in Germany.
Prosecutors could not be reached for comment today, the start of a three-day weekend in Germany.
Faber was born in the Netherlands on January 20, 1922.
Dutch prosecutors have said he was convicted for killings at three different Dutch locations in 1944-1945, including six at the Westerbork transit camp, where thousands of Dutch Jews, including Anne Frank, were held before being sent to labor camps or death camps in eastern Europe.
PTI
