Case hasn't been closed on WWII Nazi assassin



The Associated Press
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 03.08.2008


ESCHWEILER, Germany — Heinrich Boere's first victim was a pharmacist. Two more victims would follow on a single day, one gunned down at point-blank range in his doorway, the other on the road.
Although the killing spree happened in 1944, a footnote to the far greater carnage raging across World War II Europe, it still haunts Germany and the Netherlands, leaving a sense of justice denied by dueling court systems despite the Continent's long march to unity and harmonized institutions.
Boere was part of a Waffen SS death squad of mostly Dutch volunteers assigned to kill countrymen in reprisal for attacks by the anti-Nazi Resistance. His is among more than 1,000 cases worldwide that the Nazi-tracking Simon Wiesenthal Center says are still open as of last April 1.
Though sentenced to death in the Netherlands in 1949 — later commuted to life imprisonment — Boere has managed to escape jail so far. One German court has refused to extradite him because he might have German nationality as well as Dutch. Another won't make him serve his Dutch sentence in a German prison because he was absent from his trial, having fled to Germany.
Now, The Associated Press has learned, a German investigator has quietly reopened the case in a last-ditch attempt to bring charges against the 86-year-old Boere and see that he faces justice.
Boere volunteered for the SS only months after the Netherlands fell to the German blitzkrieg in 1940. After the war he spent two years in an Allied prison camp where he made the statements later used to convict him, but he escaped to Germany before the Dutch could bring him to trial.
Much of what is known about the case comes from the Dutch file on the 1949 trial that convicted Boere.
According to Ulrich Maass, the prosecutor now investigating him, the death squad is known to have been responsible for 54 killings. Boere was convicted of three of them, which he detailed, almost gunshot by gunshot, in statements to Dutch police preserved in the court file.
The first was in July 1944.
According to Boere's statement, he and fellow SS man Jacobus Petrus Besteman set off for the town of Breda, and the local office of the Sicherheits-dienst, the Nazi internal intelligence agency. There they were given a list of names slated for "retaliatory measures."
Their target that day was Fritz Hubert Ernst Bicknese, pharmacist.
Wearing civilian clothes, Boere and Besteman walked into the pharmacy and asked the man there if he was Bicknese. When he answered "yes," Boere pulled his pistol from his right coat pocket and fired two or three shots into Bicknese's upper body, then Besteman moved in and fired another two or three shots into the fallen man.
The next one, in September, followed a similar pattern: Boere and accomplice Hendrik Kromhout shot bicycle-shop owner Teun de Groot when he answered the door at his home in the town of Voorschoten. They then continued to the apartment of F.W. Kusters and forced him into their car. They drove him to another town, stopped on the pretext of having a flat tire and shot him.
After the war, when the Allied war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg finished its work, it fell to the West German government to prosecute remaining Nazis. But Boere wasn't among them. Today he lives in Eschweiler, outside Aachen, in an upscale old-age home with its own barbershop and caged parakeets tweeting in the lobby. Staffers say he uses a walker but rarely leaves his room.
Telephoned by the reception desk to ask if he would meet with a reporter, he replied curtly: "I don't want to be disturbed." But last year he spoke to the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, saying of his wartime deeds, "It was another time, with different rules."
He described ringing de Groot's doorbell and asking him for his papers. "When we knew for sure we had the right person, we shot him dead, at the door," he said. "I didn't feel anything, it was work. Orders were orders, otherwise it would have meant my skin. "Later it began to bother me. Now I'm sorry."
The Dutch didn't give up, and sought his extradition. But a German court in 1983 refused on the grounds he might have German citizenship, and Germany at the time had no provision to extradite its nationals.
A state court in Aachen ruled in 2007 that Boere could legally serve his sentence in Germany, but an appeals court in Cologne overturned the ruling months later.

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For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman