Former Nazi hitman, 88, convicted over WWII murders

A GERMAN court has convicted an 88-year-old of murdering three Dutch civilians as part of a Nazi hit squad during World War II, capping six decades of efforts to bring the former Waffen SS man to justice.

Heinrich Boere, number six on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s list of most-wanted Nazis, was given the maximum sentence of life in prison for the 1944 killings.

“These were murders that could hardly be outdone in terms of baseness and cowardice – beyond the respectability of any soldier,” Judge Gerd Nohl said.

For Dolf Bicknese, it was the first time he had seen in person the man who killed his father in 1944.

“The person hardly interests me any more,” the 73-year-old told reporters. “My interest is justice.”

During the trial, Boere admitted killing a bicycle-shop owner, Bicknese’s father, a pharmacist and another civilian as a member of the “Silbertanne” hit squad – a unit of largely Dutch SS volunteers responsible for reprisal killings of countrymen who were considered anti-German. He said he had no choice.

“I knew that if I didn’t carry out my orders I would be breaking my oath and would be shot myself,” he testified in December.

But the prosecution argued Boere was a willing member of the fanatical Waffen SS, which he joined shortly after the Nazis overran his hometown of Maastricht and the rest of the Netherlands in 1940.

Judge Nohl characterised the murders as hit-style slayings, with Boere and his accomplices dressed in civilian clothes and surprising their victims at their homes or places of work late at night or early in the morning.

Though sentenced to death in absentia in the Netherlands in 1949, later commuted to life imprisonment, Boere has managed to avoid jail until now.

One German court refused to extradite him because it ruled he might have German nationality as well as Dutch. Another would not force him to serve his Dutch sentence in a German prison because he had fled to Germany.

Defence lawyer Gordon Christiansen said he would appeal to a German federal court. Boere will remain free until the appeals process is complete – and that could take two to three years if it goes to the European Court of Human Rights, Christiansen said.

Teun de Groot, whose father of the same name was killed by Boere, said it was “a shame” Boere would not be imprisoned immediately but was happy nonetheless.

Boere was born in Eschweiler, Germany. The son of a Dutch man and a German woman, he moved to the Netherlands when he was an infant. Boere testified that he decided to join the SS after the Germans had overrun the Netherlands and he saw a recruiting poster signed by Heinrich Himmler that inspired him.

After fighting on the Russian front, Boere ended up back in the Netherlands as part of “Silbertanne” – a death squad believed to be responsible for 54 killings in Holland.

According to statements Boere made to Dutch authorities after the war, he and a fellow SS man were given a list of names slated for “retaliatory measures.”

Their first target was the pharmacist, Fritz Hubert Ernst Bicknese. The two 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.

The next victim followed a similar pattern: Boere and an accomplice 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 the third victim, Franz Wilhelm Kusters, and forced him into their car. They drove him to another town, stopped on the pretense of having a flat tire and shot him.