Unrepentant Nazi hit-squad member killed Dutch civilians
BER LI N — Heinrich Boere, who murdered Dutch civilians as part of a Nazi Waffen SS hit squad during the Second World War but avoided justice for six decades, died in a prison hospital while serving a life sentence. He was 92.
Boere died last Sunday of natural causes in the facility in Froendenberg where he was being treated for dementia, North Rhine-Westphalia Justice Ministry spokesman Detlef Feige said.
He had been the state’s oldest prisoner.
Boere was on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals until his arrest in Germany and conviction in 2010 on three counts of murder.
“Late justice often sends a very powerful message regarding the importance of Nazi and Holocaust crimes,” the centre’s top Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff, said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. “It’s a comforting thought to know that Boere ended his life in a prison hospital rather than as a free man.”
During his six-month trial in Aachen, Boere admitted killing three civilians as a member of the Silbertanne, or “Silver Fir,” hit squad — a unit of largely Dutch SS volunteers responsible for reprisal killings of countrymen who were considered anti-Nazi.
He sat through the proceedings in a wheelchair and was regularly monitored by a doctor.
He spoke little, but told the court in a written statement he had no choice but to obey orders to carry out the killings.
“As a simple soldier, I learned to carry out orders,” Boere testified. “And I knew that if I didn’t carry out my orders I would be breaking my oath and would be shot myself.”
But the presiding judge said there was no evidence Boere ever even tried to question his orders, and characterized the murders as hit-style slayings, with Boere and his accomplices dressed in civilian clothes and surprising their victims at their homes or workplaces.
“These were murders that could hardly be outdone in terms of baseness and cowardice — beyond the respectability of any soldier,” the judge said. “The victims had no real chance.”
Born to a Dutch father and German mother in Eschweiler, Germany, Boere moved to the Netherlands when he was an infant. After the Germans had overrun the Netherlands, the 18-year-old Boere saw a recruiting poster for the Waffen SS. It offered German citizenship after two years of service and the possibility of becoming a policeman. Boere was one of 15 chosen out of 100 would-be recruits.
“I was very proud,” he told the court.
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.”
Boere killed pharmacist Fritz Hubert Ernst Bicknese with a pistol in his pharmacy, then he and the accomplice killed bicycle-shop owner Teun de Groot when he answered his door. They forced the third victim, Franz Wilhelm Kusters, into their car, drove him to another town, stopped on the pretence of a flat tire and shot him.
After the war, Boere escaped a prisoner-of-war camp in the Netherlands and returned to Germany.
He was sentenced to death in the Netherlands in 1949 — later commuted to life imprisonment — but the case always seemed to fall through the legal cracks.
A prosecutor in Dortmund quietly reopened the case, beginning from scratch and charging Boere with the three murders in 2008.