Enjoying a Peaceful Old Age: Suspected Nazi War Criminal Eludes German Justice System

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After 1945, a Dutch court initially sentenced Klaas F. to death, but that sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. But he did not stay in prison for very long. On Dec. 26, 1952, F. and six other convicted Nazi war criminals escaped from prison in Breda while a film was being shown.

They crossed the Dutch-German border at Ubbergen. The following day, the district court in Kleve fined the men 10 marks each for illegal entry -- but a court employee gave them the money and even added a little extra for their onward journey. "They were all comrades in the court," recalled one of the escaped prisoners in a 1997 interview with the German magazine Stern.

Two days later, the Dutch authorities in Germany again sought the extradition of the fugitives -- without success. Bonn refused, citing a 1943 decree by Adolf Hitler, according to which all members of the Waffen-SS were automatically German citizens. But didn't F. claim he had refused to swear the oath of allegiance to the Führer? Was he therefore definitely a member of the SS or not? The questions remained unanswered.

Then in 1957, the Düsseldorf District Court also refused to initiate proceedings against the escapees, claiming that there was insufficient evidence against them. For F. it was exactly the kind of free pass that he needed. He moved to Ingolstadt and lived a suitably respectable, bourgeois life in the prosperous West Germany of the "economic miracle" era.

'Heaps of Material'

In 2003, the Dutch government, under pressure from the victims' families, requested that F. serve in Germany the life sentence that he had been given in 1947. But the Ingolstadt District Court, which now had jurisdiction over the former SS member, said the request was inadmissible. After all, a German court -- in the form of the Düsseldorf District Court in 1957 -- had already let F. off the hook.

Then the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Dortmund got involved, as its director Ulrich Maass confirmed to SPIEGEL ONLINE. The office's investigators had managed to gather "heaps of material" against F. in Germany and the Netherlands. A fresh indictment on the basis of this evidence might have been possible, says Maass.

However the public prosecutor in Munich that was responsible for the case, which had received the files on Klaas F. from Maass in 2006, had a different view of the matter. In their opinion, F. had shot his victims in the conviction that he was carrying out valid death sentences against resistance fighters. In F.'s case, there is no evidence of the base motives which, under German law, are a defining characteristic of murder, said Thomas Steinkraus-Koch, a spokesman for the Munich public prosecutor. In which case, one had to give the defendant the benefit of the doubt and assume it was manslaughter, Steinkraus-Koch explained. But in the case of F., the crime of manslaughter would have become time-barred in 1990, he added.

Unless new evidence that supports the suspicion of murder turns up, the case is now closed for German investigators, Steinkraus-Koch said. The Chief Public Prosecutor's Office has repeatedly confirmed the termination of the proceedings, the last time in May 2008. In any case, the five binders relating to the case of Klaas F. have now been returned to the archive, Steinkraus-Koch said.

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• Part 1: Suspected Nazi War Criminal Eludes German Justice System
• Part 2: A Christmas Prison Break