Life jail for ex-SS assassin for 1944 Dutch murders

AACHEN - Heinrich Boere, an 88-year-old who admits that he assassinated three suspected members of the Dutch resistance for the SS during the Second World War, was jailed for life Tuesday at the end of a murder trial in Aachen, Germany.

Boere, a native speaker of Dutch, served in the Feldmeijer death squad set up by the Nazi military organisation SS.

He described the 1944 assassinations in detail, but contended at the trial, which began last year, that he was only following orders and would have been executed for insubordination if he had disobeyed.

His lawyers had tried to have the case, one of a last rush of war crimes trials before all the suspects die of old age, thrown out of court, arguing the trial breached European Union laws of due process. But the court convicted him on three counts of murder.

It was not immediately clear after the verdict if Boere, who lived in an old people’s home before the trial and uses a wheelchair, would have to actually go to jail, because court-appointed doctors must first certify that he is medically fit enough to live in prison.

Boere described how he and another SS man wore civilian clothes during unannounced visits to people believed to oppose the Nazis.

Boere had a list of five people to liquidate because they were suspected of being active in the Dutch resistance. Two of them escaped death because they were not home when Boere came to call.

“I always regarded these assignments as military orders which I had to carry out,” said Boere in a statement via his lawyer.

He described killing the first victim, Fritz Bicknese, a pharmacist in the city of Breda. Boere and his accomplice waited till the last woman customer had left the pharmacy, then asked the man

behind the counter if he was Bicknese.

“I then took my loaded pistol from my breast pocket and fired the first shot at Bicknese,” he said. The two assassins fired several more bullets into him with silenced pistols before hurrying away.

He believed at the time that the SS “acts of reprisal” were necessary and justified, he said in the statement.

“Today, 65 years after what we did, I obviously see it from a different point of view,” he said. But he did not apologise.

Boere said that at the time, neither his conscience nor his feelings had suggested to him he was committing a crime.

His second mission six weeks after killing the pharmacist was to assassinate Teunis de Groot and Frans Willem Kusters.

The two SS men did not kill Kusters when they found him in the town of Voorschooten because his wife was nearby. They took him away by car, claiming he had been summoned for an interview, and killed him on a road nearby.

De Groot, a bicycle merchant, came to the door of his home in Wassenaar near The Hague wearing only his underpants.

“After ascertaining he was the person we sought, I took my loaded pistol from my right breast-pocket and shot him, aiming at the heart,” said Boere.

Tuin de Groot, son of the victim, was in court Tuesday to hear justice done to the assassin. In all, three men, sons of two of the victims, were represented at the Aachen trial as co-prosecutors.

Lawyers representing them called in vain for Boere to be additionally charged with causing the concentration-camp deaths of seven people. They said Boere’s undercover inquiries led to a sweep in which the Nazis arrested and tortured 52 people.

Many Dutch people joined the resistance against the 1940-1945 German occupation of their nation, mounting sabotage attacks, hiding political prisoners or helping downed Allied airmen to escape home.

A Dutch court sentenced Boere to death at a trial in absentia in 1949 and this was later commuted to life imprisonment, but he never served that sentence because Germany refuses to extradite any of its former soldiers.