Heinrich Boere
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Heinrich Boere (born 1921 ), is a convicted Dutch war criminal.
[edit] War crimes
Boere was a member of a 15 man Waffen-SS squad of Dutch volunteers code named Silbertanne, or Silver Pine, that was tasked with killing members of the Dutch resistance. Boere joined the SS only months after the German Occupation of the Netherlands in 1940. Silbertanne was responsible for 54 known killings, three of which Boere admitted to committing. [1]
Boere’s first killing was committed in July 1944 when he and fellow SS member Jacobus Petrus Besteman received orders from the local Sicherheitsdienst office in Breda to murder a pharmacist named Fritz Hubert Ernst Bicknese. Wearing civilian clothes, Boere and Besteman walked into Bicknese’s pharmacy and asked him his identity. Upon a positive reply, Boere fired three shots into Bicknese’s upper body, then Besteman fired several more shots as Bicknese lay on the floor. [1]
In September 1944 Boere and Hendrik Kromhout arrived in Voorschoten at the home of Teun de Groot, a bicycle-shop owner and father of five children who hid fugitives in his shop and was an acquaintance of anti-Nazi activists. As de Groot fumbled with his wallet to show his ID papers, Boere and Kromhout shot him dead. They then went to the apartment of F.W. Kusters, who was forced into their car, driven out of town, and shot when the pair, feigning a flat, tired to stop the car. [1]
[edit] Post-War years
In the immediate post-war years Boere spent two years in an Allied prisoner-of-war camp, where he was interrogated and admitted to the three slayings. After release from the camp, Boere fled to Germany. In 1949 Boere was convicted in a Dutch court for the three murders, but the German government has since refused to extradite him. The West Germany government was responsible for prosecuting war criminals, but Boere was never brought to trial. [1]
The Dutch government has continued to seek Boere’s extradition. In 1983 a German court refused the Dutch request on the grounds that Boere might have German citizenship, and Germany at that time did not permit extraditing its own nationals. In 2007 a court in Aachen ruled that Boere could serve his sentence in Germany, but an appeals court in Cologne overturned the ruling, saying that the 1949 conviction was invalid because Boere was unable to present a defense. Recently, Boere’s case has attracted a great deal of public attention and in 2007 opposition lawmakers brought the case up with the Dutch Ministry of Justice. Boere is listed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center as a Nazi war criminal at large. Besteman, Boere’s partner in Bicknese slaying, has served time in prison in the Netherlands for his war crimes. [1]
Today Boere lives in an old-age home in Eschweiler, Germany. [1]
On 14 April 2008 the state prosecution in Dortmund announced to be preparing to file charges against Heinrich Boere.[2]
