Klaas Carel Faber (born 20 January 1922 in Haarlem, North Holland), is a convicted Dutch-German war criminal. He is the son of Pieter Faber and Carolina Josephine Henriëtte Bakker, and the brother of Pieter Johan Faber, who was executed for war crimes in 1948.
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Faber came from a family with a strong Dutch National Socialist background.[1] Faber joined the Waffen SS a month after the German occupation of the Netherlands. After five months, he abandoned military training for less demanding police jobs in Rotterdam and The Hague.[2] From 1943 to 1944 he was part of a firing squad at the Westerbork concentration camp, the camp Anne Frank passed through on her way to her death at Belsen.[1][3] He was radicalized when his father Peter Faber, who was a baker at Heemstede, was killed by Hannie Schaft of the Dutch resistance on June 8, 1944.[1][2] He participated in the SS's "Silbertanne" (Silver Fir)) death squad which targeted members of the Dutch resistance, and those who hid Jews and opposed Nazism.[4] He was also a member of Sonderkommando Feldmeijer, which assassinated prominent Dutch citizens.,[5] and served as a bodyguard to Dutch Nazi leader Anton Mussert.[1][5]
After the war, Klaas Carel Faber was tried by a Dutch court and sentenced to death by firing squad in June 1947, for the murder of at least 11 persons during the war.[6] The Dutch court stated that the Faber brothers were "two of the worst criminals of the SS".[7] Pieter Faber was executed in 1948.[7] On 14 January 1948, Faber's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. However, on 26 December 1952, he escaped from prison in Breda, with Herbertus Bikker, Sander Borgers and four other former members of the Dutch SS, and the same evening crossed the border into Germany.[8] The escape may have been masterminded by the Stichting Oud Politieke Deliquenten an organisation of former Dutch fascists and collaborators.[8] As a former member of the SS, Faber had obtained German citizenship.[9] Following his escape Faber went on to live in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt and before retirement worked for the car manufacturer Audi as an office clerk.[7][10]
In 1957, a German court dismissed charges against him for lack of evidence.[3][11] In 1952 Faber obtained German citizenship; at the time a Nazi-era law granted citizenship to foreign Nazi collaborators.[7] Two extradition requests were made by the Dutch in 1954 and 2004 to have Faber returned to complete his sentence. Both requests were denied by the German authorities,[7] the second referring to the 1957 decision of lack of evidence.[11] When new evidence was presented to a Munich court in 2006, the cases were viewed as manslaughter as opposed to murder, and thus outside the statute of limitations. A new arrest warrant from Dutch authorities was required to reopen the case.[11]
In April 2009 Faber was listed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center as one of most important Nazi era war criminals still at large.[12] The center noted that he was a member of the Sonderkommando Feldmeijer execution squad.[7] In July 2009 it was reported that the German government may want to prosecute Faber after all[6] though other sources say that he enjoys immunity from prosecution.[13] In August 2010, following the petition of more than 150 lawyers organized by Jerusalem-based lawyer David Schonberg which pressed the Israeli government to demand that Germany enforce Faber's sentence or extradite him to the Netherlands, and change its policy of allowing Nazi war crimes suspects to escape prosecution. Israel's justice minister, Prof. Ya'akov Ne'eman, wrote to the German justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, asking that justice would be carried out.
In November 2010, the Netherlands issued a European Arrest Warrant for Faber, the first the country has issued for a war criminal.[14][15] The application queries the legality of Faber's German citizenship given because of his membership in the SS.[3][7] A Justice official from Bavarian justice stated that the request would be considered, "but as far as I know, there is nothing new".[7]