Former SS officer Klaas Carel Faber was added to the global list of Nazis who escaped justice over the weekend after he died at the age of 90 in Germany. Faber, who was born in Holland, escaped from a Dutch prison in 1952 after being convicted of murder during World War II and sentenced to life in prison. Despite his conviction and sentencing, Faber managed to escape from prison and made his way to Germany, never changing his identity and living the remainder of his life there in relative quiet. Born and raised in Holland, Faber joined the SS a short time after the Nazis invaded his country. The Nazi sympathizer climbed through the ranks, eventually becoming a Gestapo officer presiding over executions at the Westerbork transit camp, a detention and transit camp that functioned during the war as an assembly point for Italian and Dutch Jews on their way to Nazi concentration camps. Faber's systematic murder of Dutch Jews and resistance fighters landed him in a Dutch court in 1947. During his trial, prosecutors succeeded in proving his involvement in only 22 incidents of murder, although he was suspected of many more. The charges against him though were enough to warrant a death sentence, although the sentence was commuted to life in prison at a later time. Faber spent only a few years in prison and in 1952 he escaped together with six other Nazi officers. The group fled across the border into Germany unimpeded and Faber, who was granted German citizenship in 1943, began his new life as a German citizen. Several attempts by Dutch legal authorities to bring Faber back to Holland to complete his sentence were thwarted by the German legal system and the ex-SS officer lived a trouble-free life for the next 60 years in Germany. Meanwhile, Germany's medical association has adopted a declaration apologizing for sadistic experiments and other actions of doctors under the Nazis. In the statement adopted earlier this week in Nuremberg, the association said many doctors under the Nazis were "guilty, contrary to their mission to heal, of scores of human rights violations and we ask the forgiveness of their victims, living and deceased, and of their descendants." In addition to performing pseudo-scientific experiments on concentration camp inmates, German doctors also were key to the Nazi's program of forced sterilization or euthanasia of the mentally ill or others deemed "unworthy of life." The medical association says "these crimes were not the actions of individual doctors but involved leading members of the medical community" and should be taken as a warning for the future.
