Sates Bruins

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Siert Bruins on the way to court in Hagen (1979)

Siert Bruins , also Siegfried Bruns (born March 2, 1921 in Vlagtwedde , today part of Westerwolde ; † September 28, 2015 in Breckerfeld ), was a Dutch - German collaborator during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II .

biography

During the occupation of the Netherlands

Siert Bruins came from a poor family in Vlagtwedde ; he had three brothers. All four became members of the NSB . Siert and his younger brother Derk-Elsko joined the Weerbaarheidsafdeling , a division of the NSB, and later the Dutch SS .

The Bruins brothers were deployed on the Eastern Front. Siert Bruins was injured and, after retraining as an SS-Unterscharführer, was assigned to the security service (SD) of the border police post in Delfzijl . Delfzijl is a small port town in the north of the Netherlands with around 20,000 inhabitants at the time, whose 126 Jewish citizens were deported to Auschwitz in 1942 . Siert Bruins and his colleagues there had the task of tracking down and executing Jews who went into hiding who were hiding on the surrounding farms, as well as Dutch resistance fighters who helped them. A contemporary witness testified that Bruins and his group from the security service had spread “fear and terror” in Delfzijl and the surrounding area.

In 1944, Bruins and his commando arrested the 36-year-old resistance fighter Aldert Klaas Dijkema and took him in a car to his home village of Appingedam in the province of Groningen . They ordered Dijkema to get out of the car and go to a nearby factory. Bruins and SS-Oberscharführer August Neuhäuser followed him, and a few minutes later Dijkema was shot to death. In April 1945, when nearby Groningen had already been liberated by Canadian troops, the SS commando from Delfzijl seized Bruins, two fugitive Jewish brothers - Lazarus and Meijer Sleutelberg -, forced them to dig their own graves and murdered them. A few hours later, Bruins and other German and Dutch members of the SD Delfzijl took a boat across the Ems to Emden , Germany.

After the war

After his escape, Siert Bruins took the name Siegfried Bruns in Germany ; Due to his membership in the SS, he had German citizenship through a Führer decree of May 1943. His wife, with whom he had been married since March 1945, was sentenced to three years of forced labor and ten years of losing the right to vote after the end of the war in the Netherlands because of her political proximity to the occupiers . In the early 1950s, Bruins settled with his wife and two sons in the small town of Breckerfeld in the north-western Sauerland and set up a horticultural business . Other old Nazis and war criminals lived nearby , such as Bruins' brother Derk-Elsko (1923–1986) and Herbertus Bikker , with whom Bruins was friends.

Legal proceedings

In the Netherlands, Bruins was sentenced to death in absentia in 1949 for the murders of Aldert Dijkema and the Jewish brothers Laas and Meijer Sleutelberg . The death sentence was later - like many others - commuted to life imprisonment. According to the 1949 ruling, Dijkema was jointly shot at least four times in the back by Bruins and von Neuhäuser. In the Dutch newspapers he was nicknamed Beest or Beul (executioner) van Appingedam . His whereabouts were unknown.

In 1978, Simon Wiesenthal tracked down the Bruins brothers after Siert Bruins' son had presented his father's Dutch passport when he was asked to marry . The public prosecutor's office in Hagen refused to investigate, whereupon a group of former Dutch resistance fighters considered kidnapping Bruins to the Netherlands. With the help of a " decoy ", Bruins was to be persuaded to take a sightseeing flight in a sport airplane and brought to the Netherlands, but the plan failed. It was only when Wiesenthal stubbornly insisted that Bruins was arrested and charged; extradition was out of the question due to his German nationality.

In February 1979 the trial of Siert Bruins was opened before the Hagen District Court with charges of murdering the Sleutelberg brothers; the killing of Dijkema was counted as manslaughter and was therefore statute barred. In 1980 he was sentenced to seven years ' imprisonment for aiding and abetting murder, as no personal involvement in the case of the Sleutelbergs could be proven; Bruins said he only "stood guard" during the execution. He served five years. After his arrest, friends and acquaintances collected signatures for his release; Members of the local bowling club called him a "decent and welcome resident".

The legal opinion in Germany changed in 2010 with the trial of another Dutch Nazi criminal, Heinrich Boere , who killed three resistance fighters. He was proven to be treacherous , which meant that his deeds were regarded as murders that did not expire. Boere was sentenced to life imprisonment. The German historian Stephan Stracke advocated the reopening of the case against Bruins. At the beginning of 2012, the German judiciary opened a new investigation against Bruins. At the end of November 2012, Bruins was charged in Germany with the murder of Aldert Klaas Dijkema in September 1944. Dijkema's 97-year-old sister was a joint plaintiff.

The trial against the now 92-year-old Bruins began on September 2, 2013. At the end of November of the same year, his litigation was established. Bruins denied having shot the man and accused his superior Neuhäuser († 1985). Dijkema tried to flee, he claimed, which is why Neuhäuser shot him from behind. The meanwhile deceased Neuhäuser, in turn, had testified years earlier that they had both shot at Dijkema.

On January 8, 2014, the trial was discontinued without a verdict, as the court believed that it could no longer be determined whether Dijkema had been murdered: the exact course of events could not be reconstructed. There was only evidence of a manslaughter, which is now statute-barred.

At the time of his death in 2015, Siert Bruins was considered the last surviving Dutch war criminal. David Barnouw from the Dutch NIOD Instituut voor Oorlogs-, Holocaust- and Genocidestudies was convinced that there are still "hundreds of unidentified SS volunteers".

Web links

Commons : Siert Bruins  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Siert en Derk-Elsko Bruins - Verzet en verraad. In: Drenthe in de oorlog. Retrieved April 24, 2021 .
  2. ↑ a b c d Stories from the German provinces - history that writes the wrong life: Hagev XIV: Siert Bruins. In: deutschegeschichtenblog.wordpress.com. April 11, 2016, accessed April 24, 2021 .
  3. ↑ War crimes: borne by the place. In: Der Spiegel . 29/1979, July 15, 1979, accessed April 25, 2021 .
  4. ↑ a b Treating strafzaak contract: Sapke Bruins: Ik wist van niets. In: Reformatory Dagblad . November 13, 1979, accessed April 25, 2021 (Dutch, reproduced on digibron.nl).
  5. ^ Stephan Stracke: Nazi paradise Germany. In: texte.blogsport.eu. May 19, 2006, accessed April 25, 2021 .
  6. ↑ a b c d e Wierd Duk: Siert-Bruins-Trial: A Nazi criminal goes unpunished. In: Zeit Online. January 8, 2014, accessed May 23, 2021 .
  7. ↑ Trials: murder trial against former SS men suspended. In: Zeit Online . January 8, 2014, accessed April 25, 2021 .
  8. ↑ a b Tobias Müller: Nazi Crimes: The "Executioner of Appingedam". In: juedische-allgemeine.de . September 2, 2013, accessed April 25, 2021 .
  9. ^ Murder trial against former SS man Siert Bruins: shootings are the order of the day. In: Berliner Zeitung . September 17, 2013, accessed April 25, 2021 .
  10. ↑ Murder Trial: "Bruins knew exactly what should happen". In: welt.de . September 23, 2013, accessed April 26, 2021 .
  11. ↑ Reading of old statements in the Nazi trial - accomplices incriminated Bruins. In: wa.de . September 23, 2013, accessed April 26, 2021 .
  12. ↑ Siert Bruins free again: murder trial against SS men stopped. In: Berliner Zeitung. January 8, 2014, accessed April 25, 2021 .
  13. ↑ Profiel Siert Bruins: 'Het beest van Appingedam'. In: NU.nl. October 13, 2015, accessed April 24, 2021 (Dutch).
personal data
SURNAME Bruins, Siert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bruns, Siegfried
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Dutch collaborator during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II
DATE OF BIRTH March 2, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Expanse
DATE OF DEATH September 28, 2015
PLACE OF DEATH Breckerfeld