Sonderkommando silver fir

The Sonderkommando Silbertanne (also Sonderkommando Feldmeijer after its commander Henk Feldmeijer ) was a command of the Dutch SS and was entrusted with the execution of the so-called “Silbertanne” murders in the occupied Netherlands from September 1943 to September 1944. His relatives were Dutch SS members or veterans who had fought with the Germans on the Eastern Front.

background

In response to a series of attacks by Dutch resistance fighters , in which, among others, Hendrik Alexander Seyffardt , commander of the Dutch Volunteer Legion, was killed, the SS committed retaliatory murders of civilians under the code name silver fir . For every German or Dutch person who died and who had worked with the occupiers, three to five Dutch resistance fighters or Dutch people who were known to work with resistance circles or who had an "anti-German" attitude should be killed. In this way, at least 54 Dutch people were murdered by the SS.

The SS Sonderkommando had the task of breaking all resistance in the occupied Netherlands through indiscriminate shootings , which went directly back to Hitler and was classified as a secret Reich business . If there were attacks by underground fighters against Germans or collaborators, the Higher SS and Police Leader Hanns Albin Rauter set the SS command in march with the code word “Silbertanne”. Certain civilians were then shot dead. One of the most famous victims of the command was the Dutch writer AM de Jong .

Executives of the Sonderkommando, which consisted of 15 men in 1944, were Heinrich Boere , Willem Polak , Maarten Kuiper , Sander Borgers , Klaas Carel Faber , his brother Pieter Johan Faber , Daniel Bernard and Lambertus van Gog .

Legal processing

Kuiper, PJ Faber and Rauter were sentenced to death by a Dutch court after the end of the war and executed in 1948 and 1949 respectively . The other members of the commando were able to evade legal prosecution by fleeing abroad (Borgers, KC Faber, van Gog, Boere) or were acquitted for lack of evidence (Bernard). Polak evaded the execution of his life sentence by fleeing to Germany after a prison break.

Heinrich Boere confessed to the Aachen regional court on December 8, 2009 that he had shot three people during the action. From his point of view at the time, however, it was not a crime. In March 2010 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Since he had already been convicted of this crime in the Netherlands, he filed a constitutional complaint against this judgment (Article 50 of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights ). However, this was not accepted for decision.

In August 2010, the Federal Ministry of Justice ordered the Free State of Bavaria to review the 60-year-old verdict of the Dutch judiciary against Klaas Carel Faber. Faber, who lived undisturbed in Ingolstadt until his death in May 2012, is said to have been responsible for a total of 22 murders by the Sonderkommando.