A 92-year-old former member of the Waffen SS, the military arm of the Nazi Party, will be tried in the German town of Hagen over alleged participation in the murder of a Dutch resistance fighter, German media reported Monday.
Dutch-born German national Siert Bruins will appear in court on 2 September, facing charges of killing Aldert Klaas Dijkema in September 1944 while stationed on the Dutch-German border.
Dijkema was shot four times in the back in the Appingedam area east of Groningen almost 70 years ago. The trial is considered as one of the last of its kind in Germany.
If convicted, the 92-year old faces a life sentence. German media report, however, that due his age and different types of sickness, Bruins can negotiate for up to three hours per day imprisonment.
BBC recaps that a court in the Netherlands convicted Bruins in absentia of participating in three shootings, including that of Dijkema, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. He was sentenced to death in 1949, a ruling later commuted to life imprisonment.
However, the former SS officer avoided serving his sentence having fled to Germany, which does not extradite its own nationals.
Bruins did serve a seven-year jail term in Germany in the 1980's after a court convicted him of being an accessory in the murder of two Jewish brothers in the Netherlands in April 1945.
The 92-year old is one of the last presumed Nazi criminals detained by the German authorities, as was another former SS officer, Heinrich Boere, who was sentenced to life in March 2010 for the murder of three Dutch civilians.
Local media recap that since the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-1946, around 106 000 German or Nazi soldiers have been accused of war crimes. About 13 000 have been found guilty and around half sentenced, according to the authority charged with clearing up Nazi crimes.
The trial of Bruins will go against the background of one of Germany's most high-profile neo-Nazi trials in post-war period which began in May this year. Beate Zschäpe and four others alleged members of National Socialist Underground (NSU), a neo-Nazi gang randomly discovered in 2011, have been charged with complicity in the murders of eight ethnic Turks, a Greek immigrant and a German policewoman between 2000 and 2007.
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