Nazi Hitman Unfit For Trial, Court Rules

The attorney for Nazi hit man Heinrich Boere says a German court has ruled that his client is medically unfit for trial.

Gordon Christiansen told The AP that the Aachen state court made its decision on Wednesday.

Both court spokesman Georg Winkel and Dortmund prosecutor Ulrich Maass refused to comment.

Maass brought charges in April against the 86-year-old Boere for the World War II murders of three men in the Netherlands when he was a member of a Waffen SS death squad that targeted civilians in reprisal killings for resistance attacks.

Though Boere was sentenced to death in absentia by a Dutch court in 1949 - later commuted to life imprisonment - German courts have blocked attempts to extradite him or enforce the verdict here.

The son of a Dutch man and German woman, Boere was 18 when he joined the Waffen SS - the fanatical military organization faithful to Adolf Hitler's ideology - at the end of 1940, only months after his country had fallen to the Nazi blitzkrieg.

After taking part in the invasion of the Soviet Union, he ended up back in the Netherlands as part of a unit known as Silbertanne, or Silver Pine, which was composed mostly of Dutch volunteers given the job of killing their countrymen.

The unit is suspected of 54 killings, and Boere admitted after the war while in an Allied prison camp that he took part in three slayings, according to Dutch court documents.

Boere also described his participation in killings during an interview with a Dutch newspaper last year, but said he was working in an official capacity.

"I didn't feel anything, it was work. Orders were orders, otherwise it would have meant my skin. Later it began to bother me, now I'm sorry," he was quoted as saying by the newspaper Algemeen Dagblad.