Heinrich Boere, 88, on trial for war crimes, described in chilling detail to a German court Tuesday how he assassinated three Dutch civilians in 1944 for the Nazi SS, according to dpa. Boere was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment, by a Dutch court soon after the Second World War, but never served the term because Germany refuses to extradite its former soldiers. Boere had a to-do list of five people to liquidate because they were suspected of being active in the Dutch resistance. Two of them escaped death because they were not home when Boere came to call. The Germans occupied the Netherlands from 1940 to 1945. "I always regarded these assignments as military orders which I had to carry out," said Boere in a statement read to the court in Aachen, Germany by his lawyer. He described killing the first victim, Fritz Bicknese, a pharmacist in the city of Breda. Boere and his accomplice waited till the last woman customer had left the pharmacy, then asked the man behind the counter if he was Bicknese. "I then took my loaded pistol from my breast pocket and fired the first shot at Bicknese," he said. The two assassins fired several more bullets into him on the ground before hurrying away. He believed at the time that the SS "acts of reprisal" were necessary and justified, he said in the statement. "Today, 65 years after what we did, I obviously see it from a different point of view," he said. He did not apologize. Boere said that at the time, neither his conscience nor his feelings had suggested to him he was committing a crime. Before he was indicted, Boere had admitted to a news reporter that he killed people as a member of Feldmeijer, a wartime SS death squad. After years of delay, Germany arrested Boere at an old people"s home and put him on trial for the three murders. Boere"s father was Dutch and his mother was German. He is currently stateless. The trial, which is expected to continue until February, is one of two war-crimes trials under way in Germany. They may be the last involving Second World War events. The other involves John Demjanjuk, 89, who is accused of serving as an SS auxiliary guard at the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland in 1943. Demjanjuk, who was expelled from the United States in May, has refused to speak to the Munich court about the allegations. Boere said Feldmeijer was a top-secret unit run by the security arm of the SS which employed German soldiers who had previously been fighting Russia on the Eastern Front. They were required to sneak up on civilians and kill them with minimum fuss. His second mission six weeks after killing the pharmacist was to assassinate Teunis de Groot and Frans Willem Kusters in Voorschooten. De Groot, a bicycle merchant, came to the door of his home wearing only his underpants. "After ascertaining he was the person we sought, I took my loaded pistol from my right breast-pocket and shot him, aiming at the heart," said Boere. The two assassins did not kill Kusters on the spot because his wife was nearby. They took him away by car, claiming he was being taken away to interview, and killed him on a nearby road.
