Germany: Nazi criminal Bikker dead
UK's Daily Telegraph says Berlin police finally able to confirm death of 'hangman of Ommen', one year after he was buried in Ruhr city of Hagen. Former SS member apparently died of natural causes at 93
Herbertus Bikker, a wanted Dutch Nazi war criminal known as 'the hangman of Ommen', was confirmed dead at the age of 93, the British Daily Telegraph reported Thursday.
Although he died last year, the report said, German police have only now confirmed that he was buried in the Ruhr city of Hagen after dieing peacefully, aged 93, at home.
Bikker, a member of the Waffen SS, became infamous as De Beul van Ommen for his cruelty while serving as a prison guard at the Erika concentration camp, in the Dutch province of Overijssel.
He also served in an elite SS regiment on the Eastern Front and took part in Nazi punishment raids in the Netherlands.
According to the report, after the war, Bikker was sentenced to death the murder of the Dutch resistance fighter Jan Houtman in November 1944, during an SS raid.
His sentence was commuted to life-long imprisonment without parole but in 1952 he escaped from a jail in Breda with six other war criminals and fled to Germany.
As a former Waffen-SS soldier, Bikker became a German citizen and could not be extradited to the Netherlands after he was finally tracked down in 1995.
A new German trial for the Houtman murder was abandoned after five months in February 2004 when Bikker was judged mentally incapable of understanding the judicial proceedings against him.
Bikker lived in the Ruhr city of Hagen as a pensioner until his death in November last year, which was not made public until Dutch press reports on Wednesday.
