4/3/2015, 4:45 AM israelnationalnews.com
Fifth-Most Wanted Nazi Criminal Dies a Free Man
By Ben Ariel

Soren Kam, who was the fifth-most wanted war criminal on the Simon Wiesenthal Center list, dies at 93.

One of the most-wanted Nazis in the world, Soren Kam, has died at the age of 93 without having been punished for a murder conviction, The Independent reported on Thursday, citing German media.

Kam, a Danish former volunteer officer died on March 23, just a little more than a fortnight after his wife passed away, according to the German newspaper Allgauer Zeitung.

He was the fifth-most wanted war criminal by Jewish rights organization Simon Wiesenthal Center, which seeks to bring former Nazis to justice and educate about the Holocaust.

Kam had been a volunteer officer in the Schalburg Corps, a SS-Viking division, and was one of three men who killed Danish anti-Nazi newspaper editor Carl Henrik Clemmensen in 1943.

A Danish court convicted him in absentia of the murder after the war. Another man was executed for the same crime.

Kam had fled to Germany where he obtained citizenship in 1956 and his new home country had refused to extradite him to Denmark several times, according to Danish media cited by The Independent.

“The fact that Soren Kam, a totally unrepentant Nazi murderer, died a free man in Germany, is a terrible failure of the Bavarian judicial authorities,” Dr. Efraim Zuroff, from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said in a statement.

“Kam should have finished his miserable life in jail, whether in Denmark or Germany. The failure to hold him accountable will only inspire the contemporary heirs of the Nazis to consider following in his footsteps,” he added.

In recent years, Germany has begun a crackdown on Nazi war criminals. The crackdown began following the 2011 Munich trial of John Demjanjuk, a Nazi war criminal charged of assisting in the murder of 28,060 people at the Sobibor death camp and sentenced to five years. The former Nazi died in 2012.

In February it was announced that a 93-year-old former Auschwitz death camp officer will go on trial in Germany this month on charges of at least 300,000 counts of accessory to murder.

Several weeks later, a 93-year-old man, who was not identified, was charged in a German court with 170,000 counts of accessory to murder on allegations he served as an SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp.

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