Heinrich Boere

Feldmeijer in a uniform of the Dutch SS.

While in the southern German city of Munich, former camp guard, Demjanjuk stands trial, at the same time in Aachen, Germany, the former Dutch SS-volunteer Heinrich Boere stands trial.
Boere, born in a little village near Aachen, moved to the Dutch city of Maastricht at the age of 2. At a young age he worked in a factory when, at the age of 19, he volunteered to join the German SS. A year later he also volunteered to fight for the Germans in Russia, but he was forced to leave the SS-Army because of a kidney-illness. It is believed that some 22 000 Dutchmen volunteered for the SS, another 10 000 men volunteered for the NSKK (they served as transporttroops for the German Army).

In 1944 Boere was asked to join the murder-command of Feldmeijer (Feldmeijer was the leader of the Dutch SS). This was a group of Dutch volunteers, all SS-members or members of other collaborative groups, who hunted down and killed more than 50 members of various Dutch resistance groups. This operation is known as the Silbertanne-Aktion and it lasted from September 1943 until September 1944.

It is believed that this Silbertanne-Aktion was started off by the Germans after some murder attempts on NSB-members (NSB: Dutch National-Socialist Movement; compared to the German NSDAP) in the first half of 1943. On the 5th of February 1943 there was the attack on Hendrik Seyffardt, leader of the Dutch Volunteer Legion (they fought on the German side, most of them died on the eastern front in Russia). He died the next day of his shotwounds. The same resistance group committed some 10 attacks on high-ranked members of the NSB and on collaborating policemen, in the coming months. Two days later there was the attack on a high-ranked official of the NSB, H. Reydon. He died 6 months later. On March 23 1943 the mayor of Baexem (a village in Limburg) is murdered, he was a NSB-member.

In April and May 1944 Boere was also active for the SiPo Maastricht (SicherheitsPolizei: Security Police). During that time he worked for the SiPo as a V-man (Vertrauensmann: a person who infiltrated into resistance groups) and was one of the persons responsible for the arrest of 52 members of various resistance groups which were picked up during a razzia in 17th of May 1944 in the village of Helden-Panningen in the southern province of Limburg. Seven of them died in German camps.
These V-men, also women, were actively involved in infiltrating Dutch resistance groups, like the NV-Group, but they were also used to hunt down people who were hiding from the Germans. People who were in hiding like, people who had to work for the Germans, members of the Dutch army, pilots of American or English planes and Jewish people. Jewish people that were in hiding but were arrested by the SiPo were asked to work for them to catch more Jews.

In 1949 he was sentenced to death by a Dutch court. At that time Boere already managed to escape to Germany where he lived undisturbed in his birth-village Eschweiler. The conviction was later changed to life imprisonment and he lost his Dutch citizenship. Finally in march 2010 he was convicted again to life imprisonment, but this time by a German court. His appeal, later on, against this sentence, was denied. But until this day, he still leads the life of a free man. Another court has to decide whether he's fit to go to prison.
In September 2011 a court decided that Boere was healthy enough to go to prison and in December 2011 he was imprisoned in a prison-hospital. On December 1 2013, Boere died at the age of 92.

Sources;
www.waffen-ss.nl: Very extensive website, managed by Edwin Meinsma, about the Dutch SS and all related subjects,
Het verborgen front (The hidden front); by A.P.M. Cammaert, Leeuwarden, 1994; about the resistance movements in Limburg,
Newspaper articles in Trouw and Dagblad de Limburger,
The Wikipedia website.
Sluipmoordenaars (Assassins); by Inger Schaap, 2010; extensive study about the Silbertanne-Aktion killings..