Ex-Nazi charged with World War II killing

• Tweet

HAGEN, Germany, Nov. 26 (UPI) -- Former Nazi SS member Siert Bruins has been charged by a German court with the 1944 assassination of a Dutch World War II resistance fighter.

Bruins, 91, a Dutch native who acquired German citizenship for services to the German army during World War II, was sentenced in absentia to death by the Netherlands in 1949 and served a seven-year prison sentence in the 1980s for the deaths of two Dutch Jews during wartime, the International Business Times said Monday.

A court in Hagen, Germany, will now determine if evidence is sufficient to try him for the death of Aldert Klaas Dijkema, a Dutch resistance leader captured and shot to death by Nazis near the German border in Appingedam, Netherlands.

Bruins and a since-deceased comrade, August Neuhauser, allegedly shot Dijkema and then claimed he tried to escape, the newspaper said.

"This is wonderful. It again reinforces that it is still possible to bring Nazi war criminals to justice," said Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter with Israel's Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Bruins now resides in Dortmund, Germany.