A German court has decided to shelve the case against a 92-year-old former member of the Nazi SS, saying there were too many gaps in the evidence some 70 years later to deliver a verdict.
Dutch-born Siert Bruins, now a German citizen, went on trial in September in the western city of Hagen on charges that he executed a resistance fighter in the northern Netherlands in 1944. He is accused of killing resistance fighter Aldert Klaas Dijkema in September 1944 in Appingedam, near the German border in the northern Netherlands.
Bruins’s lawyer argued his client didn’t know of plans to kill the fighter, and that another now-deceased SS man pulled the trigger. The killing happened at a time when Allied forces had entered the Netherlands and were pushing back the occupying German troops.
The dpa news agency reported Wednesday that the court shelved the case instead of delivering a verdict, saying too much evidence was missing and it was no longer possible to question many of the witnesses.
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