The Public Prosecutor has demanded a four year prison sentence for Jan Bulder, a Dutch Nazi collaborator, for his role in the deportation of at least 20 Jews from Holland in 1944, all of whom perished at Auschwitz.
Bulder, 67, first denied the charges but later confessed that he tracked down and arrested Jews in hiding and handed them over to the Germans. He admitted that he worked for the so-called “Judenreferat 4-B” in The Hague during the Nazi occupation of Holland.
Bulder was arrested as a collaborator soon after the liberation of Holland in 1945 but managed to escape to South Africa where he lived until 1969. He returned to Holland under an assumed name but used his true name later on the assumption that the statute of limitations on the prosecution of war criminals was in effect. The statute was in fact deleted from the Dutch Penal Code in 1971.
Bulder was arrested last January when he landed at Schiphol Airport from a vacation in Spain and was brought to trial shortly afterwards. He claimed that he had been forced to work for the Germans in order to avoid a year’s imprisonment imposed on him by the Nazis for being absent without leave from the Waffen SS unit in which he served on the Eastern front during World War II. (By Henriette Boas)
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