'Unrepentant Nazi Murderer' Dies a Free Man at 93

Soren Kam was Denmark's most-wanted Nazi
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 31, 2015 2:14 AM CDT
'Unrepentant Nazi Murderer' Dies a Free Man at 93
Soren Kam was convicted in absentia of the murder.   (Danish Criminal Archives)

In what a top Nazi hunter calls a "terrible failure of the Bavarian judicial authorities," one of Denmark's most-wanted Nazis has died a free man at the age of 93. Soren Kam, one of the highest-profile Danish Nazis during World War II, was wanted in his homeland for the 1943 kidnap and murder of anti-Nazi newspaper editor Carl Henrik Clemmensen, the Copenhagen Post reports. He fled to Germany after the war and the country refused to extradite him back to Denmark after he was granted citizenship in 1956. Kam—who died on March 23, around two weeks after his wife, according to a death notice—also fought on the Eastern Front with the Waffen SS and was granted the Knight's Cross medal by Adolf Hitler in 1945.

Kam, who was the Simon Wiesenthal Center's No. 5 most wanted war criminal, "should have finished his miserable life in jail, whether in Denmark or Germany," Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff tells Reuters, calling him a "totally unrepentant Nazi murderer." "The failure to hold him accountable will only inspire the contemporary heirs of the Nazis to consider following in his footsteps," Zuroff says. Kam successfully fought extradition attempts by claiming that he feared for his life and only shot Clemmensen after he was already dead, reports the Telegraph, which tracked Kam down to his home in a peaceful Munich suburb in 2007 and was confronted by his angry daughter. (Archaeologists recently found a hidden Nazi lair deep in the jungle.)

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