Soren Kam should suffer like his victims

Soren Kam is an 86-year-old, Danish-born, former SS officer and citizen of Bavaria, who in mid-1943 took part in the brutal murder of an anti-Nazi newspaper editor, Carl Henrick Clemmensen, in Denmark.

Obersturmfuehrer Kam led a group of three Nazi thugs who, the editor's daughter was later told, fired through her father's hands as he desperately tried to protect himself. The second most highly decorated Danish Nazi, Kam escaped prosecution for the murder although another Dane, Knud Helweg-Larsen, was hanged for it in 1946.

Kam also seized the records of Denmark's Jewish community, hoping thereby to facilitate its massacre in the Holocaust. As a result, he is on the list of the top 10 most-wanted Nazis of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. 

Recently he was tracked down by the BBC and interviewed. In the course of answering questions in the street, Kam claimed the murder was an "unfortunate accident" but crucially did not deny being present, adding that "I was ordered to be there", an excuse that should have died out at the Nuremberg Trials.

The Danish government has demanded the extradition of Kam, who has been a citizen of Bavaria since - yes, you've guessed it - 1945. Yet the Bavarian government and courts have denied extradition, on the grounds that there is not enough evidence to show that Kam was involved, despite his taped admission.

The whole issue will now be taken up by the EU Justice Commissioner, with all the delay, obfuscation and political manouevring that that implies, as the opportunity to make Kam pay for his 'alleged' crime slips away.

Meanwhile one can almost hear the arguments that are being made in Bavaria for allowing Kam to live out his life in peace there: it was all a long time ago; he's a frail old man; he was only obeying orders; where's the proof that would stand up in a modern court of law, and so on and so on.

Overall, Germany has been faultless in facing up to, and in many cases paying up for, her Nazi past. Compared to the Japanese, French, Swiss, Swedes and some others, the Germans have not tried to construct a national myth for the years 1939-45 and their actions during that time. (Indeed, although Denmark saved 7,000 of her Jewish population in the war, twice that number of Danes volunteered to shed their Aryan blood on the Eastern Front for the Fuhrer, many committing terrible war crimes against civilians in the process.)

Yet it seems that Bavaria, which has historically always been the least de-Nazified part of Germany, is now about to sully the otherwise blameless record of the rest of the Federal Republic by effectively protecting Soren Kam from well-deserved prosecution for his part in individual murder and the Holocaust.

Yes, he's a frail old man, but there's no statute of limitations on murder, and if it had been up to him Adolf Hitler - whom he met - would have ruled Europe until he too was a frail old man, with unimaginable consequences for Western civilisation.

It might well be that it is impossible to prove forensically today in a court of law that Soren Kam actually pulled one of the triggers that killed the campaigning anti-Nazi journalist. All the witnesses are long dead, and he was smart enough not to admit it on camera. But that does not invalidate the extradition proceedings in any way. Why should this man be accorded the luxury of a happy old age, something that his actions over the Jewish register denied those thousands of Danish Jews who did not escape?

Rather, though it sounds harsh to say so, the remainder of Kam's life, be it long or short, should now be spent in that nightmare world of depositions, extradition proceedings, public trial, cross-examinations, camera lights, huge legal fees and - even if acquitted on lack of evidence - years of debilitating worry and fear. We can be certain that this experience will not constitute a tithe of what he and his SS colleagues visited upon the genuinely innocent during the Second World War. ·