Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Soren Kam, No. 5 Most Wanted Nazi, Dies a Free Man at 93

Soren Kam, No. 5 on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of most wanted war criminals, has died.

Kam, 93, a volunteer in the SS Viking Division and Denmark’s highest-ranking Nazi, died last week in Germany, where he fled in 1956 and obtained citizenship. Germany on several occasions refused to extradite him to Denmark, Reuters reported.

“The fact that Soren Kam, a totally unrepentant Nazi murderer, died a free man in Kempten (Germany) is a terrible failure of the Bavarian judicial authorities,” the Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff, said in a statement.

“Kam should have finished his miserable life in jail, whether in Denmark or Germany. The failure to hold him accountable will only inspire the contemporary heirs of the Nazis to consider following in his footsteps.”

A Danish court found Kam responsible for the 1943 murder of Danish anti-Nazi newspaper editor Carl Henrik Clemmensen, but Kam escaped to Germany before he could be punished. Kam’s accomplice in the crime was executed in 1946.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism so that we can be prepared for whatever news 2025 brings.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.