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 CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO