Ex-Nazi, 90, Starts Life Sentence

A 90-year-old former member of the Nazi SS is heading to prison for murder—67 years later. An ambulance picked up the wheelchair-bound Heinrich Boere at his nursing home in Germany and carried him to a prison hospital, the BBC reports. A medical expert ruled him fit to serve his term for the killing of three Dutch people in 1944. He has admitted to the killings, saying he was following orders and would otherwise have faced a concentration camp. An appeal of his sentence was rejected.

"At no time in 1944 did I act with the feeling that I was committing a crime," he said in court; now, he says he feels differently. But the judge called the killings "totally random." The half-German, half-Dutch Boere was initially convicted of the killings in 1949 in Amsterdam, but he wasn't extradited. Decades later, a German court rejected the conviction because Boere hadn't been at the trial. He was finally indicted in Germany in 2008 and sentenced last year. (More Heinrich Boere stories.)