Heinrich Boere

Heinrich Boere (born 27 September 1921) is a convicted Dutch war criminal and former member of the Waffen-SS.

Boere was born in Eschweiler, Germany, to a Dutch father and a German mother, but his parents moved to Maastricht when he was two years old. He volunteered for the Waffen-SS in September 1940, only months after the German occupation of the Netherlands. In June 1941 at the age of 19 he left to fight on the Eastern Front. Of his activities there, nothing is known. In December 1942 he contracted pyelonephritis and was sent back to Maastricht.

In 1943, Boere became a member of a 15 man Waffen-SS squad of Dutch volunteers, the Sonderkommando Feldmeijer, tasked with killing members of the Dutch resistance and anti-German citizens as retaliation. Following attacks on German occupational forces and Dutch collaborators, the SS and Police Leader for the Netherlands, Hanns Albin Rauter, ordered the Sonderkommando to retaliate by assassinating civilians presumed to be in some way connected to the resistance.^[2] This operation, codenamed Silbertanne (Silver Fir), was responsible for probably 54 known killings, three of which Boere admitted to committing.^[3]

Boere’s first killing was committed in July 1944 when he and fellow SS member Jacobus Petrus Besteman received orders from the local Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) office in Breda to murder a pharmacist named Fritz Hubert Ernst Bicknese, father of twelve. Wearing civilian clothes, Boere and Besteman walked into Bicknese’s pharmacy and asked him his identity. Upon a positive reply, Boere fired three shots into Bicknese’s upper body, then Besteman fired several more shots as Bicknese lay on the floor.^[3]

In September 1944, on a Sunday, Boere and Hendrik Kromhout arrived in Voorschoten at the home of Teun de Groot, a bicycle-shop owner and father of five children, who hid fugitives in his shop and was an acquaintance of anti-Nazi activists. As De Groot, still in his pyjamas, fumbled with his wallet to show his ID papers, Boere and Kromhout shot him. They then went to the apartment of F.W. Kusters, forced him into their car, and drove out of town. The pair then falsely claimed that they had a flat tire, stopped the vehicle and shot Kusters.