Bavaria has refused to extradite a convicted Nazi war criminal back to the Netherlands, from where he broke out of jail in 1952, Germany's justice ministry said Wednesday.

The ruling comes nearly six months after Dutch prosecutors issued a European arrest warrant for Klaas Carel Faber, 89, third on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of wanted Nazis, who is living freely in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt.

A federal justice ministry spokeswoman said the case had been carefully re-examined, but was now definitively buried with Wednesday's decision.

Faber, a member of a Nazi SS unit, was sentenced to death by a Dutch court in 1947 for murdering 22 Jews in the occupied Netherlands during World War II although this was later commuted to life imprisonment.

He escaped from Breda prison in the western Netherlands in 1952 with six other former SS men and fled to Germany, eventually settling in Ingolstadt in Bavaria where he worked for automaker Audi....