BERLIN (Reuters) - An 88-year-old former SS death squad member admitted in a German court on Tuesday that he had killed three Dutch civilians in World War Two but said he had been following orders.

Heinrich Boere, who is on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of most wanted war crime suspects from World War Two, went on trial in October in the western city of Aachen charged with the 1944 killings.

"His lawyer read a statement to the court which acknowledged he had shot dead the three civilians," said a spokesman for the Aachen court.

"He also said he was acting upon orders and that at the time, he had viewed this kind of behaviour as part of a war situation," added the spokesman.

Boere was captured by U.S. forces in the Netherlands after the war and confessed to killing the three Dutch civilians when he was a member of an SS squad targeting anti-Nazi resistance fighters.

Boere escaped and fled to Germany before being sentenced to death in absentia in the Netherlands in 1949. After refusing a 1980 Dutch extradition request, a German court indicted him in April 2008.

German media have reported that Boere and other members of the squad shot dead a chemist in his shop in the Dutch town of Breda, as well as a bicycle seller and another man in Voorschoten in the southern Netherlands.

The case has attracted wide international interest, not least because it has coincided with the case of John Demjanjuk, 89, who went on trial last week in Munich on charges of helping to kill 27,900 Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland.

Experts say a new generation of lawyers are seeking to prosecute the last remaining war crime suspects and are keen to improve Germany's patchy record of bringing former Nazis to justice.

In January, Boere's case nearly collapsed due to a court ruling that he was unfit for trial mainly due to a heart condition but the ruling was overturned on appeal. The proceedings will resume on Friday.

reuters.com