An octogenarian SS assassin has been given a life sentence for the cold-blooded murder of three civilians in Nazi-occupied Netherlands after he admitted killing was "easy - bend a finger. Bang. Dead."

Heinrich Boere (left) sits in his wheelchair next to his lawyer Gordon Christiansen Photo: AP
Heinrich Boere, 88, was sentenced by a German court for the 1944 murders after defying justice and escaping a Dutch conviction as a Nazi assassin and traitor for over 60 years.

"These were murders that could hardly be outdone in terms of baseness and cowardice - beyond the respectability of any soldier," said Gerd Nohl, the presiding judge in a court in the German cathedral city of Aachen.

Boere, who escaped a Dutch prisoner of war camp in 1947 to flee to Germany, showed no emotion from the wheelchair, where he sat as the verdict was read.

As a Dutch national, with a German mother, Boere volunteered, in 1943, to join a special Waffen SS unit charged with killing his countrymen in reprisals for resistance attacks.

The squad, codenamed Silbertanne, or Silver Pine, wore civilian clothes and carried out 54 killings. Boere confessed to three carried out in 1944.

He and an accomplice shot Fritz Bicknese in the pharmacy where he worked and Teunis de Groot, a bicycle shop owner, at his home. They killed Frans-Willem Kusters after driving him to woods.

"At last we have got him. Better late than never," said Teun de Groot, the 77-year-old son of the shop owner, following the verdict.

Boere, who has been living in a nursing home in Eschweiler, just outside Aachen, has admitted to the murders on numerous occasions.

"Yes, I got rid of them. It was easy. You just had to bend a finger. Bang! Dead!," he said in 2008.

He has also defended his actions. "It was another time, with different rules. When we knew for sure we had the right person, we shot him dead, at the door. I didn't feel anything, it was work." He had argued that he risked being sent to a concentration camp if he refused orders.

But the German judge pointed out that the unit carried out the murders either early in the morning or late in the evening. The risk to Boere when he shot the three men was "zero", he said.

For decades, Boere managed to escape justice and prison by following the path of other former SS men and finding shelter in Germany, where he worked until 1976 as a coal miner.

In 1984, a German court refused to extradite him to the Netherlands because it was thought he had German nationality as well as Dutch. Germany as a rule does not extradite its citizens.

Another German court ruled in 2007 that a 1949 Dutch death sentence, later commuted to life, was invalid because Boere, a fugitive, was unable to present a defence.

Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said: "We welcome the conviction, we welcome the sentence and this is again another proof that even at this point it is possible to bring Nazi war criminals to justice."

But, even following the sentence, Boere will continue remain free after his lawyer announced an appeal to a German Federal Court, a process that could last three years if it is taken to the European Court of Human Rights.

telegraph.co.uk