When Heinrich Boere is asked how he was able to shoot three Dutch resistance fighters, he tells interviewers: “Not difficult, you just curled your finger around the trigger and pulled. Bang!” And then he laughs.

The 88-year-old former Waffen SS member never hid his past, but has managed to use every possible loophole to escape trial and imprisonment. Yesterday, however, the robust pensioner finally reached the dock.

His case in Aachen, in western Germany, will be followed by the Munich trial of John Demjanjuk next month.

Mr Demjanjuk, 89, is facing charges of complicity in 27,900 cases of murder.

The prosecutors in both trials face similar problems: the defendants are old and can credibly claim infirmity or memory loss; the witnesses to their crimes are frail and their testimony can be questioned.

Mr Boere, who lives in an old people’s centre in his home town of Eschweiler, near Aachen, is the son of a Dutch father and German mother. Before the war they moved from Eschweiler and the young Mr Boere joined a Dutch battalion of the Waffen SS.

He fought in the Caucasus, fell ill and returned to the Netherlands, where he was made a reservist. This was 1943: more than one hundred thousand Dutch Jews were being deported to the death camps; half a million Dutchmen had become forced labourers and the resistance was starting to fight back, shooting collaborators.

Mr Boere was put on a hit squad. The SS leadership announced that for every attempt on the life of a German or German collaborator, three Dutchmen would die. As he freely admits, Mr Boere killed three Dutchmen — a pharmacist, a businessman and a bicycle shop owner, Teunis de Groot.

De Groot’s son, also called Teunis, was in court yesterday. He was asleep when the doorbell rang early on a Sunday morning in 1944 and his father was shot in the hallway. “I was 11 years old,” he told reporters. “It was the end of my childhood.”

Later, as a prisoner of war, Mr Boere confessed to the killings. But before he could be brought to trial he fled across the border into West Germany. In 1949, a Dutch court sentenced him in absentia to death. This was later commuted to life imprisonment. The case lapsed — there was little enthusiasm in West Germany to pursue a man who, by the horrific standards of the Holocaust, seemed small fry.

In 1980, the Dutch lodged a formal extradition request. An investigation was opened by the German prosecutor’s office. It concluded that the killings in which Mr Boere was involved were “acceptable acts of war” in response to the illegal acts of the Dutch resistance. The ruling allowed Mr Boere to glide towards a comfortable retirement. The Dutch judiciary continued to push Germany. In February 2007, the Aachen court ruled that Mr Boere should sit out his Dutch life sentence in a German prison. Mr Boere appealed. Since he had no legal representation in the 1949 Dutch trial, it could not be accepted by a German court.

It was only through the energy of Ulrich Maass, the state prosecutor who works at the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Dortmund, that the case finally reached court. Soon after taking on the case he visited Mr Boere to see whether the man was fit to stand trial.

“Shortly after I left him he caught all sorts of illnesses that perhaps he wouldn’t have caught if I hadn’t visited him,” Mr Maass said.

Health problems became a last line of defence, but the High Court decided that Mr Boere was fit enough to stand trial — and to be confronted by the man whose childhood he stole.

Still, the defence team did manage to trip up the proceedings on the opening day, arguing that Mr Maass had prejudged the outcome.

“Most of the victims’ families want, above all, that these acts are made public,” Mr Maass had said. That was sufficient for the defence lawyers to win an adjournment. The court is to reconvene next week.

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