A court in Germany has sentenced an 88-year-old former member of a Nazi SS death squad to life in prison for the murder of three Dutch civilians during World War II.

A spokesman for the court in the western city of Aachen confirmed on Tuesday the verdict against Heinrich Boere for the three killings, which were carried out in the Netherlands in 1944.

Lawyers representing Boere said they would appeal against the decision, which could mean that the sentence is not legally binding for months.

Boere had confessed to killing the three civilians when he was a member of an SS squad targeting anti-Nazi resistance members, but argued that he was following orders.

The defendant, who is on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of most wanted war crime suspects, was born in Germany but grew up in the Netherlands.

He was captured there by US forces after the war, but escaped to Germany before being sentenced to death in absentia in the Netherlands in 1949.

German authorities refused a Dutch extradition request in 1980, but Boere was finally indicted in Germany in 2008.

Experts say a new generation of lawyers are keen to improve Germany's patchy record of bringing ex-Nazis to justice by prosecuting the last surviving war-crime suspects.