A 92-year-old former member of the Nazi Waffen SS has gone on trial in Germany accused of murdering a Dutch resistance fighter in 1944.

Dutch-born Siert Bruins, who is now German, entered the Hagen state court using a walking frame, but appeared alert and attentive as the proceedings opened.

No pleas are made in the German system, and Bruins offered no statement. His lawyer Klaus-Peter Kniffka said after opening session that it was unlikely his client would ever address the court personally.

The trial comes amid a new phase of German Nazi-era investigations, with federal prosecutors this week expected to announce they are recommending the pursuit of possible charges against about 40 former Auschwitz guards.

The renewed probes of death camp guards come after the case of former Ohio car worker John Demjanjuk, who died last year while appealing against his 2011 conviction for accessory to murder after allegations he served in the Sobibor death camp.

His case established that guards could be convicted as accessories to murder, even if there was no specific evidence of atrocities against them.

Bruins, however, had long been on the radar of German legal authorities and already served time in the 1980s for his role in the wartime murder of two Dutch Jews.

Bruins was also convicted and sentenced to death in absentia in the Netherlands in 1949 in a case that involved the killing of the resistance fighter.

The sentence was later commuted to life in prison, but attempts to extradite him were unsuccessful because he had obtained German citizenship through a policy instituted by Adolf Hitler for foreigners who served the Nazi military.

Former SS member appeared alert and attentive

Ulrich Sander, spokesman for an organisation representing the victims of Nazi crimes, said the decision to bring Bruins to trial again, even at his advanced age, was a good one.

“We must make it clear for the future that such crimes are always prosecuted, that murderers never get away,” he said.