German prosecutors have launched a last-ditch attempt to bring a octogenarian Nazi executioner to justice.

Heinrich Boere, 86, a member of a notorious Waffen SS death squad in the Netherlands, was tried in absentia in 1949 and sentenced to death. This was commuted to life imprisonment.

But he had already fled to Germany, after spending time in an Allied PoW camp.

Courts in Germany, where he still lives, have rejected efforts to extradite him to the Netherlands to serve out his sentence. But Ulrich Maass, a state prosecutor in North Rhine-Westphalia, has revived the case.

He said his new investigation was a test case in the race against time to bring Nazi war criminals to book. “We haven’t had a lot of success in the past years,” said Mr. Maass. “It’s resolving itself biologically.”

Boere was a member of the SS squad codenamed Silbertanne, or Silver Pine. The unit, mostly recruited from ardent Dutch volunteers, was engaged in murderous reprisals, against their own people, aimed at smashing the country’s anti-Nazi resistance.

Silbertanne gunmen were responsible for 54 killings in the Netherlands and Boere, while in the PoW camp, confessed to three of them.

Boere and his accomplices killed three of his countrymen in 1944 — Fritz Hubert Ernst Bicknese, Teun de Groot, and FW Kusters.

The son of de Groot, who was killed for sheltering fugitives in his bicycle shop, was 11 when his father died.

Teun de Groot, who bears his father’s name, said the murder broke up his family. He still has the wallet his father fumbled for in his doorway to show his SS visitors his ID papers. It is torn by a bullet.

Mr. de Groot insisted that Boere should face justice and serve his jail sentence.

“For him, life is two years. Ten years is life, five years is life,” he said. “He’s 86!”

In 1983 a German court refused to extradite him to the Netherlands because it was thought he had German nationality as well as Dutch. Another court in Cologne last year ruled that the 1949 conviction was invalid because Boere was unable to present a defense.

Now living in an old-people’s home in Eschweiler, outside Aachen, Boere defended his past.

“It was another time, with different rules,” he told the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad. “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. Orders were orders, otherwise it would have meant my skin.”