The case against the former soldier, Heinrich Boere, who is now a stateless person, was depicted by German analysts as one of the last major war-crimes trials. Court proceedings began last November in another case, against John Demjanjuk, 89, who was accused of helping to force 27,900 Jews to their deaths during the Holocaust.

The verdict in Aachen on Tuesday against Mr. Boere came more than six decades after he was found guilty by a Dutch court in 1949 and sentenced to death. That sentence, passed in his absence, was later commuted to life imprisonment, but he fled to Germany after the war and did not serve it.

The German court sentenced him to the maximum permissible sentence of life imprisonment on Tuesday, as the prosecution had demanded, rejecting a defense plea for the case to be dropped under European Union regulations covering due process.