Cologne court says there is not enough evidence to bring 89-year-old to trial in connection with 1944 massacre

A German court has thrown out a case against a former Nazi officer accused of taking part in one of the worst atrocities in France during the second world war.

The 89-year-old former member of the SS had been charged with murder and accessory to murder in connection with the slaughter of 642 villagers – including 254 women and 207 children – in the southwestern village of Oradour-sur-Glane.

Last year, in a symbolic gesture of reconciliation, the presidents of France and Germany met at the now-abandoned village with one of the few survivors of the massacre.

The accused former soldier, Werner C, whose last name has not been revealed in accordance with German privacy laws, was 19 at the time and serving with an SS mechanised-infantry regiment known as Der Führer. He admitted he was present in Oradour-sur-Glane at the time of the atrocity. However, he denied any involvement in the murders.

On 10 June 1944, four days after the Allied landings in Normandy, the accused German’s armoured division marched into Oradour-sur-Glane, reportedly in retaliation for the kidnapping of a German officer by the French resistance. The village was sealed off and its inhabitants rounded up and herded into the market place, under the pretext of an identity check.

“The men were divided into four groups and taken by execution squads to four barns to be killed,” read the German charge sheet.

After they were shot, many of them in the legs so their death would be slow and painful, the barns were set alight.

The women and children were herded into the village church and the doors locked. Grenades were thrown into the building and it, too, was set alight. Anyone trying to flee the conflagration by jumping out of the windows was shot. Most of the victims were burned alive.

It would come to be recognised as the most barbaric act against civilians carried out by the occupying Germans on French soil.

François Hollande, Oradour-sur-Glane massacre survivor Robert Hebras, and Joachim Gauck pay their respects in the village church. Photograph: Yoan Valat /EPA

The village, near Limoges, has been unoccupied ever since and the ruins left as a testament to the horror of the war.

Prosecutors accused C of shooting 25 people directly and being party to the murders of hundreds more. In the indictment he was accused of carrying “flammable material into the church”.

The German suspect was charged by public prosecutors in Dortmund at the beginning of 2014. His name, along with those of five other surviving soldiers connected to the killings, was discovered in the archives of the Stasi secret police in what was formerly East Germany.

The court in Cologne ruled on Tuesday there was no evidence, in the form of either witness statements or documents, to contradict the accused man’s claims of innocence.

“In a trial, it could probably only be proven that the suspect was in the area during the massacre in Oradour-sur-Glane as he has consistently maintained,” the court declared.

“This mere presence is not enough to prove accessory to murder without the proof of other circumstances.”

Last year the German president, Joachim Gauck, stood hand in hand with his French counterpart, François Hollande, and Oradour-sur-Glane survivor Robert Hébras, 88, in the village.

The singular act of barbarity, however, remains an open sore not only because of the atrocity itself but because of a failure to punish the perpetrators.

Heinz Lammerding, the Waffen-SS general in command of the unit that carried out the massacre, was captured by Allied forces but never extradited to France. He was given a death sentence by a Bordeaux military court in absentia in 1951, but died peacefully in his Bavarian home in 1971.