An 88-year-old former SS guard has been charged with taking part in one of the most shocking massacres carried out in Nazi-occupied France.

The man, who has not been identified, is accused of the cold-blooded murder of 25 people and with being an accomplice in the murder of hundreds of other civilians at the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944.

He is suspected of being a member of the armoured SS division that killed a total of 642 villagers in an atrocity that is etched on French memories.

"The prosecutor's office in Dortmund has charged an 88-year-old pensioner from Cologne over the murder of 25 people committed by a group, and with aiding and abetting the murder of several hundred people," said the Cologne regional court in a statement.

The man, who was 19 at the time of the slaughter, is among six suspects still facing possible prosecution for war crimes in Oradour-sur-Glane. He has denied the charged and has been given until the end of March to appeal.

"He acknowledged that he was in Oradour-sur-Glane at the time and was a member of the SS, but disputes any involvement in the murders," Andreas Brendal, Dortmund's state prosecutor said.

Oradour-sur-Glane has been left abandoned its blackened ruins preserved as a memorial to the slaughter of the villagers, 254 of whom were women and 207 children.

The SS armoured division marched into Oradour-sur-Glane on 10 June 1944 in retaliation for the alleged kidnapping of a German officer by the French resistance. The village was sealed off and its inhabitants rounded up in the market place where the men were separated from the women and children. "The men were then divided into four groups ... and taken by execution squads to four barns to be killed," read the German charge sheet.

The survivors were finished off with pistols or killed in fires lit by the German soldiers who then herded the women and children into the local church, locked the doors and set fire to it. Anyone trying to escape through windows was shot.

"It's important that we find someone even if it's 70 years afterwards," Robert Hébras, one of the six survivors, told French broadcaster BFMTV.

Oradour is an ambiguous symbol because it represents not just the atrocities committed by the Nazis but also a post-war failure to punish the perpetrators.

Heinz Lammerding, the Waffen SS general in command of the unit that committed the massacre, was captured by allied forces but never extradited to France and was sentenced to death in absentia by a Bordeaux military court in 1951. He died in his bed in Bavaria in 1971.

The presidents of Germany and France, Joachim Gauck and François Hollande, visited the village in September and held hands with one of the few survivors of the massacre, in a symbolic moment of commemoration and reconciliation. Germany opened a new war crimes case into the massacre in 2010, when documents implicating six suspects, now in their 80s, were discovered.