Accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk arrived in Germany from the United States on Tuesday to face charges he helped kill 29,000 Jews in 1943, raising the prospect of Germany's last major Nazi trial.

Police cars and ambulances surrounded Demjanjuk's plane as soon as it landed at Munich airport in southern Germany.

Anton Winkler from the Munich state prosecutors' office said a doctor would examine the 89-year old and if he was deemed fit to be transported, he would be taken immediately to Stadelheim prison near Munich.

Demjanjuk tops the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of the top 10 most-wanted war criminal suspects and a Munich judge issued an arrest warrant in March to put him on trial for assisting in the murders at Sobibor death camp.

A German court may yet decide he is unfit to stand trial.

More than 60 years after World War Two and the Holocaust, media coverage of the case in Germany has been restrained with many Germans, especially younger generations who did not experience the war, keen to draw a line under the Nazi past.

The transfer marks the end of a prolonged legal battle for the retired U.S. auto worker who had fought his deportation from the United States for months. Born in Ukraine, Demjanjuk has denied any role in the Holocaust.

"UNSPEAKABLE CRIMES"

The Simon Wiesenthal Center welcomed the deportation.

"Now, John Demjanjuk will finally face the bar of justice for the unspeakable crimes he committed during World War Two in what will probably be the last trial of a Nazi war criminal," said Rabbi Marvin Hier in a statement released late on Monday.

The Center says Demjanjuk pushed men, women and children into gas chambers at the Sobibor camp, in what is today Poland.

"He deserves to be punished for the unspeakable crimes he committed," added Hier.

Demjanjuk has said he was drafted into the Russian army in 1941, became a German prisoner of war and later became a guard in German prison camps until 1944.

Demjanjuk was stripped of his U.S. citizenship after he was accused in the 1970s of being "Ivan the Terrible," a notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp.

He was extradited to Israel in 1986, and sentenced to death in 1988 after Holocaust survivors identified him as the Treblinka guard. But Israel's Supreme Court overturned his conviction when new evidence showed another man was probably "Ivan."

He regained his citizenship in 1998, but the U.S. Justice Department refiled its case against him in 1999, arguing he worked for the Nazis as a guard at three other death camps and hid the facts. His U.S. citizenship was stripped again in 2002.

credited to reuters.com