A US judge has ruled that John Demjanjuk, once wrongly convicted of being the sadistic Nazi death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible," should be deported to his native Ukraine for his Nazi past.
Chief US Immigration Judge Michael Creppy's decision that Mr Demjanjuk was unlikely to face persecution in Ukraine followed a ruling three years ago that he had been a "willing" participant with the Nazis, "dedicated to exploiting and exterminating" Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Mr Demjanjuk, a retired car worker who has fought to keep his US citizenship for 30 years, can appeal the deportation order to the Board of Immigration Appeals within 30 days.
He had argued he could be prosecuted or face torture if he were sent back to Ukraine - or Germany or Poland if Ukraine refuses to accept him.
Mr Demjanjuk's lawyers could not be reached for comment.
"After 30 years, it appears that some measure of justice has finally been achieved," said Elan Steinberg, executive director emeritus of the New York-based World Jewish Congress.
"And I say 'some measure of justice' because, after all, we're talking about somebody who was found to have been a Nazi persecutor," Mr Steinberg said in a telephone interview.
"All that is happening to him, really, is that he's been stripped of his citizenship and is being deported to Ukraine."
Demjanjuk was first stripped of his US citizenship in 1981 and extradited to Israel, where he was sentenced to death in 1988 on eyewitness testimony from Holocaust survivors that he was the notorious Ivan of the Treblinka death camp where 870,000 died.
The Israeli Supreme Court overturned his death sentence in 1993 and freed him after newly released records from the former Soviet Union showed another man, Ivan Marchenko, was probably the sadistic guard at Treblinka.
In 1998, the United States restored Demjanjuk's citizenship based on the wrongful accusations, but the Justice Department refiled its case against him, arguing he had worked for the Nazis as a guard at three concentration camps.
Mr Demjanjuk was stripped of his citizenship again after the 2002 ruling found in favor of the Justice Department. Documentary evidence, including a frayed German identity card with a photograph and Demjanjuk's signature, convinced the judge that Mr Demjanjuk had been a Nazi guard.
Mr Demjanjuk, who maintained he had been drafted into the Soviet army and became a prisoner of war, was found guilty of lying to gain entry into the United States.