A German court found John Demjanjuk guilty of helping to kill at least 28,000 Jews at the Nazi death camp Sobibor during the Holocaust.

The Munich court sentenced the 91-year-old to five years in prison. Judge Ralph Alt told the court he was convinced that Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was a guard at the Sobibor death camp "and that as guard he took part in murder of at least 28,000 people."

Despite the five year sentence, Demjanjuk will be released from jail because of his advanced age, the court said. "The accused is to be released," Alt said after handing down the guilty verdict.

Demjanjuk listened to the sentence in his wheelchair and was then moved to a stretcher in the courtroom in Munich - birthplace of Adolf Hitler's Nazi movement.

His lawyer, Ulrich Busch, who had described Demjanjuk as "a victim of Germany's justice system" said he will appeal the verdict. 

Stretcher
Demjanjuk had been brought into the packed courtroom in a wheelchair on Thursday, as usual, wearing a light-blue baseball cap, dark glasses and an army-like green coat which he took off after arriving.

Drinking a glass of water, he was moved to a bed in the courtroom and then appeared to be asleep. During the morning session he was offered the chance for the last time to address the court, but he declined.

Demjanjuk has kept silent throughout the 18 months of proceedings, sitting in a wheelchair or lying on a stretcher. 

Hurdles
Prosecutors had faced several hurdles in proving Demjanjuk's guilt, with no surviving witnesses to his crimes and heavy reliance on wartime documents, namely a Nazi ID card - number 1393 -  that defence lawyers said was a fake made by the Soviets.

Guards at Nazi death camps like Sobibor were essential to the mass killing of Jews because extermination was the focus of such camps, prosecutors said. Some 250,000 Jews were killed at Sobibor, according to the Wiesenthal Center.

Busch told the Munich court on Wednesday that even if Demjanjuk did become a prison guard, he did so only because as a prisoner of war he would have either been shot by the Nazis or died of starvation.

Treblinka
Demjanjuk, who says he remained a prisoner-of-war until the end of hostilities in 1945, later emigrated to the United States where he married, had children and worked as an auto mechanic.

He is now stateless, having been stripped of his US citizenship for lying about his past in his immigration application before being deported to Germany where he has been in jail for the past two years.

He served nearly eight years in an Israeli prison, five of them on death row after being found guilty in the 1980s of being the particularly sadistic "Ivan the Terrible" guard at Treblinka, another death camp.

The Israeli supreme court later overturned the verdict and ordered his release on the grounds that he had likely been wrongly identified.