The net appears to be closing on the suspected war criminal John Demjanjuk, one of the few high-profile Nazi holocaust suspects still alive.

The 88-year-old, dubbed Ivan the Terrible is wanted in Germany for his part in the murder of thousands of Jews when he worked as a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland in 1943.

Sobibor
German prosecutors on Wednesday issued an arrest warrant for the retired autoworker, who currently lives in Ohio, the United States.

"He participated in the accessory to murder of at least 29,000 Jews," prosecutors say. Most of the victims were women, children and elderly.
Demjanjuk denies any involvement in the crimes, saying he was a prisoner of war rather than a guard.

Finale
If Demjanjuk is extradited, it could mark Germany's last war crimes trial, since the few former prominent Nazis still alive are in their 80s or 90s. Whether Demjanjuk he lives long enough to go on trial depends on how quickly the US and Germany move. He turns 89 this month,.

A trial of John Demjanjuk promises a finale to 30 years hunt for Demjanjuk. Born in Ukraine, Demjanjuk moved to the US after the Second World War where he changed his name from Ivan to John.

He was unmasked in 1977 by former Treblinka death camp inmates as "Ivan the Terrible" and he was sent for trial to Israel in 1986. He was sentenced to death two years later for torturing Jewish prisoners while herding them into the gas chambers at Treblinka where he was a guard.

The verdict was overturned amid doubts about Demjanjuk's identity. Israel sent him back to the US, where he was stripped of his American citizenship because he covered up his Nazi past on immigration forms.

He has lived under house arrest since his return and has faced other investigations in the US. The Federal Court of Justice ruled in December that Demjanjuk could be prosecuted in Germany.

Germany allows for the trial of Nazi criminals in its courts since murder and genocide are the only crimes under German law without limitation, which normally would bar prosecution after a certain period of time.

An estimated 6 million Jews as well as resistance fighters, gypsies and homosexuals were killed in Nazi death camps across Europe during World War Two. More than 260,000 people were executed in the gas chambers in Sobibor. 34.313 murdered Jews were transported to Sobibor from The Netherlands.