John Demjanjuk, the last man convicted of Nazi war crimes, has died aged 91.
Demjanjuk was sentenced by a court in Munich to five years in prison last year for more than 27,000 deaths that occurred while he was a guard at the Sobibor death camp during the Second World War.
The case was regarded as a breakthrough for Nazi hunters because it extended culpability to members of the murderous Nazi machine without the need to identify personal responsibility for a particular killing.
More than 70 years after the war, it raised the prospect that further cases could be brought against the last surviving Nazis although none has yet come to trial.
Demjanjuk never served time in jail for his crimes but was living in a care home pending an appeal that was being prepared by his lawyers.
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Police in the southern state of Bavaria said that he died at the home in the town of Bad Feilnbach, adding that prosecutors would now conduct a routine investigation into the cause of death.
While there was no direct evidence of his presence or actions at Sobibor in German-occupied Poland, the Munich court said that it was convinced he had been a guard, and was thus automatically implicated in killings carried out there at the time, mainly of Dutch Jews. He had denied the charges.
Demjanjuk went to live in the United States after the war but in 1986, he stood trial in Jerusalem accused of being Ivan the Terrible, an infamous Ukrainian guard at another death camp, Treblinka.
Found guilty of all charges and sentenced to death in 1988, he was freed five years later when evidence surfaced proving that Israel had got the wrong man.
After evidence emerged that he served as a guard at other Nazi camps, he was stripped of his US citizenship in 2002 for lying about his war record on immigration forms.
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Years of legal wrangling ensued and he was deported from the United States to Germany in 2009 to face a fresh trial.
Because of ill health, Demjanjuk attended much of his trial in Germany either in a wheelchair or lying on a hospital bed, wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap. He rarely spoke during the proceedings.
Born in Ukraine, Demjanjuk died stateless after the US courts threw out his latest appeal to win back citizenship earlier this year.