John Demjanjuk, Convicted Death Camp Guard, Dies John Demjanjuk, a retired U.S. autoworker who was convicted of being a guard at the Nazis' Sobibor death camp despite steadfastly maintaining over three decades of legal battles that he had been mistaken for someone else died Saturday, his son told The Associated Press. He was 91. Demjanjuk, convicted in May of 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder and sentenced to five years in prison, died a free man in a nursing home in the southern Bavarian town of Bad Feilnbach. He had been released pending his appeal. John Demjanjuk Jr. said in a telephone interview from Ohio that his father died in the night of natural causes. Demjanjuk had terminal bone marrow disease, chronic kidney disease and other ailments. It was not yet known whether he would be brought back to the U.S. for burial. Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk (dehm-YAHN'-yook) had steadfastly denied any involvement in the Nazi Holocaust since the first accusations were levied against him more than 30 years ago. "My father fell asleep with the Lord as a victim and survivor of Soviet and German brutality since childhood," Demjanjuk Jr. said. He loved life, family and humanity. History will show Germany used him as a scapegoat to blame helpless Ukrainian POWs for the deeds of Nazi Germans. His conviction helped set new German legal precedent, being the first time someone was convicted solely on the basis of serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of being involved in a specific killing. Despite his conviction, his family never gave up its battle to have his U.S. citizenship reinstated so that he could live out his final days nearby them in the Cleveland area. One of their main arguments was that the defense had never seen a 1985 FBI document, uncovered in early 2011 by The Associated Press, calling into question the authenticity of a Nazi ID card used against him. Demjanjuk maintained that he was a victim of the Nazis himself - first wounded as a Soviet soldier fighting German forces, then captured and held as a prisoner of war under brutal conditions. "I am again and again an innocent victim of the Germans," he told the panel of Munich state court judges during his 18-month trial, in a statement he signed and that was read aloud by his attorney Ulrich Busch. He said after the war he was unable to return to his homeland, and that taking him away from his family in the U.S. to stand trial in Germany was a "continuation of the injustice" done to him. "Germany is responsible for the fact that I have lost for good my whole reason to live, my family, my happiness, any future and hope," he said. His claims of mistaken identity gained credence after he successfully defended himself against accusations initially brought in 1977 by the U.S. Justice Department that he was "Ivan the Terrible" - a notoriously brutal guard at the Treblinka extermination camp. In connection with the allegation, he was extradited to Israel from the U.S. in 1986 to stand trial on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, convicted and sentenced to death. But the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993 overturned the verdict on appeal, saying that evidence showed another Ukrainian man was actually "Ivan the Terrible," and ordered him returned to the U.S.