German court rejects Nazi guard Demjanjuk's deportation appeal

BERLIN (Reuters) - Accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk, awaiting trial in Germany, lost an appeal on Wednesday against his deportation from the United States.

Germany's Constitutional Court ruled that Demjanjuk had given no substantiated reason to back his appeal that his deportation had infringed his basic rights.

The decision appears to clear the way for a trial of 89-year old Demjanjuk, who is accused of helping to kill 29,000 Jews in World War Two, in what is expected to be one of Germany's last major Nazi-era war crimes cases.

Last week Demjanjuk, who has been held in a jail near Munich since May 12 after he was deported from the United States, was deemed fit by medical experts to stand trial despite protestations from his family that he is too frail.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk tops the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of its 10 most-wanted suspected war criminals. They say he pushed men, women and children into gas chambers at the Sobibor death camp in what is today Poland.

Demjanjuk denies any role in the Holocaust.

Prosecutors are planning to raise charges against Demjanjuk in July and a trial could start in the autumn.

Demjanjuk has said he was drafted into the Soviet army in 1941, became a German prisoner of war and later became a guard in German prison camps.

He was stripped of his U.S. citizenship after he was accused in the 1970s of being "Ivan the Terrible," a notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp.

He was extradited to Israel in 1986 and sentenced to death in 1988, but Israel's Supreme Court overturned his conviction when new evidence showed another man was probably "Ivan."

He regained his citizenship, but the U.S. Justice Department refiled its case against him in 1999, arguing he had worked for the Nazis as a guard at three other death camps. His citizenship was stripped from him again in 2002.

(Reporting by Madeline Chambers; editing by Myra MacDonald)