FACTBOX: Significant Nazi trials

(Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court halted the deportation of accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk this week and he was freed from custody just hours after immigration agents carried him out of his Ohio home to send him to Germany for trial.

Here are details of significant trials of Nazis:

* JOHN DEMJANJUK:

-- Demjanjuk was originally sentenced to death in 1988 after Holocaust survivors said he was the notorious guard "Ivan the Terrible" at Treblinka where 870,000 people died.

-- But the Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction and death sentence in 1993 and freed him after newly released records said another man, Ivan Marchenko, was probably the Treblinka guard.

-- He returned to Cleveland in 1993 and, in 1998, the United States restored his citizenship. But the U.S. Justice Department the following year refiled its case against him, arguing he had worked for the Nazis as a guard at three other death camps and hid the facts when he immigrated.

-- A federal judge rescinded his citizenship in 2002 and he was ordered deported in 2005. Germany finally issued an arrest warrant charging him with complicity in the death of 29,000 Jews and requested his deportation.

* OTHER TRIALS:

* THE NUREMBERG TRIALS:

-- Between October 1945 and October 1946 an International Military Tribunal tried 22 of the most infamous major Nazi figures in proceedings that came to be known as the Nuremberg Trial. Twelve defendants were sentenced to death, three were acquitted, and the rest were sentenced to jail.

-- From December 1946 to April 1949, these courts tried and convicted a further 177 Nazis in 12 trials---known as the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials.

* ITALY:

-- Former Nazi major Karl Hass, who died in 2004, and ex-SS Captain Erich Priebke were convicted of participating in the massacre at the Ardeatine Caves. The massacre took place on March 24, 1944, and is regarded as one of the most serious war crimes committed in Italy. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment.

* FRANCE:

-- Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo police chief in Lyon in World War Two, was extradited to France from his postwar hiding place in Bolivia in 1983 to become the most important former Nazi officer to face his victims in a French court.

-- The "Butcher of Lyon" was accused of ordering the execution of thousands of Jews and resistance fighters, and deporting thousands more, including 44 Jewish children seized near Lyon -- to death camps.

-- Sentenced to life imprisonment after the two-month trial, he died of cancer in a Lyon hospital four years later, in 1991.

-- Maurice Papon was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1998 for complicity in crimes against humanity. He was tried for his role in organizing the transport of 1,560 Jews to a transit camp on the way to Auschwitz concentration camp.

-- He fled to Switzerland while appealing against his sentence, but was arrested by Swiss police and handed over to the French authorities.

-- He was jailed in 1999 but released in September 2002 because of poor health. He died in 2007. Papon protested his innocence to the end but failed in his bid for a re-trial.

* THE EICHMANN TRIAL:

-- Adolf Eichmann was nicknamed the "technician of death" for drawing up and coordinating schedules and logistics plans that made Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" - the genocide of six million Jews - possible.

-- He escaped from Germany after World War Two living in Argentina until 1960 when he was found by Israeli Intelligence and smuggled to Israel to face trial.

-- Eichmann was sentenced to death in December 1961 after a lengthy trial for crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity. He was hanged in May 1962. He remains the only person ever to have been executed in Israel.

Sources: Reuters/BBC

(Writing by David Cutler, London Editorial Reference Unit)