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Just hours earlier he had been carried moaning in a wheelchair out of his yellow brick home in Seven Hills, Ohio by five immigration agents as his family sobbed in the driveway.
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement allowed Demjanjuk to return home with an electronic tracking bracelet around his ankle, but said it would continue to pursue the case.
Demjanjuk's lawyer has argued that his client is in poor health, and that jailing and trying him in Germany would cause him pain amounting to torture.
His family says he is bedridden and suffers from a host of ailments including kidney disease, arthritis and cancer which makes him unfit to fly and criticized US and German authorities for putting his life at risk.
"We could have been making funeral arrangements today," his son, John Demjanjuk Jr. told AFP.
"The Germans have a medical opinion that Mr. Demjanjuk is not fit for trial, and that it would be a further danger to his life to fly. And that danger does not diminish with an oxygen machine on board the plane. What if it fails?"
The younger Demjanjuk, who insists that his father did not participate in the extermination of Jews, said he is confident the US federal appeals court will block deportation on medical grounds.
Putting the octogenarian on trial will send an important signal that those who participate in genocide will "be pursued until their last days on earth," said Jonathan Drimmera, a former federal prosecutor who spent years in charge of Demjanjuk's case.
"The evidence against Demjanjuk is rock solid, and based on seven authentic Nazi-created wartime documents that contain Demjanjuk's name, biographical and physical details, and even a photograph.
"A former comrade who served with Demjanjuk at the camp specifically recalled that Demjanjuk escorted prisoners to the gas chambers as part of his daily work, and was repeatedly assigned to gather prisoners from surrounding ghettos to deliver them to the camp to be killed."
Tuesday's ruling was just the latest twist in a long saga for the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, who changed his name from Ivan to John when he emigrated to the United States in 1952.
Former wartime inmates of Nazi camps in occupied Poland identified him as notorious Ukrainian prison guard "Ivan the Terrible" during a 1977 US Justice Department investigation.
An Israeli court sentenced him to death in 1988, but the country's Supreme Court overturned the conviction five years later, after statements from former guards identified another man as the sadistic "Ivan."
He was returned to the United States despite strenuous objections from Holocaust survivors and Jewish groups who said he should be retried based on the ample evidence that he was a death camp guard.
The US government filed new charges in 1999 using fresh evidence that surfaced following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
He was stripped of his US citizenship in 2002 but remained in Ohio long after his appeals of that decision were exhausted because the United States could not find a country willing to accept the now-stateless alleged war criminal.
Germany issued a warrant for Demjanjuk's arrest on March 11.
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The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement allowed Demjanjuk to return home with an electronic tracking bracelet around his ankle, but said it would continue to pursue the case.
Demjanjuk's lawyer has argued that his client is in poor health, and that jailing and trying him in Germany would cause him pain amounting to torture.
His family says he is bedridden and suffers from a host of ailments including kidney disease, arthritis and cancer which makes him unfit to fly and criticized US and German authorities for putting his life at risk.
"We could have been making funeral arrangements today," his son, John Demjanjuk Jr. told AFP.
"The Germans have a medical opinion that Mr. Demjanjuk is not fit for trial, and that it would be a further danger to his life to fly. And that danger does not diminish with an oxygen machine on board the plane. What if it fails?"
The younger Demjanjuk, who insists that his father did not participate in the extermination of Jews, said he is confident the US federal appeals court will block deportation on medical grounds.
Putting the octogenarian on trial will send an important signal that those who participate in genocide will "be pursued until their last days on earth," said Jonathan Drimmera, a former federal prosecutor who spent years in charge of Demjanjuk's case.
"The evidence against Demjanjuk is rock solid, and based on seven authentic Nazi-created wartime documents that contain Demjanjuk's name, biographical and physical details, and even a photograph.
"A former comrade who served with Demjanjuk at the camp specifically recalled that Demjanjuk escorted prisoners to the gas chambers as part of his daily work, and was repeatedly assigned to gather prisoners from surrounding ghettos to deliver them to the camp to be killed."
Tuesday's ruling was just the latest twist in a long saga for the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, who changed his name from Ivan to John when he emigrated to the United States in 1952.
Former wartime inmates of Nazi camps in occupied Poland identified him as notorious Ukrainian prison guard "Ivan the Terrible" during a 1977 US Justice Department investigation.
An Israeli court sentenced him to death in 1988, but the country's Supreme Court overturned the conviction five years later, after statements from former guards identified another man as the sadistic "Ivan."
He was returned to the United States despite strenuous objections from Holocaust survivors and Jewish groups who said he should be retried based on the ample evidence that he was a death camp guard.
The US government filed new charges in 1999 using fresh evidence that surfaced following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
He was stripped of his US citizenship in 2002 but remained in Ohio long after his appeals of that decision were exhausted because the United States could not find a country willing to accept the now-stateless alleged war criminal.
Germany issued a warrant for Demjanjuk's arrest on March 11.
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