John Demjanjuk's days in the United States appear to be dwindling.

U.S. immigration officials said Tuesday that they have requested travel documents from Germany to have Demjanjuk, 88, deported from the United States. That would mean he could stand trial in Munich on charges that he helped kill 29,000 Jews as a Nazi guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

A German judge issued a warrant for Demjanjuk's arrest this month, and the travel documents -- internal German government papers needed for his entry into the country -- are the first in a series of steps to get Demjanjuk overseas.

His son, John Jr., said his father is at home in Seven Hills. His father is seriously ill with kidney and bone diseases, among other health problems.

"He is not likely to survive another trial," the younger Demjanjuk said in an e-mail.

Jewish officials have hailed the move as another step in bringing Demjanjuk to justice.

"It's a shame that the whole process took so long, but I'm glad that it has finally begun," said Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem in a phone interview.

U.S. immigration officials would not say if the request for travel documents meant Demjanjuk would soon be leaving. But authorities stressed that the statement signifies the process to ship Demjanjuk to Germany has begun.

In 2005, a federal immigration judge ordered Demjanjuk deported to his native Ukraine, Germany or Poland based on lies about his Nazi service when he moved to the United States. The U.S. Supreme Court declined last May to hear Demjanjuk's case, exhausting his appeals.

Demjanjuk was born in Ukraine, and U.S. prosecutors said he was serving in the Soviet army when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. He was captured and sent to a Nazi guard camp a year later. He then went to work at various camps, including Sobibor, a federal judge found.

Demjanjuk said the Germans captured him and forced him to work in several prisoner-of-war camps before he lived in displaced-persons camps. He came to the United States in 1952.

"He was tortured by the conditions the Germans forced upon him as a captured Soviet soldier and [prisoner of war], and now they seek to torture him further," John Demjanjuk Jr. said.

Federal judges rejected Demjanjuk's claims.

German prosecutors are expected to base their case on seven wartime documents first filed in U.S. District Court in Cleveland in 2001 about his Nazi service.

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