CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The 34-year pursuit of John Demjanjuk that began in Cleveland and ended Thursday in a conviction in a Munich courtroom signals the end of an era when Nazi hunters traversed the globe seeking Hitler's henchmen.

A German court sentenced Demjanjuk -- a 91-year-old, great-grandfather from Seven Hills -- to five years in prison for being a part of the killing machine at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

He was convicted of being an accessory to the murders of about 28,000 people who died at the camp in 1943, allegations he has steadfastly denied.

He is scheduled to be released from a jail hospital today, pending his appeal. It's a legal move that has angered Jewish leaders, who say an appeal could take several months. A defense attorney said in a phone interview that he is unsure where Demjanjuk will go.

He cannot return to the United States, where he was deported because U.S. judges ruled he lied about his wartime past when he entered the country in 1952.

"It's a problem; he has to have medical care," his lawyer, Guenther Maull, said. "Nobody knows where he should go."

The 18-month trial was based on documents and evidence first used 10 years ago in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, when federal prosecutors sought to strip Demjanjuk's citizenship. The German trial is likely to be the last major one of its kind stemming from crimes committed in World War II, said Alan Rosenbaum, a Cleveland State University philosophy professor and the author of the book, "Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals."

To many, Demjanjuk became a symbol of the Holocaust. His case underscored the debate over pursuing geriatric men accused of committing crimes more than 65 years ago.

"This has been one of the longest and most convoluted paths to justice, but it has finally been achieved," said Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem.

But Zuroff blasted the German court for allowing Demjanjuk's release pending appeal, saying the crimes Demjanjuk was convicted of demanded that he stay behind bars: "We're not talking about someone who didn't help an old lady cross the street."

Lee C. Shapiro, the regional director of the American Jewish Committee in Cleveland, said the agency applauds the verdict.

"To be a part of the camp apparatus where innocent people were murdered means that he is held responsible, too," she said. "It's an important signal to the world community that mass murderers are accountable to justice."

Thomas Blatt, a survivor of Sobibor who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., said punishment is not the important issue in Demjanjuk's trial. He said the sentence could never match the suffering he witnessed at the camp.

What's important, he said, is that the world learns about the atrocities that took place there and never forgets.

John Broadley, Demjanjuk's attorney in U.S. proceedings for years, scoffed at the verdict. He said the people truly responsible for carrying out the Nazi regime are scattered in German nursing homes.

"It's a travesty," Broadley said. "It was a kangaroo court. The Germans simply want to put their own guilt to rest and what better way than to convict one of their own prisoners."

Joseph McGinness, a Cleveland attorney who has represented nine men suspected of working for the Nazis, criticized the verdict.

"Do you really think for one minute that he was going over there to be acquitted?" McGinness said. "I considered this to be a show trial, and the verdict was a forgone conclusion. . . . It's a pathetic day."

Messages left for Demjanjuk's son, John Jr., and former son-in-law, Ed Nishnic, were not returned. The younger Demjanjuk told the Associated Press "the Germans have built a house of cards, and it will not stand for long."

Demjanjuk was born in 1920 in the Ukrainian village of Dub Macharenzi, then part of the Soviet Union. He was drafted into the Red Army in 1940 and later captured by the Germans. U.S. judges found that he was sent to the Trawniki training camp for guards in 1942.

He worked at various camps, including Sobibor through at least December 1944, according to the rulings.

Demjanjuk's family said he was shipped to prisoner-of-war camps after his capture and then lived in displaced-persons camps. He has claimed he lied on his U.S. visa application in 1952 about where he was during the war because he feared that he would be sent back to the Soviet Union, where some viewed him as a traitor.

He ultimately settled in Seven Hills with his wife Vera. They had three children, John, Irene and Lydia. Demjanjuk worked at the Ford plant, and he became a fixture in the Ukrainian community, attending St. Vladimir's Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral in Parma.

Thursday's verdict marks the second time that a foreign country found Demjanjuk guilty of crimes related to German service. In the 1980s, Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel, where he was convicted of being a sadistic guard dubbed "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The Israeli Supreme Court, citing new evidence, overturned the conviction after Demjanjuk spent seven years on death row. He returned to Seven Hills. A few years later, federal prosecutors accused him of working at Sobibor. U.S. judges agreed, and he was later deported in May 2009.

Eli Rosenbaum, the leader of the U.S. Justice Department office that prosecuted Demjanjuk, said in a statement that Thursday's ruling "serves notice on all human-rights violators that the passage of time will neither erase the world's memory of their terrible crimes nor end its commitment to holding them to account."

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