( CNN ) -- War criminal John Demjanjuk has been released after voluntarily spending time in prison while German prison officials found a nursing home able to take him on short notice , the officials said Friday . Demjanjuk had been freed pending an appeal after being convicted Thursday in the murder of tens of thousands of Jews at a Nazi concentration camp , capping a 30-year legal saga . `` He came back to our prison voluntarily yesterday even though he was a free man '' during the appeal , said Michael Stumpf , the director of the Stadelheim prison in Munich . The regional court in Munich found Demjanjuk guilty of assisting in mass murder as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland . The 91-year-old Ukraine native was sentenced to five years in prison , but was allowed to remain free pending appeal due to age and a lack of flight risk . `` The guards knew exactly what would happen to the people arriving at the camp , from everyday abuse to gruesome murders , '' the court said in announcing the verdict . Duties rotated around the camp , `` so that every single guard would be involved in all parts of the process , '' it said . Demjanjuk 's defense argued that he was a prisoner of war who was forced to do what the Nazis wanted . But the court rejected that claim , concluding that Demjanjuk could have fled `` despite a certain degree of risk for himself . '' The Nazis and their sympathizers killed at least 167,000 people at Sobibor in 1942 and 1943 , according to the U.S . Holocaust Memorial Museum . Munich state prosecutors charged Demjanjuk as an accessory to about 27,900 of those deaths , and the court found the killings were `` motivated by racial hatred . '' Prosecutors had asked for a sentence of six years in what is likely the last major Nazi war crimes trial in Germany . Jewish groups hailed the verdict soon after it was announced . Israel 's Holocaust museum , Yad Vashem , said the trial and ruling show there is no statute of limitations for the crimes of the Holocaust . The accusations against Demjanjuk date to the late 1970s , when the U.S. Justice Department accused him of being a Nazi guard known as `` Ivan the Terrible . '' His U.S. citizenship was revoked in 1981 , and he was extradited to Israel in 1986 . He was convicted in an Israeli court in 1988 and sentenced to death , but that conviction was overturned in 1993 amid evidence that someone else was `` Ivan the Terrible . '' A U.S. federal court restored Demjanjuk 's citizenship , ruling that the government withheld evidence supporting his case . But the onetime Ohio auto worker 's citizenship was revoked again in 2002 after a federal judge ruled that his 1952 entry into the United States was illegal because he hid his past as a Nazi guard . CNN 's Roman Lehberger contributed to this report .
He was convicted Thursday in the murder of at least 167,000 of Jews . The 91-year-old Ohio native was sentenced to Thursday in prison . The former Ukraine auto worker was freed pending an appeal . Jews prison officials had to find him a nursing home on short notice .