Michael Stumf, director of the Stadelheim prison, said authorities had difficulty finding a home that would take in the 91-year-old on such short notice. Stumf refused to give any details about where Demjanjuk was headed, other than to say it was in the greater Munich area.

Demjanjuk has been held in Stadelheim since he was deported to Germany two years ago to stand trial on charges of 28,060 counts of accessory to murder for serving as a guard at the Nazi’s Sobibor death camp. He was found guilty on Thursday and sentenced to five years in prison.

Defense attorney Ulrich Busch filed an appeal immediately after his client was convicted.

He said Friday that he expects his client’s appeal to last around two years.

Demjanjuk, who was born in Ukraine, is allowed to live freely during that time on grounds that he doesn’t pose a flight risk in view of his age, his frail health and the fact he is stateless.

Demjanjuk was a Soviet Red Army soldier captured by the Germans in 1942. He is accused of then agreeing to serve as a guard, but Demjanjuk has always maintained he was a victim of the Nazis.

He emigrated to the US after the war and became a US citizen, but his citizenship was revoked in 1981 when the Justice Department extradited him to Israel where he stood trial, was convicted and sentenced to death but freed when a court overturned the ruling, saying the evidence showed he was the victim of mistaken identity.

Demjanjuk returned to the US and regained his citizenship briefly, then was deported again after German prosecutors issued a warrant for his arrest in 2009.

One avenue for Demjanjuk to pursue may be a 1985 FBI report uncovered by the AP that challenged the authenticity of a Nazi ID card used as evidence in the German trial.

Still, court experts and the US Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations have since said that the card — which the defense maintains is a fake produced by the Soviet KGB — is genuine, and the Munich court ruled that it was.

This week, a federal judge in Cleveland appointed a public defender to represent Demjanjuk and indicated the ID card could be used to reopen his citizenship case.

David Leopold, an immigration attorney in Cleveland, said he doubted the FBI report would help Demjanjuk because there was other evidence against him. In either case, Leopold said, “he’s not coming back here if he’s not a citizen.”

The public defender, Dennis Terez, hasn’t indicated how he might proceed on the ID card issue.