Suspected Nazi concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk will go on trial next month on charges of helping to kill nearly 30,000 Jews during the second World War.
The case against the 89-year-old retired US car worker is likely to be Germany's last major Nazi-era war crimes trial.
Demjanjuk, long wanted by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre which hunts Nazi war crimes suspects, was deported from the United States in May and has been in jail near Munich ever since.
A Munich court said today it had authorised the trial to go ahead and ordered that he remain in custody until then.
The Wiesenthal Center says Demjanjuk pushed men, women and children into gas chambers at the Sobibor death camp in what is now Poland.
Besides Munich state prosecutors, nine individuals are joint plaintiffs in the case, all relatives of victims.
Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk denies any role in the Holocaust and his family argues he is too frail to stand trial. He claims he was drafted into the Soviet army in 1941, became a German prisoner of war and served at German prison camps until 1944.
He emigrated to the United States in 1951 and became a naturalised US citizen. He was stripped of his citizenship after being accused in the 1970s of being "Ivan the Terrible", a sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp.
He was extradited to Israel, tried and in 1988 sentenced to death but Israel's Supreme Court overturned the conviction based on new evidence showing another man was probably "Ivan".
Demjanjuk returned to the United States and regained his citizenship but he was again deprived of it in 2002 after the US Justice Department refiled its case against him, arguing he had worked for the Nazis as a guard at three other death camps.
Reuters