Berlin - German officials are expecting John Demjanjuk, 89, who has been accused of Nazi war crimes, to arrive in Germany on Tuesday, Justice Ministry officials in Berlin told the German Press Agency dpa.

In a related development, Demjanjuk's lawyers lost a last-ditch appeal in Germany. They had demanded last week that Germany reject Demjanjuk's expulsion from the United States, but an administrative tribunal ruled he must be detained on arrival.

Prosecutors in Munich obtained a warrant in March for his arrest.

German authorities allege that Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, then 23, worked from March to September 1943 as a guard in Nazi-occupied Poland at the Sobibor concentration camp during a period when at least 29,000 Jews were murdered.

"From the present state of knowledge, he'll arrive in Germany during the course of (Tuesday)," a ministry spokesman said.

Demjanjuk has exhausted all US legal options to block his deportation to Germany to stand trial as an accessory to the murder.

In Germany, his lawyers argued last week that the expulsion was illegal and that Germany must oppose it.

But an administrative tribunal ruled last Tuesday that Berlin had no influence on the expulsion.

That verdict was confirmed Monday by the Berlin-Brandenburg superior tribunal, which said that offering to let him into Germany was not the cause of his expulsion, since Germany could just as well have decided after his arrival to let him in.

It added that it was not up to Germany to assess if Demjanjuk was healthy enough to travel. This was for US officials alone to decide.

Following World War II, Demjanjuk lived in Germany as a refugee until 1952, when he translated his first name from Ivan to its English form John and moved to the United States.

Demjanjuk was acquitted in 1993 by the Israeli Supreme Court of charges that he worked at a different death camp, Treblinka, saving him from the death sentence of a lower court in Israel. But when he returned to the United States, he was stripped of his US citizenship.(dpa)