The stranger settled in Cleveland after World War II with his wife and little girl. He became an autoworker and changed his first name from Ivan to John. He had two more children, became a naturalized American, lived quietly and retired. His war and the terrors of concentration camps were all but forgotten.

Decades later, the past came back to haunt John Demjanjuk. And for the rest of his life it hovered over a tortuous odyssey of denunciations byNazi hunters and Holocaust survivors, of questions over his identity, citizenship revocations, deportation orders and eventually trials in Israel and Germany for war crimes. He was convicted and reprieved in Israel, and was appealing a guilty verdict in Germany at the time of his death. He steadfastly denied the accusations.

Even at the end of his life — he died on Saturday at a nursing home in southern Germany, his son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said — questions remained in a case that had always been riddled with mysteries. Mr. Demjanjuk was 91