Demjanjuk ID Card Fake, American Expert Testifies

An American documents expert testified today that someone had altered an SS identity card purporting to show that John Demjanjuk, accused of being “Ivan the Terrible,” had trained at a Nazi guard center.

Edna Robertson of Panama City, Fla., told the court in her second day of testimony that “I have reached the conclusion that the document is an altered document, and it is not authentic.”

She said she based her conclusion on evidence that a photograph on the card that allegedly portrays Demjanjuk had been attached in place of the original photograph.

The SS identity card states Demjanjuk was trained as a Nazi guard at Trawniki, a Nazi training center in Poland. Demjanjuk says the Trawniki card is a forgery put together by the Soviets, who provided the document to Israel in 1986.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, 67, a retired Cleveland auto worker, is accused of being a brutal guard who operated the gas chambers in which 850,000 Jews died at the Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942-43.

Although the card does not mention Treblinka, the prosecution introduced it as corroboration of survivors’ testimony that Demjanjuk was a guard at the camp.

Demjanjuk has denied he was Ivan or that he was even at Treblinka. He claims he was a Soviet Red Army soldier who was imprisoned in Nazi prisoner-of-war camps before being recruited into an anti-Soviet Nazi army unit.

Robertson, who has a master’s degree in handwriting and ink analysis from the University of West Florida in Pensacola, said she discovered evidence that a number on the uniform shown in the photograph had also been changed.

The number on the card, 1393, corresponded to what she said was an altered number on the uniform in the picture. She said the number on the uniform had originally been 1693 and one number had been changed.