Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

• The yellow-orange stains were probably dried glue. It would take an evaluation by a certified chemist to determine with absolute certainty whether the substance was glue or a solvent. The latter would suggest card tampering and possible forgery.

• In all likelihood, the perforations on the picture were staple holes. It was common to find such holes on the photo but not on the document to which it was attached. Photographs were frequently stapled to a temporary document so they wouldn’t be lost in a paper shuffle.

• There were different typeface and font designs on the Trawniki card. Such variations in the printing or typesetting were normal on World War II documents.

• The half of the official seal on the photograph and the half of the seal on the page matched perfectly. This proved that only one stamp was used.

Like Bezaleli, Epstein concluded that the card was not forged. And like Bezaleli, he left the same two issues dangling—the authenticity of Demjanjuk’s signature and the possible substitution of card photos.

The third prosecution expert witness was Reinhardt Altman, a photo identification expert from Wiesbaden, Germany. Altman had worked for the German police for nearly thirty years, starting as a criminal investigator and ending up as a photo identification instructor. His job was to compare the photo on the Trawniki card to proven photos of John Demjanjuk—including two contemporary video frames of him entering the Jerusalem courtroom—to determine if the picture on the card was his.

A pioneer in the field of photo identification, Altman chose twenty-four predictive facial features for comparison, including jaw, hairline, eyes, nose, and especially the distinct configuration of the ear and the delicate line patterns of the inner lip. Then he conducted three tests. First, he compared the Trawniki photo with proven Demjanjuk photos, feature by feature. Next, he cut reproductions of the photos in half, placing the left half of the Trawniki photo next to the right half of known photos. Finally, he superimposed a proven photo over the Trawniki photo and concluded: “There is not the slightest doubt that these photographs are of one and the same person.”

The fourth prosecution expert witness was Patricia Smith. She held a degree in dental surgery from the London Hospital Medical College, had studied physical anthropology at the University of Chicago—one of the world’s leading schools in that discipline—and was professor of dental morphology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Unlike Altman, she not only compared facial harmony and disharmony, she measured them—the length of eyebrows, the distance between the eyes, the length of the bridge of the nose.

Step by step, Smith took the court through a fourteen-feature comparison of the 1942 Trawniki photo and a current video-derived photo of Demjanjuk entering the courtroom. To demonstrate “concordance” or matching, Smith used an overlay of each of the fourteen enlarged features from the two photos, projected on a courtroom screen.

Like Altman, Smith concluded that the 1942 photo on the Trawniki card was without a shadow of doubt that of John Demjanjuk.

The final prosecution expert witness was Tony Cantu, a paper and ink specialist with a doctorate in chemical physics from the University of Texas. Cantu’s U.S. government career was as colorful as it was checkered. He began as a forensic scientist at the Justice Department, advanced to a document-dating specialist at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and ended up paper-chasing forgers for the FBI and the Treasury Department. In all, Cantu had conducted more than ten thousand investigations involving paper and ink.

Cantu tested the six different inks used to make the card signatures, translator notes, typewriter letter impressions, and seal impressions. Employing a hypodermic needle with the tip converted into a boring tool, Cantu extracted two or three samples from each of the six inks and subjected them to chemical analysis. Cantu also analyzed the Trawniki card paper fibers, looking for two ingredients that would definitively date the paper after World War II—glass, which was introduced around 1950, and synthetic fibers, first introduced around 1953.

Cantu concluded:

• None of the inks on the card was manufactured after 1941.

• The unbleached pulp and groundwood in the card fibers were consistent with paper available in 1942. None of the fibers contained any materials that suggested the paper was manufactured after 1942.

• The purple ink that the Russian translator used to write his translation of the card was available from 1941 up to 1948.

There was little that defense attorneys O’Connor and Gill could do in their cross-examination of the prosecution’s five expert witnesses except challenge their credentials in an attempt to destroy their credibility; argue that their conclusions were subjective and, therefore, unscientific and suspect; and label their conclusions invalid because their analyses were superficial:

• Amnon Bezaleli had no academic or technical training in forgery identification. Most of his work dealt with alleged forged contemporary drivers’ licenses. His experience, therefore, was narrow, limited, and irrelevant to the examination of the Trawniki card. And because there were several key tests Bezaleli did not perform, his conclusion that the card was authentic was invalid.

• Gideon Epstein’s analysis was so superficial that he didn’t bother to analyze the three numerals Teufel had allegedly written on the card. Nor did he bother to count the number of ink colors or the number of Germans who wrote on the card. Nor did he analyze the ink found in the perforation holes. Nor did he measure and compare the signature strokes on the card with the strokes of Streibel and Teufel in the proven signatures. Epstein’s conclusion that the card was authentic, therefore, was based on a sloppy and incomplete examination.

• Reinhardt Altman’s analysis was based on the science of anthropology, but the technician had no training in the field. His conclusions were nothing more than voodoo conjury; his montages were merely optical illusions and “trix-mixes.” Every conclusion Altman drew was unscientific and completely subjective.

• Patricia Smith admitted that there were differences in the facial features she compared. Those differences invalidated her conclusions about authenticity.

O’Connor and Gill couldn’t touch Tony Cantu. The prosecution rested.

At this point in the trial, the Demjanjuk family knew that the defense was in deep trouble. Historians seemingly had proved that John Demjanjuk could not have been in Chelm when he said he was because the Germans had long since evacuated the camp; and they seemingly had proved also that Demjanjuk could not have been part of Vlasov’s army when he said he was because the army didn’t exist at that time. The Treblinka survivors were unflinching in their identification of John Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible. And the prosecution’s argument favoring the authenticity of the Trawniki card was formidable and almost overwhelming.

But the prosecution had a weakness that did not go unnoticed. The Treblinka survivors were old and too sure of themselves. Israelis were beginning to doubt. Amir Shaviv, the legal correspondent for Israeli television, who kept his fingers on the pulse of the trial, voiced that doubt with precision and eloquence.

“It is very frustrating that after five months of hard work by the prosecution,” he said in a telecast, “we still cannot stand up and say, without a shred of doubt: ‘John Demjanjuk, you are Ivan the Terrible.’ What is even more frustrating is that I would like to be able to hate John Demjanjuk, but I can’t, because I am not certain that he is Ivan. And I would like to be able to pity John Demjanjuk—this old man all alone in a cell, far from home, away from his family—but I can’t, because I am not sure that he is not Ivan.”