Demjanjuk ID Card Altered, Expert Testifies

JERUSALEM —  An American document expert told an Israeli court today which is trying alleged war criminal John Demjanjuk that a Nazi identity card in the defendant’s name had been altered.

Edna Robinson, a graphology and documents expert from Florida, said that the signature on the card from the Trawniki training camp was not Demjanjuk’s and that an original photograph had been replaced.

“I reached the conclusion that the document had been altered,” Robinson said. “The photograph was removed and replaced.”

Demjanjuk, 67, says he is the victim of mistaken identity and denies Israeli charges that he killed hundreds of thousands of Jews as the gas chamber operator “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was stripped of his American citizenship and extradited from the United States last year on charges that he lied to U.S. immigration officials.

“I arrived at an unqualified opinion that the signature on the ID card is not by the same writer who wrote Demjanjuk on the standards,” Robinson said, referring to examples of the defendant’s signatures on other documents.

She said she decided the card had been altered after conducting ink and paper fiber tests. Robinson also said a validation stamp overlapping the photograph and the card was printed with two different types of ink.

The prosecution says the identity card obtained from Soviet archives was issued to Demjanjuk at the Trawniki camp, where the Nazis trained Ukrainian prisoners-of-war for special guard duties at Treblinka.

A forensic document expert for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, who testified for the prosecution in May, said he had tested the card and found it to be genuine.

Demjanjuk’s defense team has maintained that the card is part of a Soviet attempt to discredit Ukrainian immigrants in the United States.