Useful Enemies

irrelevant. And he had completely destroyed Anita Pritchard.

If that wasn’t enough grief for the embattled defense, time was fast running out. It needed a big gun, an expert among experts, a forensic scientist with impeccable credentials. Sheftel asked Ed Nishnic to find such a person and fast. He would be the defense’s last hope. The redeemer.

Nishnic found Julius Grant.

• • •

Eighty-six-year-old Julius Grant was a British chemist with a doctorate in toxic metals from the University of London; an internationally recognized expert in handwriting, paper, and ink analysis; and a highly sought-after freelance expert on dating documents and paintings. He had more experience as a historic document examiner than all the prosecution experts combined, and he had served as an expert witness in more than seventy countries around the world, a record no expert witness before him could even come close to matching.

It was Julius Grant who had conclusively proven for the London Sunday Times that the Hitler Diaries were fake. He reached his unqualified and undisputed conclusion in just five hours by chemically determining that the ink used in making the diaries was recent ink, not ink from the 1940s. Grant had also proven that the “Mussolini Diaries” were forgeries and that the mummy of Egyptian pharaoh King Tutankhamen, discovered in 1922, was authentic.

Grant’s task as a defense witness was huge—prove that all five prosecution expert witnesses—Bezaleli, Epstein, Altman, Robertson, and Smith—were wrong in one way or another, by showing that at least one important element on the Trawniki card had been forged. As Grant took the stand, his boney hands and slight frame belied his physical strength and inner resolve. But he quickly showed the court just how tough he was when he declined the chair Judge Levin offered him and remained standing for the entire three days of his testimony, which was articulate, reasoned, precise, clear, and cautiously wise.

Grant made it clear to the court that he based his analysis of the Trawniki card signatures on two graphology principles. First: “Handwriting comparison is not an exact science…. You cannot identify a person with certainty from handwriting…. There are times when the forger is more clever than the handwriting expert, as in the Hitler Diaries.”

Second: “When a person signs his name—whether he does it once, twice, or a thousand times—he never does it twice exactly the same.”

With those two conditions in mind, Grant analyzed the original Trawniki card, the original and proven signatures of Karl Streibel, photos of—but not the original proven signatures of—Ernst Teufel, the card paper and ink, the questioned Demjanjuk photo, the perforations on the card, and the ink in the perforation holes.

Grant concluded:

• It was highly probable that Streibel’s signature was authentic. He added, however, that it was possible the signature had been written by a very sophisticated forger.

• Teufel’s signature was convincing but only possibly authentic because he (Grant) had not examined the original signatures.

• The Demjanjuk signature was forged.

• The ink in the perforations on the card photo was identical to the ink the Russian translator had used for his writing on the card. The ink got into the holes after they were made, leading him to doubt the authenticity of the photograph.

• Based on his chemical analysis of the age of the glue used to fix the photo to the card, the photo was replaced in the Soviet Union, not at Trawniki.

• It was unlikely that the paper was made during World War II because of the heavy rag content of the card. Rags were so precious during the war, they were “hoarded like gold.”

Putting all the pieces together, Grant concluded: “Indications are that the identification card is not authentic. In this evaluation, I am greatly influenced by the accused’s signature on it, which I find not to be his.”

The redeemer had done what Sheftel hoped he would. The internationally famous and highly respected Julius Grant had declared the Trawniki card a fake. All Shaked could do during his cross-examination was to rub some of the luster off Grant’s clear and reasoned conclusions.

In effect, Grant had cast a gray shadow of doubt over the whole Trawniki card. His testimony was so authoritative that the court could neither dismiss it nor treat it lightly. The question was: What weight would the judges give his opinions in their deliberations?

Convinced that Grant had changed the whole course of the trial, the defense presented its next witness with less panic and more confidence. His task was huge—convince the court that he was never trained at Trawniki and that he was not Ivan the Terrible. Rather, he was a Russian POW imprisoned in a camp in Poland and a newly inducted soldier in General Vlasov’s army.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE Victim or Liar?

If it please the court,” the accused said to a packed Hall of the People. “I am John Demjanjuk.”

Thus began the swan-song defense of “Ivan the Terrible.” More than three hundred spectators had gathered in the courtroom to hear him lie and, if they were lucky, to be treated to another emotional drama. To those who had been following the trial, Demjanjuk was already half-guilty even before he answered the first question. To the survivors and their families, his testimony was a waste of time. On to the gallows!

John Gill conducted the direct examination. As seasoned defense attorneys, both he and Sheftel knew it was always risky to place a defendant on the stand. But what choice did they have? If Demjanjuk did not testify, it would be interpreted as an admission of guilt.

Gill’s job was to show that Demjanjuk was a simple, honest man with nothing to hide, change Demjanjuk’s image from perpetrator to victim, and make his wartime alibi sound believable. Gill began with Demjanjuk’s childhood. The court was both patient and indulgent.

Demjanjuk testified that it had taken him eight years to complete four grades of school, and not because he was slow. “My parents were very poor, and we had nothing to wear. No shoes to put on,” he explained. “If my father had any job whatsoever, I had to stay home…. Except for the third grade, I spent two years in each grade. When I was in fifth grade, and asked to repeat it for a third time, they would not let me do it. I received what was called a disqualification report card.”

After being expelled from school, Demjanjuk joined a Komsomol, a communist youth organization, and plowed fields on a collective farm (kolkhoz). A dependable worker, he was eventually promoted to labor team organizer.

Like everyone in their village, the Demjanjuk family suffered terribly during Stalin’s forced famine (the Holodomor) of 1932–33. “It was so horrible it goes beyond anything that humanity had known up to then,” Demjanjuk testified. “Our entire family—my mother, my sister, myself—were swollen from hunger…. We ate rats, our cat, and our bird. People were lying dead in their homes, in their yards, on the roads, exposed to sunlight. No one buried them.”

As soon as it became clear that they would starve to death like their neighbors, the family sold all their belongings for food. When they had nothing left, they sold their home for eight loaves of bread and headed east for another kolkhoz, where a relative lived and worked. She had food.

The Demjanjuk family returned to their village the following year when the famine was officially over. “We didn’t find anyone alive,” he testified. The family moved into the abandoned house of a relative, and Iwan returned to his old job on the kolkhoz.

Russia’s war with Finland in the winter of 1939–40 changed his life. All the kolkhoz tractor drivers were drafted into the army, and young Iwan was given their job. When none returned after the war, Iwan’s temporary job became permanent, until late 1940, when he received a draft notice ordering him to report to an induction center with a plate, spoon, and two pairs of underwear.

When Iwan showed up without the underwear because he couldn’t afford any, the army sent him back home.