Useful Enemies

“Guard units at extermination camps, or any number of other SS units.”

“To your knowledge, was there ever any practice of tattooing prisoners of war with such blood groups who were not in the service of the SS?”

“No,” Schefler said.

• • •

In his cross-examination of Schefler, defense attorney John Martin tried to raise doubts about the authenticity of the Trawniki card, as he would throughout the rest of the trial.

“Dr. Schefler,” Martin began, “you testified that the Soviets captured certain documents in the Lublin district… when they were sweeping westward, is that correct?”

“Yes, not just there but from all over,” Schefler said.

“Certainly it is not inconceivable that they could have captured SS stamps and seals, is it not?”

“I don’t know,” Schefler said.

“Have you ever seen a card exactly like this?”

“I have never seen an identical card,” Schefler said.

Next, Martin moved on to Schefler’s credibility as an expert witness.

“Is it fair, sir, to assume that you are not an expert on the questioned documents?” Martin asked.

“I do consider myself an expert—as an historian—in the examination of historical details contained in the documents.”

“But surely, you do not consider yourself so expert that you could give testimony as to their authenticity or genuineness?” Martin pressed.

“Objection,” Moscowitz said. “It’s been asked and answered.”

“I’m going to sustain it because I think we’ve gone far enough,” Battisti ruled.

Finally, Martin challenged a critical point the government needed to establish—that Treblinka was not listed as a posting on the alleged Demjanjuk Service ID card because Trawniki approval was not required in order to shuffle guards between death camps.

“Do you have any documents of these so called transfers amongst the camps?” Martin asked.

“My testimony is based on the statements of different individuals in different trials,” Schefler said.

Martin chose not to ask Schefler whether it was historically accurate to have an undated Trawniki-issued ID card. Perhaps Martin knew, or suspected, what Schefler would answer: Undated Trawniki ID cards were common.

• • •

The prosecution scored several major points in its powerful opening double-barreled salvo: Trawniki men were integral to Himmler’s plan to murder all the Jews of Europe; they collaborated directly with the SS, a criminal Nazi organization; because they were armed and wore special uniforms, they were ineligible for a U.S. visa; and the Trawniki card was historically accurate in every detail.

In response, the defense attempted to raise two doubts in the mind of Judge Battisti about the authenticity of the Trawniki card: As a unique, one-of-a-kind document, it must have been forged; and the card was undated and, therefore, could not be authentic.

To complement the testimony of Schefler about the historical authenticity of the Trawniki card, the prosecution called document examiner Gideon Epstein to the stand to testify about the forensic authenticity of the card.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Under the Microscope

Gideon F. Epstein was a forensic document examiner with more than twenty years experience hunting forgeries, first for the army, then for the INS. With extensive training in handwriting comparison, he was one of a small pool of sixty-seven certified document examiners in the United States. His job as a prosecution witness was as complex as it was critical—to determine if the Trawniki card was authentic or a KGB forgery.

OSI was unable to provide Epstein with the original card for examination because Moscow had failed to deliver it before the trial as promised. All Epstein had to work with were the Soviet-certified photos of the front and back of the card, and for comparison purposes, two known or proven signature samples of Trawniki commandant Karl Streibel, and two of Trawniki supply officer Ernst Teufel.

Epstein studied the writing on the card under a powerful stereoscopic microscope using various degrees of magnification in order to analyze, measure, and compare the characteristics of the handwriting. He began with the speed the author used to sign his name and whether he wrote with “careless abandon.”

Speed is important because it determines whether the handwriting was produced naturally and without conscious control over the writing process. The strokes of a forger would be slower and more deliberate, no matter how many times he practiced.

Next, Epstein studied the pressure the signer used to produce the writing and the degree of smoothness in forming characters, and the up and down strokes of the writing, which produce areas of lightness and darkness. Important for his analysis were the patterns and variations that are so subtle, they are nearly impossible to reproduce.

Finally, since the body and the hand shake ever so slightly when someone writes, Epstein analyzed the tremor pattern in the sample writing. And since the stroke of the pen does not stop on a dime, Epstein examined and compared the feather, or trailing, at the end of each word. Like snowflakes, no two tremor and feather patterns are alike.

These characteristics—speed, abandon, naturalness, and the variations and patterns of pressure and smoothness, tremor and feathering—would help Epstein determine whether the writing was traced or forged. He would depend on no single writing characteristic to reach a conclusion about the authenticity of Streibel’s and Teufel’s signatures.

“After examining and performing these tests… on the questioned and the known signature of Streibel,” Horrigan asked, “did you come to any conclusions?”

“Yes I did.”

“What were those conclusions?”

“The person who made the known signatures,” Epstein said, “also made the signature… in the questioned German identification card.”

Next, Epstein concluded that the two known signatures of Teufel also matched the signature on the photograph of the Trawniki card. To illustrate how he arrived at his conclusions, Epstein presented the court with a letter-by-letter analysis of blowups of all the signatures he had compared.

“There were no differences found in any of the characteristics,” Epstein concluded.

Epstein went on to explain how he had used a low-power stereoscopic microscope to study the background tone of the Trawniki card photos to determine if there were any erasures, or if any of the cardboard fibers were disturbed. He further explained how he had used a variety of filters, films, and lighting to see if touching up, whiting out, or substitutions were present on the card.

Substitution was an important prosecution concern. Demjanjuk supporters alleged that the KGB stripped in Streibel’s and/or Demjanjuk’s name. To perform that kind of fraud, the forger would have to remove the old signature from the card. In so doing, he or she would disturb the paper in some detectable way.

Epstein testified that the only disturbance he found in the background of the card was the N in Nikolai, Demjanjuk’s father’s first name. Someone had erased the letter and corrected it. “This I assume was done by the typist when the document was made,” Epstein said, adding that the N in Nikolai, was identical to all the other N’s on the card.

Finally, Epstein examined the photo on the card. Did someone remove the original picture and substitute