Sobibor - Holocaust Propaganda And Reality - Unity of Nobility ...

382 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
This is a most convincing explanation. In 1976, the U.S. Immigration
Service started investigating the Demjanjuk case. Gitta Sereny tells
us: 1120 “In Demjanjuk’s case, the U.S. immigration authorities questioned
the 12 survivors of the Sobibór camp, then still living in the
U.S., but not one of them was able to identify Demjanjuk. In April of
1976, the authorities sent 17 photos to Israel, including the photo for
his 1951 entry visa. […] While none of the survivors there could
identify Demjanjuk, it came as a surprise that several survivors of
Treblinka felt that he was Ivan the Terrible, the gas-chamber guard
of their nightmares. A few months later, in August of 1976, the Soviet
authorities again became involved in the case. A Ukrainian
newspaper [the News from Ukraine already mentioned] published a
testimony, by then 30 years old, of a former Sobibór guard named
Boris Danilchenko which he had given in a Soviet war crimes trial.
At the time, Danilchenko had said in court, the man in Sobibór he
knew best had been a guard by the name of Ivan Demjanjuk who later
served, like himself, as a guard in the concentration camp at
Flossenbürg.”
Hanusiak’s proof was an alleged service ID card issued to Demjanjuk
in the Trawniki training camp where Ukrainian and other east European
volunteers had been trained as concentration camp guards. The
document states that Demjanjuk was assigned to Sobibór on 27 March
1943. It did not say anything about Demjanuk’s alleged assignment to
Treblinka. This “original document” was put at the disposal of the
Israeli judiciary by the Soviets as late as December 1986, when Demjanjuk
had already spent 9 months in a Jerusalem jail.
In an extensive study Dieter Lehner has advanced a number of arguments
in favor of a thesis that this document is a gross falsification. 2
We will limit ourselves to the most important points:
1) The ID card contains obvious technical irregularities for this kind of
document: 1121
“1. A combination of different fonts showing diverse characteristics.
2. Missing umlauts and umlauts of the letter ‘ü’ that
have obviously been replaced in some other way. 3. The lines, especially
those on the first page, are not parallel. 4. The special
1120 Gitta, Sereny, “Die falsche Schuld,” Die Zeit, No. 44, 1992, www.zeit.de/1992/44/Diefalsche-Schuld
1121 D. Lehner, op. cit. (note 2), pp. 16f.