TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter V: Treblinka Trials 173
information, according to which the Ukrainian had not been in Treblinka but
in Sobibór and Flossenbürg, but the ball was already rolling.
Next the Moscow-directed Ukrainian News published an incriminating
‘document’ in facsimile; once again the Soviet information was clearly not
reconcilable with the testimony of the seven Israeli witnesses. The document
was allegedly Demjanjuk’s service ID card from the training camp Trawniki,
where many Ukrainians had been trained as concentration camp guards during
the war. According to this ID card, Demjanjuk had been detailed to Sobibór
on March 27, 1943; Treblinka was not mentioned on it. The document was an
obvious and clumsy forgery, for it displayed neither a date of issue nor an expiration
date. (In mid-1987 it was subjected to a chemical analysis by the
McCrone Institute in the USA, which proved that titanium oxide was a component
of the photographic paper – a chemical used in black-and-white photography
only since the end of the sixties. 501 ) The ‘original document’ was
made available to the Israeli justice administration by the Soviets at the end of
1986, ten months after Demjanjuk’s extradition.
Up to that point US immigration authorities had only the facsimile of the
ID card as evidence, which in any case offered no evidence of Demjanjuk’s
presence in Treblinka; yet the document was accepted as conclusive. Demjanjuk
was deprived of his U.S. citizenship and in February 1986, under breach
of constitutional principles, was extradited to Israel, a nation, which did not
even exist at the time of the alleged mass murders in Treblinka. A substantial
role in this scandalous violation of law was played by the ‘Nazi-hunting’ OSI,
established under President Jimmy Carter and for many years led by a Jewish
lawyer, Neil Sher, 502 which specialized – using perjured testimony and forged
documents – in stripping innocent old men of German or eastern European descent
of their U.S. citizenship and deporting or extraditing them to prosecuting
nations. 503
One year after this, the Jerusalem trial began, and five former Jewish Treblinka
prisoners who claimed that they saw the accused in that camp in
1942/1943 recited their unspeakable tales of horror to the best of their ability.
501
Cf. also the analysis by Dieter Lehner, Du sollst nicht falsch Zeugnis geben, Berg, n.d.
[1988].
502
In 2003, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ordered Sher disbarred from the Bar Association
of the District of Columbia for misappropriating funds earmarked for Holocaust
survivors; cf. Forward, September 5, 2003; editor’s remark.
503
Through the example of one case (the prosecution of Martin Bartesch), Andrew Allen
documents the murky machinations of the OSI in “Die US-Nazijäger vom OSI und der
Holocaust-Mythos”, Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung, 5(4) (2001), pp. 428-
430; English online: “The Office of Special Investigations and the Holocaust Myth,”
www.codoh.com/trials/triosi.html.