On 5 March 1992, German magazine Stern published a claim that the Israeli prosecution concealed crucial information about the Trawniki card being a forgery, and that the Israelis had the full cooperation of the German police and the Ministry of Justice. The article stated that on 23 January 1986, three weeks before the trial, Superintendent Amnon Bezaleli took the original Trawniki card for examination at the German police force's main criminal-identification laboratory at the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) in Wiesbaden. Bezaleli was the prosecution's central witness on the Trawniki document. According to Stern, the BKA, after a cursory examination, told Bezaleli that this was a counterfeit document forged in a more or less amateur way.

The BKA laboratory's preliminary analysis addressed the following points: the face in the photograph, which the prosecution identified as Demjanjuk's, had been pasted onto the uniform using photomontage techniques; the picture was not originally attached to the card, but had been transferred from another document; there was no match between the seal on the Trawniki picture and that on the document itself. The analysts did not have time to compare Demjanjuk's known signature with the Demjanjuk signature on the Travniki document. Dr. Louis Ferdinand Werner, head of the BKA, speculated to Bezaleli in a private conversation that the card was counterfeit. Bezaleli consulted people from the state prosecutor's office in Jerusalem, then instructed Werner to stop all tests on the card.‏⁵¹

During the trial, Demjanjuk was again identified on the photo spread by Otto Horn, a former German SS guard at Treblinka.‏⁴⁹ This testimony became controversial later because it was discovered by Yoram Sheftel that on 14 November 1979, Otto Horn was interviewed by the newly created US Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations (OSI). The OSI showed him the picture of Demjanjuk, but at that time Horn failed to identify Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible, or even as a guard from Treblinka, or as anyone he ever knew in the SS forces. The OSI report regarding Otto Horn's failure to identify John Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible would have been exculpatory, but was withheld by the OSI.‏⁵²