Nfter the suspicion was raised against Matthias Graw, head of the Forensic Institute of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, at the beginning of July, he had copied in his dissertation from 1987 from a Romanian conference volume in English, it did not take long until it became clear to him that the alleged source must be a fake. The volume was not available in any university or institute library worldwide, the text version that was accessible to him contained significant errors in content, and some illustrations were clearly similar to his dissertation, without the individual measuring points being plausible.
At the beginning of October came the expected confirmation from the public authorities. After a detailed investigation, the ombudsman at the University of Hamburg, where Graw received his doctorate, declared that the conference proceedings must be a modern forgery. The effort to create the same must have been considerable. A single person would probably need several weeks, if not months, to do the necessary work – the translation of the dissertation into English, the compilation of the invented anthology contributions with set pieces, the layout and the image processing. Exactly how the counterfeiter or counterfeiters proceeded is still being discussed among experts. In contrast to similarly complex forgeries like those of Konrad Kujau or Wolfgang Beltracchi, the profit from all this would not have consisted in a financial advantage, but solely in the professional destruction of a recognized institute director. At least subliminally, it was also about the proof of intellectual superiority, for example, numerous bibliographical references can be found in the forged conference proceedings that are missing in Graw’s dissertation.