Dedicated to P r o f . D r . Dr. Ing. h.c. R. ROMPE on the occasion of h i s 80th birthday X-ray diffractometry is a widely used method to investigate strain fields in s u rface l a y e r s of otherwise perfect single crystals. Especially the sensitive method to determine the depth profile of strain induced in semiconducting materials by technological processes. of parallel double-crystal diffractometry (DCD) offers many possibilitiesIn /1/ i t was shown that in the c a s e of very thin disturbed surface layers, where the intensity from this layer is very weak, the influence of diffuse scatbering becomes apparent. On perfect crystals this effect causes a distinct intensity increase in the tails of the rocking curve leading to a deviation from the theoretically expected l,AS intensity falling off. Intensity oscillations in the rocking curve of crystals with surface strain profile are suppressed.Computer simulations with such rocking curves would lead to wrong deformation profiles. In /1/ a correction was introduced relating the scattered intensity to dynamical Bragg diffraction that led to satisfactory strain distributions.Triple-crystal diffractometry of parallel (n, -n, n) setting (TCD) offers the 2 possibilities to measure the reflection curve of disturbed crystals very sensitively /2/ and to discriminate the influence of diffuse scattering during the measurement. Whereas the wide entrance of the counter of a DCD integrates the diffuse scattered intensities in a wide angular range, the TCD with an analyzer crystal behind the sample r e g i s t e r s nearly only the intensity in the angular interval of the width of the analyzer reflection curve.In principle, TCD intensity curves measured by rotation of the analyzer crystal (As) a t fixed sample position (a) have the following form in the case I) PSF 409, DDR-1200 Frankfurt (Oder), GDR.