Update on Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: The Rauff Letter to the Criminal Technical Institute

Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans

Part I: Why the Diesel Issue is Still Irrelevant (update 1, 2)
Part II: Producer Gas

 Part III: The Ford Gas Wagon (update)
Part IV: The Becker Letter (update)
Part V: The Rauff Letter to the Criminal Technical Institute (update 1, 2, 3, cf. on Mattogno & here)

Part VI: The Turner Letter

Part VII: The Schäfer, Trühe & Rauff Telexes

Part VIII: The Einsatzgruppe B Activity & Situation Report (cf. on Mattogno)

Part IX: The Just Memo

Part X: The West-German Trials Against Members of Einsatzkommando 8

Part XI: Einsatzgruppe D in Simferopol

The letter of Rauff (RSHA office II) to the Criminal Technical Institute of the Security Police (RSHA office V) of 26 March 1942 speaking of "special vans" which can be replaced by "bottles with carbon monoxide" has been dismissed by the Holocaust denier Santiago Alvarez as forgery based on a supposedly "wrong" form. In Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: The Rauff Letter to the Criminal Technical Institute I had argued that the "odd" form is explained by its being a carbon copy (with some further typed additions) and pointed out similar carbon copies (without typed additions, which were typical for memos and transcriptions in Rauff's department to further track and treat an issue) from the German Foreign Office files. Actually, there are also documents from the RSHA office V which show the same formal characteristic in the letterhead than in Rauff's letter further supporting its authenticity.

Recall that Rauff's letter to the Criminal Technical Institute of 26 March 1942 includes the following, at first sight, odd letterhead with lacking sender and incomplete date:

                                                                               26. March     2.

II D Rf/Hb
B. Nr. 167/42g

                   1.) Letter

                   To the
                   Crim. Tech. Institute
                   at the Reich Criminal Police Office

                   Berlin.

                   [...]

In the meantime, I found more than a dozen documents from the Criminal Technical Institute, mostly authored by Albert Widmann reporting the shipment of medicals, showing the same characteristic of lacking sender and date with void. For example:

                                                                                16. Nov.     4.

                      Chemistry 4      

Mr. medical councillor Dr. Sch.
State Mental Home
Eichberg/Rheingau
via Eltville, train station Hatenheim

                      [...]

(carbon copy of letter Widmann to Sch. of 16 November 1944, Bundesarchiv B 162 / 822, p. 51, my translation; addressee abbreviated for reasons of privacy protection)

Hence, it was clearly practised in the RSHA to keep carbon copies of letters typed on preprinted sheets of writing paper, which necessarily resulted in scrambled letterheads. The "odd" heading in Rauff's letter on homicidal gas vans is, therefore, no indication for a fake, but in contrary it is a formally authentic feature of a contemporary carbon copy.

Alvarez did not seriously bother trying to understand and research the document's form. He did not perform some brainstorming on how to explain the letterhead but only pulled the convenient forgery card fitting to his aim of denying gas vans. In other words, he did not do his job as a researcher; he did do well as a Holocaust denier, though.

He did not check out the Eichmann trial docs or RSHA files for comparison. Of course, you don't necessarily have to know these to write something on German homicidal gas vans. However, you do need to do such kind of research before drawing such grave conclusion as simply dismissing RSHA gas van documents. Alvarez went far beyond his competence specifically here, but also in general in the entire book as already shown and as will shown more in this series.