3rd 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

Part XII: Material Evidence

Part XIII: Misreading the Fine Print 

It may appear like beating a dead horse when I'm still updating this post with further material refuting the already discredited Revisionist forgery hypothesis on the Rauff letter to the Criminal Technical Institute, but this one is too good not to share it.

Recall that the denier Alvarez claimed that

"[f]ormally seen, almost everything about this letter is wrong:

a) The name of the sending authority (RSHA) is not given.
b) The name of the sending office is incomplete: Instead of “II D 3,” it
only states “II D.”
c) Giving initials of the author (Rf) and of the secretary (Hb) was not
practiced on any of the other RSHA letters in this file
...
g) The paragraph starting with “2.)” was typed (squeezed in over the
“I.A.” line) after the paper had been removed from the machine, resulting
in it being shifted and slightly rotated."

(Alvarez, The Gas Vans, p. 297f.)

I have previously explained that a) and g) result from the document being a commented carbon copy of the letter, that b) suggests the document was directly authored in Rauff's office and provided an example from another RSHA office for the practice done in c).

Here is a new source, which combines all these four items in one single document from Rauff's office. In particular, it demonstrates the practice to insert a copy of a letter into a typewriter again to add internal office comments:

II D Rf/Hb. BNr. 227/42     Berlin den 20.Juni 1942.

1.) Schreiben

An das
Referat I A 4 z.hd. von Sturmbannführer Br.
im Hause


Betrifft: SS-Untersturmführer-Planstelle für SS-Hauptscharführer Heinrich Ha.

[...]

2.) Wvl. mit Weiterem sp. 15.7.1942

3.) Z.d.A.                                   [signature Rauff]
                                                  SS-Obersturmbannführer

(letter of Rauff to Br. of 20 June 1942, BArch R58/788, p. 20, quoted from Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, NDS. 721 Hannover Acc. 97/99 Nr. 10/13)

Those lines in courier font represent office internal comments and are typed with thinner letters than the rest of the text, which shows that the paper had been inserted into a different typewriter after the creation of the copy. Note also that the clerk with the initials Hb is the same as in Rauff's letter to the Criminal Technical Institute. This clerk can also be found on several other documents from Rauff's office (BArch R58/863, p. 14, 15, 20, reproduced in Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, NDS. 721 Hannover Acc. 97/99 Nr. 10/13)

So once again, there is nothing formally "wrong" with the letter (or more precisely, its carbon copy for the files of the RSHA office II D) on "the special vans" and "steel bottles with carbon monoxide" corroborating the German homicidal gas vans, but it is on the contrary as formally authentic as a document can only be.