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

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). I 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. Now I was able to locate 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:

Hence, it was clearly practise in the RSHA to keep carbon copies of letters typed on preprinted sheets of writing paper, which necessarily resulted in scrambled letter heads. 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 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 in order 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.