Update 2 on Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: The Rauff Letter to the Criminal Technical Institute

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

 Part III: The Ford Gas Wagon (update)
Part IV: The Becker Letter
Part V: The Rauff Letter to the Criminal Technical Institute (update) (update 2)

Part VI: The Turner Letter

Alvarez had argued that the initials of Rauff and the RSHA clerk on the letter to the Criminal Technical Institute of 26 March 1942 are an anomaly supporting his forgery hypothesis. I have previously rebutted this by pointing out there are only very few reference documents and that precisely this variation to the otherwise formally matching references actually makes the forgery hypothesis implausible easily trumped by the explanation that it would be an exception to a rule in the RSHA bureaucracy. 

Even this last remaining "anomaly" is now pulverised. On 27 May 1940, the head of the RSHA office II B 3 on political churches (after March 1941 office IV B on ideological enemies) Albert Hartl set up a memo on a "conversation with SS-Oberführer Nebe of 25 May on astrology" (reproduced in Rathert, Verbrechen und Verschwörung: Arthur Nebe, p. 80). The memo has the typed initials of the author and the RSHA clerk right after the office designation: "Ht./Pi.", just as in the carbon copy of Rauff's letter.

This demonstrates - on an entirely innocent document - that it was a possible practise in the RSHA to include the initials of author and clerk in documents for their own files. This is once again an example how Alvarez has drawn a serious, far reaching (still implausible and ultimately false) conclusion based on his fatal historical and logical ignorance.