Is this document genuine? [Lachout Document]

[Egg]

Is this document genuine? It's been circling the internet.

The Allied investigation commissions have so far determined that no people were killed with poison gas in the following concentration camps:
Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Groß-Rosen, Mauthausen and its subcamps, Natzweiler, Neuengamme, Niederhagen (Wewelsburg), Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Stutthof, Theresienstadt.
In these cases, it has been proven that confessions were extracted through torture and witness testimonies were false.
This must be taken into account during war crime investigations and interrogations.
Former concentration camp prisoners who, during interrogations, make statements about the murder of people—especially Jews—with poison gas in these camps must be informed of these investigation results. If they continue to insist on their claims, a report for perjury must be filed.

Die Alliierten Untersuchungskommissionen haben bisher festgestellt, dass in folgenden Konzentrationslagern keine Menschen mit Giftgas getötet wurden:
Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Groß-Rosen, Mauthausen und Nebenlager, Natzweiler, Neuengamme, Niederhagen (Wewelsburg), Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Stutthof, Theresienstadt.
In diesen Fällen konnte nachgewiesen werden, dass Geständnisse durch Folterungen erpresst wurden und Zeugenaussagen falsch waren.
Dies ist bei den KV-Erhebungen und Einvernahmen zu berücksichtigen.
Ehemalige KZ-Häftlinge, welche bei Einvernahmen Angaben über die Ermordung von Menschen, insbesondere von Juden, mit Giftgas in diesen KZ machen, ist dieses Untersuchungsergebnis zur Kenntnis zu bringen. Sollten sie weiter auf ihrer Aussage bestehen, ist die Anzeige wegen falscher Zeugenaussage zu erstatten.

[SanityCheck]

No, it's a forgery dating from November 1987 and coming from Austria
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lachout-Dokument
https://www.nizkor.org/the-lachout-document/#

Note how in the intervening 37 years, exceedingly few revisionist authors have used this document in their books.

See also for another blatant set of forgeries from the 1980s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_12

[Callafangers]

No, it's a forgery dating from November 1987 and coming from Austria
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lachout-Dokument
https://www.nizkor.org/the-lachout-document/#

Note how in the intervening 37 years, exceedingly few revisionist authors have used this document in their books.

See also for another blatant set of forgeries from the 1980s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_12

If this is indeed a forgery, let it serve as an indicator of just how easy it is, even for 'nobodies', to make forgeries which look at least superficially believable. Just imagine if you had victorious WW2 governments or vast communist networks, etc., attempting the same.

What a crazy thought, right?

[Egg]

Thanks for the replies. I knew it was a forgery simply because I'd never seen it before, but wanted to double-check.

[SanityCheck]

No, it's a forgery dating from November 1987 and coming from Austria
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lachout-Dokument
https://www.nizkor.org/the-lachout-document/#

Note how in the intervening 37 years, exceedingly few revisionist authors have used this document in their books.

See also for another blatant set of forgeries from the 1980s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_12

If this is indeed a forgery, let it serve as an indicator of just how easy it is, even for 'nobodies', to make forgeries which look at least superficially believable. Just imagine if you had victorious WW2 governments or vast communist networks, etc., attempting the same.

What a crazy thought, right?

Forgeries typically emerge on their own or in very small sets, as with the Lachout document, and most of the other examples of forgeries which some revisionists have fallen for in the past. Only Gregory Douglas seems to have been especially industrious as a forger, and I think Germar Rudolf would admit he got burned by Douglas; David Irving had his suspicions earlier.
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... eries.html

The timeline of the postwar investigations and trials just doesn't work to claim that there was actually a forgery program by any country. None of the postwar investigating powers had enough knowledge to make convincing forgeries - i.e. which could fool generations of historians. Especially since the overall volume of records was so large, with so much unexplored and left for archivists or historians, so that for every document used in a trial, there are more which remained in archives and were only discovered much later.

There was one document used at Nuremberg whose contents were flatly contradicted by other records, since it placed Himmler somewhere he wasn't on the day in question, and its tone is contradicted by other Himmler memos from the same time-frame. The purported provenance was a SD outpost in Mogilno, western Poland, so very provincial. It's as glaring as the Lachout document. The purpose? To prove Polish victimhood.
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... mmler.html

It was an isolated case and likely forged by an individual; there were enough other captured documents to keep various archives in Poland busy with digesting boring economics records as much as the legalistic decrees and other records, and enough on Poland captured elsewhere to corroborate the sources the Poles had.

Here's a more extensive 1944 SD memo on 'Polish policy' which is longer and usefully looks back from a post-Warsaw Uprising viewpoint, from the RSHA files. The reference to a Polish “fear that they, similar to the Jewish people, are to be annihilated in their ethnic substance” is echoed in a good dozen or more German contemporary documents from multiple countries, archives and collections, specifically about Poles fearing they were next in line.
https://holocausthistory.site/1944-10-1 ... substance/

As this came from the US-captured RSHA files it was microfilmed in the 1950s and had not been used earlier at a trial. The chance that an American involved with the AHA microfilming program or someone else snuck in this whole document, or altered the line mentioned above, is about nil - it is wholly improbable, especially as the first discoverer was a Polish historian who published it in 1969. It doesn't seem to have been used in a Holocaust context at all.

[fireofice]

It seems SanityCheck is saying that forgeries exist, but downplays it by saying that these were insignificant nobodies who did them and therefore no big deal. That's a pretty laughable position to hold. In my opinion, other documents like the Franke-Gricksch report, The Becker and Just letters are also confirmed forgeries in my opinion (yes, I am aware of the arguments against this, I don't find them convincing at all and we don't have to relitigate that here, I'll probably make separate threads on those in the future).

He also argues that because they weren't used at the time, they can't be forgeries. This is a completely unconvincing argument. Something may be forged and it could be planned to be used for a certain purpose but then gets abandoned. After all, there was a lot going on. Also the forgery could be used for other purposes, like demonizing the Nazis at a later date. Using a forgery to condemn the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials is clearly not the only motive to forge something. The document SanityCheck provides that he says is definitely not a forgery/very improbable that it is one is not improbable at all. I personally think that document is probably authentic, but I don't find it "improbable" that it was forged. This is based on different priors that we are working with here. I think it's not improbable because I don't think document forgery done by the allies to smear a group they hated and had power over is improbable at all. Meanwhile, SanityCheck thinks the allies were something like this:

orthodox view of allies.png (162.1 KiB) Viewed 470 times

And given the underhanded tactics used (denying them a fair trial without fair use of evidence, torture, ect.) the idea that the allies would forge documents should not be considered ridiculous. But it's understandable why the orthodoxy would hold onto such an absurd position, because that would weaken their position immensely.

[Archie]

The Lachout document is indeed fake. It surfaced in 1987 for the Wiesenthal vs Rainer trial in Austria. See these articles by Klaus Schwensen.

https://codoh.com/library/document/step ... st/#_edn34
https://codoh.com/library/document/on-t ... -document/

Faurisson noticed the similarity between the Lachout document and the Pinter letter and asked Lachout about this. Thereafter Lachout began incorporating Pinter into his story, claiming that Pinter had headed up the Allied Commission on Mauthausen and had authored a Mauthausen report.
https://www.unz.com/book/arthur_r_butz_ ... _11_53:1-2

But this Mauthausen commission never existed and Pinter when asked about it later said "I had nothing to do with Mauthausen." The Americans had just conducted Mauthausen trials in 1946 and 1947 where they executed dozens of people and affirmed the reality of the gas chamber there. If you think about it, it makes no sense for the Americans to have had a separate commission in 1948 to contradict their own findings from the year before. There would be zero incentive to do that. Never happened.

When this was used back in the late 80s, the point that was made was that in the West they were able to do more honest investigations while in the East we just had Communist lies. There's some appeal to that narrative because all the "extermination" camps were in the East, but the reality is that the Americans were nearly as unreliable as the Soviets.

Some of the gassing stories in the Western concentration camps were walked back but not so emphatically as presented in the Lachout document. And not that early. The main walk-back was Dachau around 1960 (but this is still debated). In the Western camps, the establishment actually still claims relatively small scale gassings at a handful of them.

[Stubble]

Translation;

Military Police Service

Vienna, 1 Oct 1948
10th dispatch

Circular Letter No. 31/48

1. The Allied Commissions of Inquiry have so far established that no people were killed by poison gas in the following concentration camps: Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen and its satellite camps, Natzweiler, Neuengamme, Niederhagen (Wewelsburg), Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Stutthof, Theresienstadt

In those cases, it has been possible to prove that confessions had been extracted by tortures and that testimonies were false.

This must be taken into account when conducting investigations and interrogations with respect to war crimes.

The result of this investigation should be brought to the cognizance of former concentration camp inmates who at the time of the hearings testified on the murder of people, especially Jews, with poison gas in those concentration camps. Should they insist on their statements, charges are to be brought against them for making false statements.

2. In the C.L. (Circular Letter) 15/48, item 1 is to be deleted.

The Head of the MPS
Müller, Major

Certified true copy:
Lachout, Second Lieutenant

L.S. (place of the seal)

C.t.c.:
Austrian Republic
Vienna Guard Battalion
Command Command

I hereby confirm that on 1 October 1948, being a member of the Military Police Service at the Allied Military, I certified the copy of this dispatch of the circular letter to be a true copy in pursuance of Art 18, para. 4 AVG (General Code of
Administration Law).

Vienna,27 October 1987

Obviously, this has to be fake, we all know Belsen was a gas. There is a song and everything.

[Hektor]

No, it's a forgery dating from November 1987 and coming from Austria
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lachout-Dokument
https://www.nizkor.org/the-lachout-document/#

Note how in the intervening 37 years, exceedingly few revisionist authors have used this document in their books.

See also for another blatant set of forgeries from the 1980s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_12

If this is indeed a forgery, let it serve as an indicator of just how easy it is, even for 'nobodies', to make forgeries which look at least superficially believable. Just imagine if you had victorious WW2 governments or vast communist networks, etc., attempting the same.

What a crazy thought, right?

The ease to produce superficial documents is indeed telling. But what would be the motive for the Lachout document? Who did forge it and why?