The Turner Letter is Fake

[fireofice]

The Letter from Harald Turner to Karl Wolff of 11 April 1942 reads:

I shot dead all the Jews I could get my hands on in this area, concentrated all the Jewish women and children in a camp and with the help of the SD got my hands on a "delousing van," that in about 14 days to 4 weeks will have brought about the definitive clearing out of the camp

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot. ... html#_doc5

Now what the "delousing van" is, isn't entirely clear. But many people want to say it's a gas van. Fine, I'll go with that for the sake of argument.

Just looking at the content of that specific line, it makes absolutely no sense. How can he "shoot dead all the Jews" and then "concentrate the Jewish women and children in a camp" and then kill them with a "delousing van"? This contradictory nonsense is all within the same sentence! Clearly, whoever forged this was just going for shock value without even thinking if they were making any sense at all.

[Hektor]

The Letter from Harald Turner to Karl Wolff of 11 April 1942 reads:

I shot dead all the Jews I could get my hands on in this area, concentrated all the Jewish women and children in a camp and with the help of the SD got my hands on a "delousing van," that in about 14 days to 4 weeks will have brought about the definitive clearing out of the camp

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot. ... html#_doc5

Now what the "delousing van" is, isn't entirely clear. But many people want to say it's a gas van. Fine, I'll go with that for the sake of argument.

Just looking at the content of that specific line, it makes absolutely no sense. How can he "shoot dead all the Jews" and then "concentrate the Jewish women and children in a camp" and then kill them with a "delousing van"? This contradictory nonsense is all within the same sentence! Clearly, whoever forged this was just going for shock value without even thinking if they were making any sense at all.

The style is a bit odd. Also note that the 'compromising page' is the second one. There is no handwriting on that page and the SS-runes are also missing. I wonder if this has ever been analyzed using textual criticism. I doubt that. I'd guess if they were as critical with e.g. religious Christian text many NS-documents they find useful may fail standards of authenticity.
It may turn out that documents ascribed to one author, may have had more than one. And that wouldn't look to good, if that was generally acknowledge. There is no reason to accept unsigned single pages as authentic, if the documents were at some stage under hostile control. If there is potential for alteration in favor of a desired position, than one has to assume that this opportunity was abused.

But it is the same with a lot of pro-Holocaust arguments some of them may be true, but they may be untrue as well. Some documents may be authentic, but they may be forgeries as well. I'm of course not suggesting that "ALL Documents" are forgeries. That would be implausible. But it's perfectly possible that some documents are forgeries, when it was deemed useful to forge them. It's also reasonable to assume that the Allies had the resources to do so in a highly professional way. The more obvious forgeries are probably sloppy due to too much zeal by the perpetrators.

Consider that Konrad Kujau did forge 62 volumes of Hitler diaries. And he was a private individual, just an over the top ambitious one. Do they really think that major world powers with colonial empires didn't have the expertise and man power to forge a couple of pages attributable to an enemy they fought for 6 years and were hostile to for decades?

[curioussoul]

I don't usually fall back on the forgery explanation, but the problems with the Turner Letter can not be explained other than by reaching the conclusion that it's a forgery.

As Alvarez explains in his study on the Gas Vans, Turner held a PhD in Law, yet, his letter is riddled with errors and the SS runes are simply mimicked by making two large slash-characters half-a-line underneath each other and then two dashes in between. As far as I know, this type of fake SS rune was not typically used on official documents stored at the RSHA offices, who had real typewriters with an button specifically with the "SS" runic logo.

[fireofice]

I don't usually fall back on the forgery explanation, but the problems with the Turner Letter can not be explained other than by reaching the conclusion that it's a forgery.

As Alvarez explains in his study on the Gas Vans, Turner held a PhD in Law, yet, his letter is riddled with errors and the SS runes are simply mimicked by making two large slash-characters half-a-line underneath each other and then two dashes in between. As far as I know, this type of fake SS rune was not typically used on official documents stored at the RSHA offices, who had real typewriters with an button specifically with the "SS" runic logo.

According to the HC bloggers, he apparently did make the SS runes that way in his letters.

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot. ... urner.html

I am unsure about many of the claims the bloggers made. That's why I am sticking with what stuck out to me the most. Alvarez never wrote anything about the observation I made though. As far as I can tell, I'm the first one to have noticed this particular problem.

[fireofice]

Reading Alvarez's comment on this passage, he says:

By “Jews” obviously only Jewish males are meant.

https://holocausthandbooks.com/dl/26-tgv.pdf page 91

Is it though? It just said Jews. There's no distinction between types of Jews. I'm pretty sure when Jewish males were meant, it was specified that they were actually males. I think Alvarez was being a bit too charitable here.

[curioussoul]

I don't usually fall back on the forgery explanation, but the problems with the Turner Letter can not be explained other than by reaching the conclusion that it's a forgery.

As Alvarez explains in his study on the Gas Vans, Turner held a PhD in Law, yet, his letter is riddled with errors and the SS runes are simply mimicked by making two large slash-characters half-a-line underneath each other and then two dashes in between. As far as I know, this type of fake SS rune was not typically used on official documents stored at the RSHA offices, who had real typewriters with an button specifically with the "SS" runic logo.

According to the HC bloggers, he apparently did make the SS runes that way in his letters.

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot. ... urner.html

I am unsure about many of the claims the bloggers made. That's why I am sticking with what stuck out to me the most. Alvarez never wrote anything about the observation I made though. As far as I can tell, I'm the first one to have noticed this particular problem.

Sadly, you can't trust anything on the HC blog considering their long history of lying about documents and outright falsifying or forging/inventing documents out of thin air.

I don't trust for a second that Turner's other letters are stylistically similar without seeing those letters and examining them for myself. The fact that they intentionally neglected to reproduce them on the blog indicates that some dishonesty is at play here. In regards to the post-war testimony of Karl Wolff, that really says nothing about Turner's use of the fake SS insignia. They claim that it's present on other letters, but this would lead us to believe that a host of documents supposedly originating from Turner are forged, not that Turner created his own absurd SS character. As Alvarez points out, Turner had access to a proper typewriter with the runic SS key.

Either way, the letter's reference to a "delousing van" (including the quotation marks) does not in-and-of-itself prove the homicidal gas van theory.

[Otium]

Check the Holocaust Handbooks for discussions on these documents. Do some research.

[fireofice]

Check the Holocaust Handbooks for discussions on these documents. Do some research.

I'm very well aware that the HH books discuss these things, thanks. Although I don't remember every detail in these books. It's been awhile since I read Alvarez's book and didn't recall everything, although I knew he covered this letter. I just wanted to add my own commentary on top of it.

[Otium]

According to the HC bloggers, he apparently did make the SS runes that way in his letters.

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot. ... urner.html

Alvarez also refers to other Tuner documents on page 90 of his book. His main point is that the other Turner letters do not contain the same convoluted and incorrect German prose; and also the spelling errors, particularly damning I think, is the spelling of 'Kanada' as 'Canada' (the English way) a very difficult mistake for a German to make I would think. Not to mention that "the original of this letter [...] does not have the German standard paper format (DIN A4, 210 mm × 297 mm) but instead U.S. letter format, a paper size which during the war was not available in Europe." (page 88) Did Turner also have a habit of using the wrong kind of paper and a way to get adhold of it?

If there are other letters they could also have been forged. Unless all the other pecurliarities are accounted for somehow, this particular letter is still suspect, and the runes (while strange in my opinion) do not mean this document is authentic.

Everything seems to point to this letter being of English provenance, not a German.

Alvarez even points out that there are letters from Turner in which used the correct SS runed typewriter (page 91). Strange...I guess he just chose not to use his previous gimmick for some reason? It makes even less sense considering the effort it'd take to construct what Alvarez refers to as an "artistic rendering" of the SS runes.

Reading Alvarez's comment on this passage, he says:

By “Jews” obviously only Jewish males are meant.

https://holocausthandbooks.com/dl/26-tgv.pdf page 91

Is it though? It just said Jews. There's no distinction between types of Jews. I'm pretty sure when Jewish males were meant, it was specified that they were actually males. I think Alvarez was being a bit too charitable here.

The letter does make a distinction, which is the very contradiction you pointed out in the OP. The seperation of the women and children. Because of this, it seems clear to me, Alvarez interprets "Jews" to only apply to the men.

[fireofice]

particularly damning I think, is the spelling of 'Kanada' as 'Canada'

I agree with this. The bloggers say that Germans did sometimes spell it that way, but clearly that was not the normal way of spelling it. Considering that the Allies have been caught in forgeries before, I wouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt.

Also, even assuming the letter is authentic, it doesn't explicitly mention gas vans. That's one of the main reasons I never focused on it much or paid attention to it, because it just doesn't have much of an effect on my view of the holocaust, authentic or not. It's also why much of what I read about on that letter is something I forgot about. Whereas arguments against the authenticity of the Just and Becker documents was something I paid much more attention to, since these documents being authentic would have an effect on whether I thought these gas vans existed.

[Hektor]

particularly damning I think, is the spelling of 'Kanada' as 'Canada'

I agree with this. The bloggers say that Germans did sometimes spell it that way, but clearly that was not the normal way of spelling it. Considering that the Allies have been caught in forgeries before, I wouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt.

Also, even assuming the letter is authentic, it doesn't explicitly mention gas vans. That's one of the main reasons I never focused on it much or paid attention to it, because it just doesn't have much of an effect on my view of the holocaust, authentic or not. It's also why much of what I read about on that letter is something I forgot about. Whereas arguments against the authenticity of the Just and Becker documents was something I paid much more attention to, since these documents being authentic would have an effect on whether I thought these gas vans existed.

And it's typically for the 'hit and run' kind of evidence so often given by Holocaustians. Some borderline statement on a document that can neither be tested, nor has a known context. One is then forced to rely entirely on the 'expertise' and 'credibility' of the historians. And that they have an extreme bias to the exterminationist side is all too obvious. Them disputing 'evidence for the Holocaust' is like Catholics 200 years ago disputing 'evidence for Peter being the first pope'. They will grasp anything to fit their narrative and do ignore anything that isn't in line with it.

[Otium]

particularly damning I think, is the spelling of 'Kanada' as 'Canada'

I agree with this. The bloggers say that Germans did sometimes spell it that way, but clearly that was not the normal way of spelling it. Considering that the Allies have been caught in forgeries before, I wouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt.

Yes exactly, not only is it not the normal way of spelling it, but taken together with all the other problems with the document it's not likely to be a German who just so happens to be spelling 'Canada' in the English way.

Regardless, there's a big question mark over this letter, which the bloggers cannot make go away by pointing out exceptions to the issues compounded in this one single document. It certainly doesn't prove their case that it's legitimate, and it doesn't dispel the revisionist suspicions.

[Hektor]

Spelling and grammar mistakes are not definite proof of forgery.

But if they are odd and cumulative, they are certainly an indication.

It's a bit different with formal mistakes in document that deviate from practices of German bureaucracy at the time.

If a document was to be distributed to high ranking officials, the people responsible for the content would be highly skilled and professional themselves and they would be highly motivated to write and type letters that won't give reasons for formal objections or dismissals.

It can be assumed that professional forgers working for intelligence services would be familiar with this and hence try to emulate style, form, grammar and spelling. If that person did live in a non-German country most or all his life, there is a chance that the local language and formalities may have affected the ability to craft German documents. They did however other examples and potentially had time to train on this. Where it gets difficult is to get a whole chain of documentation together. If I'd be a forger I would insert single pages in documents after familiarizing me with the style. I admit I'd have to focus on this at least for a week. Forgers may have more criminal energy than I, though. With 'atrocity proof' they'd need to be highly motivated to damage the reputation of those they think they are their enemies. That would however be the case with German Jews that had an axe to grind.

[bombsaway]

particularly damning I think, is the spelling of 'Kanada' as 'Canada' (the English way) a very difficult mistake for a German to make I would think.

You seem to be making an assumption that the 'Canada' spelling was completely obscure in Germany. How do we know this to be the case? I did a google books search, filtering for German language only and written before 1900 and 1942, and the results are about even between the two spellings. I think Alverez's critique is full of assumptions like this, eg about the letter format

he says : "David Irving has remarked that the original of this letter,
which is kept in the Berlin Document Center biographical file on
Turner, does not have the German standard paper format (DIN A4, 210
mm × 297 mm) but instead U.S. letter format, a paper size which during
the war was not available in Europe.55"

source is this http://www.fpp.co.uk/Legal/Penguin/Reply/3.html

But all David Irving (the plaintiff) has to say about the "letter-size" is

"The Plaintiff admits that this document may be genuine (the original is now in the Berlin Document Center biographical file on Turner), despite spelling and punctuation blemishes (non-German paper-size, non-German quotation marks, erratic use of the 'ß' character -- dass, Einfluß, weiss, erschiessen, Grüssen -- the anglicised spelling of Canada, the absence of a proper SS-runes character). "

Alvarez seems to turn "non-German paper-size" into "U.S. letter format, a paper size which during the war was not available in Europe" which is just transparently bad scholarship (either dishonest or plain dumb) and should give anyone pause about his ability to analyze documents

[Otium]

Spelling and grammar mistakes are not definite proof of forgery.

But if they are odd and cumulative, they are certainly an indication.

You're right, but this isn't really apt to describe the situation with the Turner letter. The spelling and grammar is so wrong that an educated German man could not possibly make such errors, particularly when we have numerous other letters from the same man in which these errors are completely non-existant. The grammatical errors aren't even what one would expect a native German to make when writing in their own language, these are errors which native English speakers would make in writing German.

I guess Turner - an educated man with a PhD in law - in this one letter written on U.S. stationery just so happened to write like an English speaker who doesn't fully understand the correct grammatical structure of the German language... Sorry, but this is just ridiculous to me. In any other historical circumstance a letter with such a dubious provenance would've been panned.