Werd wrote:Ah yes, I thought you meant something else that had not been covered. Even Reviso admitted he made a mistake with the "privaten Berufen" issue saying that it was indeed odd. As for the Heydrich issue, I feel I must quote Christian Mentel again.
According to revisionists, an authentic Wannsee Protocol would have to display on every single one of its 15 pages all bureaucratic formalities: all rubber stamps, dates, signatures, reference numbers, names, etc. Some revisionists even claim that because the margin width was not correct and the line pitch were not as they should be, the whole Protocol was not sufficiently authorized, not effective legally, and thus worthless for historiography.
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Mentel misses the point again. The Wannsee minutes do not have any probative value, since none of the pages is signed by any person with authority. But I can see what he's doing, he picks out some weaker arguments against and then tries to brush them off as irrelevant.
Well, even if there were only some slight oddities with the document the accumulation of such oddities would be an indication not to trust the document. You'll see, all Mentel is going to fall back on is 'academic consensus' on the matter. And a word on oddities, I'd grant that they aren't too strong of an argument, when low level documents are concerned. But on the ministerial level, where top officials are concerned, I don't think a German official would have exposed himself to frowning from his colleagues by delivering a sloppy document.
OK, on the point: Mentel doesn't address the Heydrich issue at all, neither does he deal with the totally unheard of vocational assignations like "privaten Berufen".
You see, one could grant them their speculative claims like perhaps in art historiography (Is this composition from Mozart or not?). Bear in mind we are not dealing with something as circumstantial, but with an issue that's used to hold the German nation hostage for decades with. I think that given this level of importance, it would be mandatory to hold any document up to a far higher standard than some benign document of marginal historical importance. One would actually expect serious historians to do that. But no, they accept anything they deem somehow useful for the Holocaust story-line to be authentic without any further "Quellenkritik", meaning serious assessment and scrutiny of sources.
What is suppressed by the revisionists is the simple fact that the Wannsee Protocol was not prepared and not sent out as an isolated document by itself. Instead, it was an attachment to a letter of invitation for a Wannsee follow-up conference. It is on this higher-ranking cover letter (dated February 26, 1942; cf. image 10), where all the features can be found that revisionists complained about on the Protocol.
Now why not add the letter to the published document facsimiles then? It seems Mentel is naive and thinks forgers would have done a sloppy work of it. Now, if I would be tasked to forge such a document, I won't invent all documents anew. What I'd do would be to pick up existing authentic documents, remove papers I don't find useful and then use authentic materials to manufacture content on it, that I'd like to have on it.
Think of the possibilities here, usually there is only signatures on the first and on the last page (in between pages are commonly paraphrased, but sometimes they are not). So with the right materials and some basic knowledge of language and bureaucratic practices, it's pretty easy to forge documents that way. You could even fool a person that made the real ones by just showing him the pages (you didn't exchange) with his signature. With the distance of years, I guess few people would remember exact content anyway.
