The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

40 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
2.2.2. The Becker Document (501-PS), 16 May 1942
2.2.2.1. Origin
This letter is the most important part of the Nuremberg document
501-PS and is frequently quoted (IMT vol. 26, pp. 102-105). The other
parts of that document are three telegrams, which I will analyze in chapter
2.2.3.
Paul Rassinier may have been the first to critically comment on this
document (1950, pp. 175-178). Next followed German revisionist Ingrid
Weckert in 1985 (pp. 18f.), with an updated and more thorough
version nine years later (in 1994, pp. 193-218), which appeared in a
slightly revised English translation several years later (in Rudolf 2003,
pp. 215-241). In this she writes regarding this document’s origin (pp.
224f.):
“The author has in her possession two letters from the National
Archives in Washington DC, USA, each of which attests to a different
origin of the Nuremberg Prosecution Document 501-PS.
An April 26, 1945, memo from the Headquarters of the 12th US
Army states that a unit of the 12th Army had found the documents in
the ‘RSHA reserve depot in Bad Sulza’. The originals, the memo
states, were sent to the document center in Paris.
The docket, which usually accompanied the documents that were
presented to the Nuremberg Tribunal, is dated September 7, 1945.
This paper states that the place where the document was found, as
well as its source, is unknown and that it had been received from the
OCC London (the British Prosecution).
A document without such identification, i.e., with the note ‘source
and origin unknown’, lacks even slightest evidentiary value. If the
defense had submitted an equally dubious paper, the Court would
have rejected it instantly.”
2.2.2.2. Analysis of the Form
Mrs. Weckert has subjected the document to a detailed formal critique
(in Rudolf 2003, pp. 226f.), after which she concluded:
“By now the author has in her possession three different ‘copies’
of the letter from Becker to Rauff, but a copy of the original letter is
still not to be had. Evidently no such ‘original copy’ exists.”
Her conclusions are based on the assumption that the one version
which really could be addressed as an original letter is only a carbon