Allied Prosecutors Fabricated Documents at Nuremberg

The Nuremberg documentary record is among the best-authenticated archival collections of the twentieth century. The Allied prosecutors at Nuremberg captured approximately 100,000 German documents and submitted approximately 5,300 of them in evidence at the International Military Tribunal and the subsequent twelve trials. The provenance of each document was set out in trial exhibits, the chain of custody was sworn to by Allied document officers, and the originals were placed in evidence in the courtroom for inspection by defence counsel and bench. The defence counsel, all senior German lawyers given full access to the prosecution exhibits, did not allege document forgery as a serious defence in any of the cases. The denier claim that the documents were fabricated is a post-war invention with no contemporary basis in the trial proceedings.

How the documents were captured

The capture of German government documents was a planned Allied operation. The London International Conference of August 1945, which set up the IMT, also set up the document-capture process. American, British, French and Soviet teams entered Germany behind the advancing armies, located the surviving German government archives, and shipped them to centralised processing facilities. The principal facilities were at Berchtesgaden (for the captured Hitler papers), at Marburg (for the Foreign Office files captured at Mühlhausen), at the IG Farben offices in Frankfurt (for the company’s own files), at the Topf und Söhne offices in Erfurt (captured by the Soviets), and at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Zentralbauleitung (captured by the Soviets). The captured documents were given accession numbers, catalogued, and made available to the four prosecuting teams.

The American team’s accession numbers ran with the prefix “PS” (Paris-Storey, after the document chief Robert G. Storey, with most of the captured documents having been processed in Paris before the IMT). The British team used “GB” exhibits drawn from the same documentary base. The French team used “RF” exhibits. The Soviet team contributed Soviet-captured documents under “USSR” prefix. Each document submitted in evidence was identified by its accession number, and the chain of custody from capture site to courtroom was sworn to by the responsible Allied document officer. The capture-site, capture-date, and capture-circumstances are on record for every exhibit.

How the defence engaged with the documents

The Nuremberg defence teams were headed by senior German lawyers (Otto Stahmer for Göring, Otto Kranzbühler for Dönitz, Hans Flächsner for Speer, Hans Marx for Streicher, and so on) and were given access to the prosecution exhibits well in advance of the trial. The defence challenged specific documents on specific grounds in many cases, and successfully impeached or excluded individual exhibits where impeachment was warranted. What the defence did not allege, in any of the trials, was systematic document forgery. The defence position was that the documents were authentic captured German papers, but that they did not establish the conclusions the prosecution drew from them, or that they did not implicate the specific defendant being tried. The trial transcripts, all 22 volumes of the IMT and the 15 volumes of the subsequent trials, are public; the defence engagement with the documents can be read for itself.

The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial of 1963 to 1965 examined the same documentary corpus again, in a German court, with German defence counsel hostile to the prosecution case. The defence at Frankfurt had every motive to challenge the documents and every legal opportunity to do so under West German law. The court found the documents to be authentic. The Auschwitz Trial verdict and judgment, delivered by Judge Hans Hofmeyer, treated the documentary record as evidentially unimpeachable.

Specific documents the deniers allege are forgeries

The deniers’ specific forgery allegations cluster on a small number of documents: the Wannsee Protocol, the Höfle Telegram, the Höss confession, the Anne Frank diary, the Stroop Report. Each is dealt with on its own leaf below this section. Each has been subjected to professional documentary, forensic and palaeographic examination. None has been shown to be a forgery. The Wannsee Protocol’s surviving copy at the Foreign Office archive carries the original typewriter impression of Eichmann’s office, the original SS-internal classification stamps, and the original distribution list. The Höfle Telegram is a British signals-intelligence intercept, decoded at Bletchley Park in real time in January 1943, with the decryption record (HW 16/23) declassified in 2000 and matching the document in independent SS records. The Höss confession was given orally over weeks in three different settings (Allied custody at Heide, Polish custody at Kraków, courtroom at Warsaw), with consistent content; the written memoir was composed in Polish custody on standard-issue paper, in Höss’s own handwriting, with the manuscript surviving and palaeographically authenticated. The Anne Frank diary was forensically examined by the Netherlands Forensic Institute in 1986 and found to be authentic; the report runs to 700 pages.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it converts a meticulously documented archival corpus into a mass forgery, with no evidence offered for the forgery beyond the denier’s preference for the conclusion. Document authentication is a professional discipline; the German captured papers have been authenticated by paper analysis, ink analysis, typewriter forensics, palaeography, comparison with surviving carbon copies in different archives, and cross-reference with surviving recipient files. The defence counsel at the time accepted the authenticity. The post-war German state, which had every reason to challenge the record had it been challengeable, has accepted the authenticity. The denial is the position of accepting no evidence and asserting forgery as a default; it is not a position derived from any evidence about specific documents.

What specific document is alleged to be forged? On what evidence? Who has examined it forensically?

See also

• The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution
• The Nuremberg Trials
• Rudolf Höss
• Anne Frank
• The Stroop Report
• IG Farben

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Sources

• International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, 22 volumes, Nuremberg, 1947 to 1949, with full document exhibits and chain-of-custody affidavits
• Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, 15 volumes, US Government Printing Office, 1949 to 1953, the subsequent trials
• Robert G. Storey, The Final Judgment? Pearl Harbor to Nuremberg, Naylor, 1968, on the document-capture and processing operation
• Bradley F. Smith, Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg, Basic Books, 1977
• Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, Knopf, 1992
• Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial transcripts (1963 to 1965), Fritz Bauer Institut, Frankfurt; Hermann Langbein, Der Auschwitz-Prozess: Eine Dokumentation, two volumes, Europa Verlag, 1965
• Devin O. Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963 to 1965: Genocide, History, and the Limits of the Law, Cambridge University Press, 2006
• House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial, on the authentication of the Wannsee Protocol surviving copy, https://www.ghwk.de
• Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas, “A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during ‘Einsatz Reinhardt’ 1942”, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 15:3, 2001, on the Höfle Telegram authentication
• Netherlands Forensic Institute, De Dagboeken van Anne Frank, Bert Bakker / Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, 1986, the forensic authentication of the Anne Frank diary
• Mr Justice Charles Gray, judgment in David Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, Royal Courts of Justice, 11 April 2000, on the documentary corpus
• Richard J. Evans, Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, Basic Books, 2001
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Documentation and Trials” and “Nuremberg Trials”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org