The denier argument on specific documents is that the central documents of the Holocaust are forgeries. The Wannsee Protocol, the Stroop Report, the Einsatzgruppen reports, the diary of Anne Frank: each, on this account, was either invented after the war by Allied or Jewish hands, or substantially altered, or attributed to authors who could not have written it. The argument is the natural extension of the broader denial of the evidentiary record. If you cannot deny that a document exists, deny that it is what it purports to be.
The forensic work on these documents is extensive. The Wannsee minutes have been studied as a physical artefact, as a textual artefact, and as a part of the surviving correspondence of the conference’s participants. The Anne Frank diary has been examined by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation in a definitive critical edition. The Einsatzgruppen reports have been studied alongside the surviving operational records of the units they document. In each case the forensic work has confirmed the document. The deniers cite their own counter-experts, sometimes credentialed in unrelated fields, sometimes producing analyses that have not survived peer review.
The arguments addressed in this section
The Einsatzgruppen Reports Were Forged deals with the deniers’ attempt to dismiss the most damning operational record of the mass shootings on the Eastern Front. The reports were captured in their entirety, together with the carbon copies, distribution lists, and the recipients’ filing notations.
The Anne Frank Diary is a Forgery is the most-cited and most-refuted of the document-forgery claims. The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation published a critical edition in 1986 that addressed and rejected each of the forgery arguments in detail.
The Stroop Report is a Fabrication deals with Jürgen Stroop’s own account of the suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The deniers’ argument requires Stroop to have written a report falsely incriminating himself, which he then signed and bound for presentation to Himmler, and the contents of which he confirmed under interrogation after the war.
The Diary Was Written by Her Father is a sub-claim of the Anne Frank forgery argument, addressed separately because it appears in deniers’ literature in detail and warrants a specific response. The handwriting analysis, the materials analysis, and the textual evidence collectively rule it out.
The Wannsee Protocol is a Forgery deals with the deniers’ attempt to dismiss the surviving copy of the minutes of the Wannsee conference. The copy in question is one of thirty originally produced; its authenticity has been examined and confirmed.
Each of the pages below addresses one denier claim and the historians’ answer to it. Read together, they show that the document-forgery arguments are not the result of forensic doubt about the documents. They are the result of the deniers’ need for the documents to be forgeries.