What do you think of this? Is this a phoney, too?
What do you think of this? Is this a phoney, too?
I think it is bogus for many little reasons.
The fonts used seem off, to me at least. I also think the handwriting is not sufficiently of the period, and there seem to be some small grammatical errors. Naturally, there is a booming industry in fake genocide evidence, when, in reality, it is pretty rare.
While in Warsaw a few years back on business, I did get a file of mimeographed circulars from the Staatspolizei in Schesien, i.e. Gestapo from 1944, which I sold to a research library. The documents were authentic and something I had never seen before or since.
My negative view is impressionistic, and I could be wrong. But it looks wrong somehow. But, one should see where this place was in Poland, whether it was formerly Habsburg, in which case the chance of the grammatical errors being made by a partial speaker of German are within the realm of the possible. The US Holocaust Museum curators would know for sure, in fact.
Authentic things of this kind do show up, but they tend to show their age, as this kind paper in routine, official documents is highly acidic and does not age well.
You know I think the ink looks too fresh, too. I mean it looks like it was written yesterday. (Maybe it was ) That's a damn fine stamp they used. SS and all... Is there ANYTHING that is not faked?
Of course, I could be quite wrong. This kind of thing did emerge in the collapse of the Soviet European order. Nonetheless, I have been looking at central European handwriting on a professional basis for more than three decades, and this script looks too modern, at least for German speaking Europe, which this piece technically is not.
Maybe our Polish colleagues can give an insight here.
Skepticism is always warranted with this kind of thing, in fact.
The question: who profits?
With the huge interest in Endloesung/Holocaust/Shoah material in the Euro-Atlantic Raum, then the incentive for the document faker is pretty high, indeed.
Happy new year and may the person on this document, if it is real, have survived to live a happy and healthy life. The opposite was likely the case, and the use of such a forgery does no honor to the suffering of those real people who were "erfasst" in such a census of the ethnic cleansers.
I can't make out what it says but , the Ink Stamp looks oversized to me and the way the finger was "rolled" to get the fingerprint is typical these days but --I don't think that was the common practice back then.
It would be interesting to see how it reacts to a Black Light.
Hello Odessa1,
As a collector of Holocaust/Endlösung related documents, I can only confirm what "Friedrich-Berthold" has written in this thread.
"Is there ANYTHING that is not faked?"
- Short answer: NO.
And although this is the only way we can learn about these items, by showing them on international forums, it is alas also the way counterfeiters learn to make better fakes.
I myself have a small collection of Holocaust related documents, I have already placed some images of it on this forum, perhaps you can learn something from them. This is the link:
https://www.warrelics.eu/forum/germa...lueprints.html
Cheers & a happy new year,
Peter
I do indeed think that some of us have been blind and short sighted in aiding the fakers and their Machenschaften. Such is an old problem, to which Mollo made reference in his books in the late 1960s, of course.
All the same, the internet pictures have greatly improved the quality of many fake items.
Such a thing is typical of the challenge and response in all human endeavor.
But, in the matter of handwriting, for instance, this is a discipline and skill that has died out in Europe and has important implications for certain items.
How can a young person learn penmanship when he or she only uses a computer?
Consider here, as well, that the apprenticeship in an Austrian tailor firm lasted.......eight years. That is, one's Lehre to become accepted in the guild lasted nearly a decade. Who is able to re-learn such skill over such time in a world of balance sheets and 24/7 and globalization today? Surely there are those who have, but not as there once was, and in the specific manner that uniforms were once made.
Finally, Nazi stuff was faked before and during the III. Reich (it was made in a shoddy manner by those not authorized to do so), hence the regulations of the RZM. Thus, we are faced with a perennial problem.
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