The following has been established about the “document’s” formal criteria:
A. Purported Provenance
Whenever Lachout has presented “statements” in order to “confirm” the “authenticity” of the “document” (which have already been partly proven to be falsifications), he has given a different account of the “document’s” origins as well as different “statements”, which have already proven to be falsifications. The official source has been given different titles: either “Military Police Service”, or “Allied Military Command Austria”, etc.[16] But, according to all the information we have about the Four-Power Occupation of Austria, such an Allied authority never existed.
The “Gazette of the Allied Commission for Austria” published regulations for public security which state:
“b) Austrian Civilian Police may be included in Inter-Allied Police or Military Patrols.”[17]
The March 1946 edition published the personnel lists of the Allied Military Missions in Austria and stated:
“2. The Allied Council decided that Allied Missions in Vienna, whether military or political, should not include military guards, and that their protection should be assured by the Austrian police except where non-military guards are required.”[18]
Police duties within Austria could only be undertaken by all the four Allies in one body, the Inter-Allied Command, and then only at the request of the Austrian police authorities.[19] The commander-in-chief of an Allied zone could only use the Inter-Allied Patrol (“Four-in-a-jeep”) even in an emergency. Hans Landauer, a retired policeman who began service in 1945, described the usual procedure as follows:
“If the Soviet occupation power (whose zone included Lower Austria, parts of Upper Austria and parts of Vienna) had some sort of request from the criminal police, this information would be conveyed by the Soviet Headquarters, whose seat was in Purkersdorf, Lower Austria, but which also had some office space in the Lower Austrian state government building on Herrengasse in Vienna, to the Lower Austrian Police Headquarters.”[20]
The Allied Control Agreement for Austria, signed on July 4, 1945, set up a control apparatus, whereby
“supreme authority was to be vested in an Allied Council consisting of the four Commanders-in-Chief, each of whom…. was to have supreme authority in his own zone …Below the Council was to be an Executive Committee, responsible for ensuring implementation … of the Council’s decisions on matters effecting Austria as a whole.”[21]
This supreme authority was given the title “Allied Commission for Austria”.[22] In addition, there was an Allied Command for the administration of the City of Vienna consisting of four commanders who were nominated by the respective Commanders-in-Chief.[23] Organizations that appear in the certificates of authenticity supplied by Lachout, like the “Allied Investigation Commission”, therefore did not exist.
Furthermore, the Allies as a rule only accepted Austrians, or former Austrians, into their service if they had either worked for one of the Allied authorities or had been part of one of the Allied military units while in emigration, and were known to be trustworthy. The Soviet military power did not accept former Austrians into the service of the occupying authorities at all. Never were interned POWs accepted for occupying duty in 1945 and certainly not with an officer’s rank, as Lachout maintains.[24]
B. The “Document’s” Language
The official Allied languages were English, French and Russian. Also the above mentioned Allied gazette appeared with a trilingual title. Its forward read
“The ‘Gazette’ will appear monthly in four languages: English, French, Russian and German. The English, Russian, and French languages are official languages, and only text in these languages are authentic.”[25]
Even if the Lachout “document” were only a translation into German, one can be certain that the Allies would never have used an abbreviation as “F.d.R.dA.” (Für die Richtigkeit der Ausfertigung, Responsible for the correctness of the content) or “RS” (Rundschreiben, circular), which are only found in Austrian civil servant usage.[26]
C. The Stamp “Republic Österreich-Wachbataillon Wien-Kommando”[27]
Austria did not have her own military force until 1955. In 1945 the Under-Secretariat for Military Affairs, then under Franz Winterer, was part of the Chancellory of the Provisional Chancellor, Karl Renner and was dissolved at the Allies’ request with the resignation of the provisional government on December 21, 1945.
The newly elected National Assembly reaffirmed this on January 18, 1946. The gendarmerie’s alarm-formation was only formed in 1949. The so-called B-Gendarmerie, a small number of para-military units, was only established on August 1, 1952. It was put under the command of the Interior Ministry.
Therefore, there was no “Guard Battalion Vienna” in 1948. This has been confirmed in letters from the Defense and Interior Ministers to the DOEW.[28] A further problem: How was it possible that an “original” stamp of the “Guard Battalion Vienna” ever got on a “copy” of a tenth copy, as it appears on the published facsimile? This could only have been possible years later with the advent of photocopying.
D. The Missing “Document” Heading
It is impossible that the Allied authorities’ official stationery would not carry a letterhead showing the name of the responsible command. This letterhead and, more importantly, the name of the occupation authority in question, are missing on Lachout’s “document.”
E. “Allied Investigating Commissions”
There was no such organization as an “Allied Investigating Commission” in such a general form. The United States, Great Britain and other Allied nations had already formed the “War-Crimes Commission of the United Nations” during the Second World War. This met in London for the first time in October, 1943 to organize the collection of material about war-crimes.[29] The Commission formed the starting point for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.
The trial against those responsible for the Mauthausen concentration camp was processed by a United States court in Dachau. Here the question of poison-gas murders was investigated. It would have been absurd for the very authority that carried out these extensive trials to produce such a “document”. Besides, the question of poison gassing in the Mauthausen concentration camp had already been dealt with during the Allies’ Nuremberg trials.[30]
F. The Use of the Allgemeines Verwaltungsverfahrensgesetz
by Allied Authorities.[31]
The Allied authorities were not under the jurisdiction of the Austrian legal system for their internal correspondence. That means, it was impossible that an Allied authority would have bothered to state that the “document” was correct according to criteria set down in Para 18 of the Allgemeines Verwaltungsverfahrens-gesetz, which is normal procedure for Austrian authorities and as it is confirmed by Lachout’s signature on his “document”.
G. Lachout’s Alleged Role with the “Military Police Service”
Lachout signed the “document” as “lieutenant”. He was only twenty years old at the time. He was too young to have had such a rank. Moreover, there were no Austrian officers among the Allied Powers, unless that person had already volunteered as an emigrant to serve with the troops of his country of exile during the war. It was impossible to “moonlight” with an Allied authority while at the same time being a civil servant of the City of Vienna as Lachout supposedly did. To serve in a non-Austrian military organization also meant automatic forfeiture of one’s Austrian citizenship.
An officer’s appointment needs several years of intensive training. Even during the war, officer’s training lasted more than a year and as a rule required a high-school diploma. Lachout says that he got his Austrian highschool diploma in 1946. The DOEW has, therefore, concluded in its court rebuttal that “Lachout’s claims must be … qualified as obviously false.”[32]
Lachout could never have served as a member of an Austrian executive body (police, gendarmerie, B-gendarmerie) in a “Military Police Service”, because he never belonged to an Austrian executive body after 1945.[33] Furthermore, moonlighting for an Allied organization would have been inconceivable.[34]
