The Lachout Document
Anatomy of a Forgery

Austrian Resistance Archives, 1990

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]

The original plaintext version of this file is available via ftp.

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