PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION OF HNADWRITING

1. Preliminary examination

2. • systematic approach
• standard method of operation assures
• that a complete analysis is conducted methodically
• meets the requirements for expert testimony, according to Daubert.

3. First step
• Determining whether the material is of good quality
• Contains enough characteristics of handwriting to be identifiable
• Squiggly lines and initials or short signatures may not contain enough
characteristics
• Initials (found in teachers most commonly)

4. Second Step – only if sufficient characteristics can be
found
• Exemplar collection (Standard writing)
• determine if they are suitable for comparison with the questioned
material.
• must be representative of the writer
• written under similar conditions as the questioned material within a
reasonable time frame.

5. Exemplar Parameters
• should come from an environment similar to that of the questioned
material
• should reflect the physical and mental condition of the writer at the
time of the questioned writing
• should have been written before the questioned material and some
shortly after
• should contain suitable material for comparison, such as similar letter
combinations and spacing
• all of the exemplars are genuine

6. Hitler Diaries
• In April 1983 Gruner and Jahr, the parent company of the West German
publisher of the popular magazine Stern, announced that it had
purchased for $2.3 million an astonishing set of documents: sixty-two
notebooks that purported to be the handwritten diaries of Adolf Hitler,
as well as an unpublished third volume of Mein Kampf (My Struggle),
Hitler's autobiographical manifesto written while he was incarcerated
in Landsberg prison in the 1920s.
• Stern began to serialize the diaries, which covered the period 1935–45,
and sold publication rights to Newsweek in the United States and to
the London Times.

7. • The story surrounding the documents supposed that they had been on
a plane carrying the Führer's personal archives out of Berlin when it
was shot down in April 1945 near the village of Börnersdorf, in what
would later become East Germany. The documents, which escaped
destruction because they were housed in a metal box, were recovered
by local farmers, who hid them until they were smuggled out of the
country and came into the hands of a document collector and World
War II enthusiast named Konrad Kujau.

8. • The diaries sent shock waves throughout the world and touched off a
historical controversy, for they portrayed a Hitler who was very
different from the man who haunted the history books. In particular,
they suggested that Hitler had no involvement in the 1938 riot against
the Jews called Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), that he knew
nothing of the "final solution," or plans to exterminate Europe's Jewish
population, and that his goal was simply to resettle western Europe's
Jews in eastern Europe. If the diaries were authentic, they were the
most significant historical find in decades, and the history of
the Nazi regime of the 1930s and 1940s would have to be entirely
rewritten.
•

9. • Stern had initially been skeptical and reluctant to purchase the documents. In
time, skepticism and reluctance turned into an almost fevered excitement
about this apparent historical discovery. Stern's eventual willingness to accept
the authenticity of the documents rested on two foundations. First were the
memoirs of Lieutenant General Hans Baur, Hitler's chief SS pilot, who
confirmed that a plane flown by one Major Friedrich Gundlfinger was indeed
ferrying Hitler's private papers out of the country the month when his plane
was shot down. Second, Stern sought confirmation from other sources. It
submitted the papers to three handwriting experts: Dr. Max Frei-Sulzer , a
former head of the police forensic science department in
Zurich, Switzerland; American document verification expert Ordway Hilton;
and a third expert in the employ of the German police. Comparing the writing
in the diaries with known samples of Hitler's handwriting retrieved
from Germany's Federal Archives, these experts concluded that both the
diaries and the samples were written by the same hand, that of Adolf Hitler.
Backing up their claims were prominent historians such as Britain's Hugh
Trevor-Roper, although other historians noted historical inconsistencies in
the diaries and denounced them as hoaxes.

10. • The controversy prompted the German Federal Archives to conduct its
own independent tests, focusing not on the handwriting, but on the
physical documents themselves. On May 6, 1983, the archives held a
press conference and announced that the diaries were forgeries.
• The forensics evidence used to reach this conclusion was based on
examination of the ink and paper, as well as seals affixed to the
documents. Modern ink has different varieties of chemical
composition, or "fingerprints," that fall into four groupings: (1) inks in
which gallic acid is used to hold iron salts in suspension; (2) those in
which gum arabic is used to hold carbon particles in suspension; (3)
those that contain synthetic dyes, as well as a range of polymers and
acids; (4) those that contain various solvents and additives such as
chloride to hold synthetic dyes or pigments.

11. • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ0tAxnapos
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8-Tq-dZw_w

12. Factors to be kept in mind
• Mechanical factors such as
• writing instrument
• type of paper
• writing surface
• amount of light used.
• Physical factors incorporate
• health of the writer, both physical and mental
• any handicaps or accidents affecting the writing hand
• whether the writer was under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
• amount of formal education of the writer in order to identify the skill level.

13. Initial examination
• search for obvious signs of forgery in the questioned material.
• simple forgery is generally the easiest type of forgery to identify
• determine if there is any evidence of self-disguise (if there are no signs
of forgery)