Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

Der Stern

Der Stern had been skeptical at first but eventually became convinced that they were genuine. Having bought them, by various accounts for somewhere between two and four million dollars, they announced their acquisition. Newsweek and The Times (of London) were trying to buy them. The Times requested that they be examined by Ordway Hilton, a document specialist from South Carolina, and Frei, also a well respected expert in document verification. Using a sample of Hitler’s handwriting provided by the West German Federal Archives, Hilton and Frei concluded that they were indeed written by Hitler. But they were not. The problem, as it was later discovered, was that the sample from the archives was also a forgery created by the same forger who had forged the Hitler Diaries, Konrad Kujau.  Later, it was discovered that the paper had been manufactured after 1953. Tests on the inks used for the diary showed that it had only been on the paper for about one year. But Hilton and Frei had only been asked to compare the handwriting. They had done that correctly from the samples at hand. The task of doing chemical analysis had fallen to another laboratory. 

All of this is not to criticize Joe Nickell. Depending on which accounts of this small bit of history you read, and when you read it, you might get a different collection of facts and different interpretations. Indeed that was so with what was being reported about Frei’s work.