World War 2: A NAZI fake of a 'LIFE' magazine

"LIFE" is the title of a well-known glossy American magazine that circulates all over the world. It was also the title of an 8-page folder dropped by German planes over a few U.S. air bases in East Anglia, including Lakenheath, during the autumn of 1943. The front page was an actual reproduction of the true LIFE issue for July 26, 1943, with pictures of 8th Air Force crews but the remaining seven pages showed gruesome and horrifying pictures of aircrews who had been killed over Germany, together with many speeches, reports and quotations on the subject of the air bombing of the Third Reich. It is thought that this mini-magazine was produced to bring home to the Americans the awful disaster of the Schweinfurt raids when 198 U.S. bombers were lost out of 291 taking part. Very little information indeed seems to be available about this particular fake magazine and those copies that were not confiscated by the American authorities on base were undoubtedly 'collected' by U.S. personnel and taken home to the States. The only two copies known were once in the collection of the president of the Psywar Society, Captain P.H. Robbs. No mention of the incident appeared in the contemporary national press.
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Hitler's Diaries

Kenneth Rendell, a dealer in historical documents who helped unmask the Hitler diaries, called them "bad forgeries but a great hoax." The hoax began in 1981, when a reporter for the German magazine Stern caught wind of diaries recovered from a Nazi plane crash and stowed away for decades. Over 50 journals, purportedly handwritten by Hitler, revealed a kinder, gentler dictator whose "final solution" to the "Jewish problem" was not genocide but merely the deportation of Jews.

Stern hired experts to authenticate the diaries but gave them only a few select pages to review. Even worse, many of the examples of "genuine" Hitler documents Stern provided for comparison were from the same dealer who had proffered the diaries. They were, of course, all in the same hand—that of the forger.

When Stern broke the story of the diaries in late April of 1983, it triggered banner headlines around the world. But they were soon revealed as fakes. At his trial, forger Konrad Kujau, a German dealer in military memorabilia, openly admitted guilt and gladly signed Hitler "autographs" for the crowd.

Lincoln's Love Letters

The stumbling, awkward English in this exchange of letters would have horrified Abraham Lincoln, a master of prose with impeccable grammar. The letters are supposedly between Lincoln and his real-life clandestine love Ann Rutledge. In them, "Beloved Ann" professes, "if you git me the dictshinery...I no I can do both speeking and riting better...my hart runs over with hapynes when I think yore name..." While slightly more literate, "Lincoln's" letter to Rutledge is peppered with anachronisms and signed "yours affectionately, Abe"—a nickname the proper Mr. Lincoln abhorred.

Despite the crude nature of the forgeries, The Atlantic Monthly published a series of articles based on them entitled "Lincoln the Lover: The Courtship," in January 1929. As soon as the articles went to press, several Lincoln scholars, including biographer Carl Sandburg, identified the letters as outlandish fakes.

Shakespeare's Lost Play

After passing off as genuine what were counterfeit fragments of the scripts of Hamlet and King Lear he claimed were penned by the bard himself, late 18th-century forger William Henry Ireland became foolishly daring. He announced the discovery of a completely unknown Shakespeare drama called Vortigern.

Thrilled by the thought of a new Shakespeare, a renowned theater producer signed on to premier the play at Drury Lane. But when Ireland handed over the text, his game was up. The producer quickly came to suspect that the hackneyed script was written by Ireland himself. Not only did he refuse to bill it as a Shakespeare original, but he planned to stage the play as an April Fool's Day joke—along with a musical farce about the gullibility of an art collector. The play eventually premiered a day late, on April 2, 1796.

Donation of Constantine

This ancient letter, which helped bolster the Catholic Church's power for roughly 700 years, was probably the first forgery to significantly impact the course of history. Allegedly sent by the Roman emperor Constantine the Great to Pope Sylvester I in the fourth century A.D., the letter testifies to the emperor's conversion to Christianity and grants vast authority to the pope and his successors. Among other privileges, the emperor gives the pope dominion over "Rome and the provinces, districts, and towns of Italy and all the Western regions."

Constantine's conversion is an historical fact, but the letter is a pure fabrication. While its origin is debated, the Donation was likely concocted between A.D. 750 and A.D. 850, perhaps by a church official. Various popes used it over the ensuing centuries to defend their political power, and the Donation was even celebrated in a painting in the Vatican. It was revealed as a fake in the 15th century.