5 Unbelievable Historical Hoaxes That People Actually Believed

The Hitler Diaries

In 1981 a series of volumes supposedly written by Adolf Hitler were bought for the incredible sum of 9.3 million Deutsche marksfor serial publication by Stern magazine in Germany. These unearthed volumes held great promise for not only selling copies of Stern (and syndication rights for magazines across the globe), but also for helping the world to figure out what could lie in the mind of a man like Hitler.

The reason these journals had not been found earlier? The story went that a plane crashed over Dresden in 1945 carrying the volumes, the contents of which were kept safe by local farmers and then later by an East German official. This well-spun tale was fabricated by the man who also forged the journals, Konrad Kujau. Now known to have been forging Nazi documents for years, Kujau wrote an impressive sixty volumes, covering even the most minute details of Hitler’s daily life and of World War II.

At the time of purchase the handwriting was verified by looking at other examples of Nazi documents which had, unfortunately, also been forged by Kujau. It was not until the German Federal Archives alerted the magazine that they were most certainly fakes that the reality began to sink in and a more scientific analysis was performed. Kujau spent three years in prisonfor fraud and several of the magazine’s key employees resigned.

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