The collapse of the Soviet Union may have seen the temporary end of Russian expansionism, but it did not see a termination to an incredible outpouring of documentary forgeries which have plagued the historical world since the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
Russian historical experts working for the NKVD and its successor, the KGB, conducted, and still are conducting, a prolific forgery factory in Moscow. These products have sown dissension and confusion in the ranks of legitimate historians and journalists. The former are more difficult to delude, but the latter, eager for sensational material with which to reap profits, are extraordinarily careless in assessing the accuracy of offerings from Muscovite document peddlers.
Aside from extensively rewriting their own history, Russian forgery experts spent most of their time in producing material designed to delude, confound and mislead their perceived enemies, both domestic and foreign. Much of this began after the Second World War with extensive rewriting, editing and deliberate forgeries of German military and political documents designed to embarrass the United States and its client, the West German government, as well as to elevate the image of their own regime.
Faked reports dealing with the purported death of Hitler began the deluge and these were followed by endless papers concerning the fate of Martin Bormann who the Soviets claimed was living somewhere in the West, probably protected by the insidious Americans. The same creative writers also heavily edited and enhanced the records of German Army Group Center, captured by their military units, when that entity was overrun during the war.
The purpose of this exercise was to supply proof that German General Adolf Heusinger, nominated for a high NATO position, had been involved in war crimes on the Eastern Front during the course of the war. The KGB intermingled original, relatively unimportant documents with doctored or completely invented papers, released these through their agencies in the West and awaited the results. Fortunately, other period copies of the original documents were safe in German and American archives and comparisons quickly disclosed the fraudulent nature of the Heusinger attack. (See Security and reduced tension: On the occasion of the 70. birthday of general (ret.) Adolf Heusinger. 4 August 1967. Markus-Verlagsgesellschaft, Cologne 1967.)
Many documents were prepared over the years in the event that they might be needed for a future propaganda assault and then left secure in Soviet archives.
In addition to these activities, the KGB experts also concocting material proving that many American prisoners of war remained in Vietnam after the American withdrawal, and Mr. Morris, an American historian, was taken in by these as period articles in the New York Times show. Also produced was a series of badly forged papers proving that US citizen, John Demjanjuk, was a notorious German concentration camp guard, which was exposed in U.S. Federal Court proceedings in Virginia. Both of these projects were eventually exposed as frauds, but the problems they engendered during their brief life span were monumental.
One of the most ambitious Soviet productions concerned the writings of Dr. Josef Goebbels, Hitler's brilliant Minister of Propaganda, who killed himself and his family in the Berlin Führerbunker in 1945. Dr. Goebbels was a devoted diarist, setting forth his experiences and thoughts on a daily basis beginning in the 1920s and running through to the final days in Berlin.
After he became Minister of Propaganda, these records were dictated by Goebbels on the following day and typed by a secretary on special paper using a large-type continental typewriter. An original and two carbons were made and the completed documents carefully stored. It should be noted that with the increasing pressures of his offices, Goebbels no longer had the time to write out his diary by hand, but always dictated it to a secretary on the day following the events he wished to record.
After the war, in 1946, a book appeared in East Berlin entitled Extracts and Confessions of a War Criminal and purported to be quotes from the Goebbels' diaries. It was later discovered that the book, which was entirely fictitious, was written by one Max Fechner, a well-known German communist, once the deputy head of the Socialist Unity Party, and a colleague of the German communist leader, Walter Ulbricht, who had spent the war in Moscow amongst his friends.
In 1967, Soviet historian Jelena Rshewskaja published a book in East Berlin entitled Hitlers Ende ohne Mythos (Hitler's end without Myth) in which she discusses having inspected "thick folders of handwritten Goebbels material" found in the bunker. In the same year, the pump was further primed by a similar report from Juliusz Stroynowski, a historian from Communist Poland who had fled to the West. He disclosed that he had accidentally discovered "several stacked folders" of handwritten Goebbels' diaries "in the archives of the Soviet Ministry of Defense." Stroynowski claimed that he had been permitted to examine the material, but was not allowed to make copies of any of it.
The stage was now set in the press and interest aroused. The actual purported diaries were disclosed once again, this time to British journalist John Costello, who again was only permitted to look and not to copy, according to a letter from Costello to Robert Crowley in 1991. A copied document is, in the hands of any journalist or academic, a published document. And a published document which has passed from the control of its owner, and in the case of the Goebbels material, its creator, cannot be sold for profit.
Because handwritten documents on the original, special paper Goebbels used would have been nearly impossible to successfully fake, the new Soviet line was that the documents had actually been typed and then put onto glass negatives. These were hidden by the Germans in cases where the Soviets were able to "discover" them after the war. Having altered the Goebbels' diaries from "several stacked folders" of handwritten material to a box of more easily forged photographs of typed manuscript, the Russians began to offer their rare, politically-incorrect material to sources in Germany for sale and publication. German experts universally rejected these productions as completely fake.
http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/NetLoss ... audsII.htm
On the American side:
Among the many fraudulent historical documents that have been cited over the years by “conformist” historians of the Third Reich era, Irving said, have been the fake wartime diaries of Gerhard Engel, Hitler’s army adjutant, and of Felix Kersten, masseur and confidant of Himmler. Similarly unreliable is the diary of Mussolini’s foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, which American officials doctored after the war. Completely fake are Hitler’s supposed “table talk” remarks from February and April 1945. Irving related that the Swiss lawyer Francois Genoud, now dead, admitted privately that he had fabricated them.
http://www.gnosticliberationfront.com/rauschning.htm
Is the Ciano Diary real or fake?
David Irving answered:Count Galeazzo Ciano, who married Mussolini's daughter Edda and was his foreign minister (executed in 1944), certainly did write a diary in handwriting. His daughter Edda took it to Switzerland for safety and using it, tried to blackmail the Nazis into pressuring Italy to spare her husband, on which see the Goebbels Diaries and other sources. After the war the diary fell into American (OSS) hands, probably in Switzerland. There are several files on the diaries in the secret papers of the first CIA chief Allen Dulles in the Seeley Mudd Library, at Princeton University.
The well known interpreter Eugen Dollmann told me many years ago that in British captivity after the war he was approached by an MI6 officer who showed him the diaries, or what purported to be the diaries, and asked if they were authentic. Dollmann confirmed that they were, but the officer then smirked and said that they had meanwhile been "worked over." And how! Vicious criticism of top Nazis had been inserted, including especially Ribbentrop. This is why conformist historians love quoting the Ciano Diaries.
The diary also heaped criticism on Rommel in December 1940, blaming him for "his" failures in North Africa. Fakery clue: Rommel did not even arrive in Africa until February 1941, and there was not even any talk of his going there in December 1940. I shall be researching in the Princeton library in June, as so often before, for my Himmler biography: what precisely did Dulles report to Washington about his contacts with the Stauffenberg plotters, because the Nazis were reading his code messages?
http://www.fpp.co.uk/docs/Irving/RadDi/2012/120512.html
Note: The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the CIA's "black propaganda" branch during WW2. At its peak in late 1944, the OSS employed almost 13,000 men and women.
