Relax, Churchill didn't do it
British historians are in an uproar as documents alleging British skulduggery during the Second World War are revealed as fakes. The trouble is, writes John Allemang, even when the lies are exposed, the power of the written word remains.
In the never-ending battles for historical truth, documentary evidence commands the greatest authority.
Memories lapse, eyewitnesses are partial, political players have reputations to protect and even the smartest interpreters of the past have a weakness for beautiful theories that can't always be sustained by the dull disorder of facts.
But a document is seemingly without bias or deception or self-conscious posturing - it simply is what it is, an inanimate object awaiting judgment, the raw material of the human narrative that refines what we once thought into what we now know.
"We rely on documents to give us the best record of what people were doing at the time," says historian Margaret MacMillan, author of The Uses and Abuses of History. "But the cardinal rule of history is that to do good work, you have to be able to trust the documents."
Unfortunately, the powerful faith placed in a document's unguarded truth has also mesmerized fraud artists and historical deceivers, as the custodians of the British National Archives have been the most recent to discover. Earlier this month, they announced that 29 documents in their care, all of which purported to expose covert British actions during the Second World War, were fakes - including a series of memos that seemed to prove British agents had assassinated SS chief Heinrich Himmler to cover up secret peace talks between him and Winston Churchill's government.
The documents (which an interested person can view at
About us | FOI disclosure log 2007) make for compelling reading. Here, for example, is the chilling top-secret memo written by a certain John Wheeler-Bennett of the Foreign Office to Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart of the Political Intelligence Department on May 10, 1945: "We cannot allow Himmler to take to the stand in any prospective prosecution, or indeed allow him to be interrogated by the Americans. Steps will therefore have to be taken to eliminate him as soon as he falls into our hands."
And when Himmler indeed dies shortly after being captured by the British - having committed suicide, according to official reports - there follows the worried reaction of Churchill's right-hand man, Brendan Bracken, writing on May 27, 1945, to the Earl of Selborne at the Ministry of Economic Warfare: "I'm sure that if it were to become public knowledge that we had a hand in this man's demise, it would have devastating repercussions for this country's standing."
Lies, all lies - but in the hands of a revisionist British historian named Martin Allen, who based three highly publicized books on these and other faked documents that had been slipped into the national archives, such tales of British deceitfulness have managed to pass for the truth.
"False memory syndrome" is the phrase used by one British historian to describe the way historical fact is distorted by these forgeries, which linger on among conspiracy theorists and Internet believers long after they have been exposed as frauds. In the case of Mr. Allen's inflammatory documents, investigators have discovered such elementary slip-ups as the use of a laser printer to manufacture letterheads from the Second World War era, pencil tracings under ink signatures and an over-reliance on a small number of typewriters to create memos that supposedly came from a wide range of British government departments.
Even the phrasing of the supposedly hush-hush documents now sounds too good to be true - would high-level assassins see any point in committing words to paper such as "I'm sure that if it were to become public knowledge that we had a hand in this man's demise..." except to boost the sales figures of some future historian?
And yet these fabrications, like so many before them, have the power to persuade. Why do we give any credence to made-up stories that contradict the established truths? In some ways, the answer appears almost too easy - at a time when the leaders of Britain and the United States could persuade their citizens to go to war in Iraq based on lies, it becomes that much easier to reject the official version of the facts.
But examine the issue more closely and what you see are the George W. Bush and Tony Blair governments acting much like the Martin Allens of this world - "Look what we've found," they say, and suddenly a highly dubious document about Saddam Hussein's attempt to buy uranium in Niger manages to take centre stage, sway the moral fence-sitters and justify all-out war.
It all comes back to the document, and the illusion of truth it conveys to people who are ready to be deceived. One of history's most famous and influential frauds, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, still has an avid following among those predisposed to believe that 19th-century Jewish leaders not only plotted a course of world domination, but wrote it all down in a handbook. That the detailed prescriptions of the Protocols are ludicrous is beside the point - in an anti-Semitic culture, anything approaching scholarly skepticism has already been set aside.
Similarly, around the same time the Protocols started to gain currency, French military authorities were fabricating a case against Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer wrongly accused in 1894 of spying for the Germans. The charge was demonstrably weak, and yet forged evidence was accepted because Dreyfus's Judaism in itself seemed subversive to French conservatives, whose nationalism was based on ultra-Catholic orthodoxy as well as an unquestioning allegiance to the military authorities who were desperately trying to rig the case after mistakenly arresting him in the first place.
The most famous literary hoax of the 18th century, James Macpherson's purported translations of a third-century Gaelic bard named Ossian, could have succeeded only in a world already predisposed to accept the discovery of a local ancient epic filled with fair-haired maids and glittering spears and sun-streaked mist - the early Romantic Age equivalent of our own era's faked tell-all memoirs of abusive childhoods.
Ossian was greeted with derision by no less an authority than Samuel Johnson, much as the Protocols were widely denounced, Dreyfus's case prompted Emile Zola's outraged J'accuse and Mr. Allen's self-serving revelations were rebutted by scholars intimate with the machinations of British intelligence.
But the paper trail, once established, is difficult to eradicate - the laws of equivalency take over, where one document is as good as another, or even better when there is no contradictory information available. So, in the disproportionate logic of the document absolutists, the worldwide Jewish conspiracy becomes true because it's written down in the Protocols, whereas Hitler had nothing to do with the Holocaust because there is no memorandum bearing his signature that orders the extermination of the Jews.
And much like the evidence compiled against the prisoners held at Guantanamo, the moment a lie has been documented, its status is considerably enhanced. For John Drewe, an Englishman who peddled faked 20th-century paintings around the world in the 1980s and 1990s, the challenge in persuading auction houses of a work's authenticity wasn't in the art, which he commissioned from a down-on-his-luck painter/songwriter who advertised in a satirical magazine. The real issue was creating the documentation that would validate the paintings' forged signatures.
Art comes down to taste and judgment, but documents are real, and so Mr. Drewe infiltrated gallery archives to plant fake catalogues that backdated his made-to-order master-pieces, while building a network of phony collectors who could vouch for his paintings' extended history - their provenance, to use the term auction houses employ to connect a work back to its original creator.
Mr. Drewe served two years in jail. Despite demands from British historians to take action against the person who planted the Second World War forgeries in the country's archives, prosecutors have refused to press charges because - so much for claims of history - it is not considered in the public interest to do so. And so the story of the past remains a work in progress.
John Allemang is a Globe and Mail writer and frequent Focus contributor.
17-05-2008, 03:31 PM
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