BBC: 'How fake Hitler diaries fooled the British press'
https://www.youtube.com/embed/EVqeFZSaGN0
Quote: "The thing that struck Hugh Trevor-Roper most forcefully and certainly struck me as a non-expert when I saw the original material was the sheer scale of it,' The Times editor Charles Douglas-Home told the BBC on 22 April 1983. 'The enormous range of this archive. It's not just that there are nearly 60 volumes of notebooks filled out in Hitler's longhand which is there, there are about 300 of his drawings and pictures and personal documents such as his party card. I remember there are the drawings which he submitted to art school when he was a young man hoping to get into art school, and there is a painting, an oil painting and so on. Now a forger would have to be very good to forge across that whole range.' ... With serialisation deals signed, Stern hastily planned a press conference to announce the publication of Hitler's diaries to the world. But even before the notebooks' grand reveal, doubts were being raised about their veracity – not least by the staff of The Sunday Times themselves, who had been burnt before. In 1968, the newspaper had made a down payment on diaries supposedly written by the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, which had also been vouched for, by his son no less. 'But they turned out to be fakes devised by two little old ladies who lived in Vercelli outside Milan,' journalist Phillip Knightley, who worked for The Sunday Times's investigative team, told Witness History in 2011" (Burke, M., 2025). Observation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcTvwv_ZKhE&t=57s Bibliography: Burke, M. (2025, April 21). “It will be a great hoax in the history of mankind”: How fake Hitler diaries fooled the British press. BBC.co.uk; BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20250414-the-fake-hitler-diaries-that-fooled-rupert-murdoch
