Famous Forgery Cases

Mussolini's Diaries:  When forgers faked diaries of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini that were revealed in 1957 it was said, "Thirty volumes of manuscripts cannot be the work of a forger. You can falsify a few lines or even pages, but not a series of diaries." Yet an Italian woman named Amalia Panvini, aided by her 84-year-old mother, had done just that. They were able to produce masterful forgeries that even fooled the dictator's son, Vittorio. Italian police confiscated most of Panvini's fraud diaries but 11 years later, (despite the widely publicized forgery case) the Sunday Times of London purchased four remaining volumes for a large monetary amount. Fortunately, the newspaper editors caught their mistake before publishing the artificial documents.

Dictator Benito Mussolini

Sunday Times newspaper that almost
published the fake diaries

Hitler's Diaries:  Kenneth Rendell was a dealer in historical documents and helped unmask the Hitler diaries, calling them "bad forgeries but a great hoax." In saying this, he was claiming the artificial documents to have been poor imitations but still a hoax that caused some disturbance. This massive hoax began in 1981, when a reporter for the German magazine Stern heard of diaries recovered from a Nazi plane crash. Over 50 journals (reportedly handwritten by Hitler) revealed a kinder dictator whose "final solution" to the "Jewish problem" was not genocide but merely the deportation of Jews. Many other forgeries have occured throughout history but almost all have been quickly discovered. Any and all forgeries are recognizable against original writing due to slight changes in handwriting characteristics.

The magazine hired experts to authenticate the diaries but gave them only a few select pages to review and compare. Even worse, many of the examples of "genuine" Hitler documents provided by the Stern for comparison were from the same dealer who had forged the diaries. Therefore, they were all in the same handwriting style—that of the forger. When Stern broke the story of the diaries in late April of 1983, it triggered headlines around the world. Afterward, they were soon revealed as fakes. At his trial, forger Konrad Kujau, a German dealer in military objects, admitted guilt and gladly signed Hitler "autographs" for the crowd.



Konrad Kujau revealing the false Hitler diaries in court