Word: forgers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Moreover, as in so many manuscript forgeries, a knowledgeable reading of the diaries was damning in itself. The forger or forgers had unknowingly perpetuated minor errors that historians had found in the Domarus book. The crowd at a Hitler rally in Breslau was put at half a million, for instance, whereas more reliable non-Domarus reports had estimated 130,000. Both the diaries and Domarus had General Franz Ritter Von Epp congratulating Hitler in 1937 on his 50th anniversary in army service, when the dictator was only 48 years old; the Führer had actually praised...
Vittorio Mussolini examined the writing and said it was his father's. An expert from Switzerland's Lausanne University conducted chemical tests, compared the diaries with Mussolini's known handwriting and found the discovery authentic. "Thirty volumes of manuscript cannot be the work of a forger, but of a genius," he said. "You can falsify a few lines or even pages, but not a series of diaries...
...forger, Clifford Irving was something else: audacious and foolhardy enough to concoct the "autobiography" of a living person who could readily refute it, point by point, if he wished to do so. When Irving convinced McGraw-Hill in 1971 that Howard Hughes had asked him to help him write his autobiography, the New York City-born freelance writer was clearly counting on the reclusive Hughes to remain silent. Carrying out his elaborate hoax, Irving forged letters from Hughes to himself that persuaded McGraw-Hill to give Irving a $750,000 contract to produce a 230,000-word manuscript. Irving even...
...were respected experts in the art of forgery detection initially taken in by the fabrications of such prolific deceivers as Irving and the two mother-daughter teams? Irving contends that hired experts tend to render the favorable judgments that publishers seeking their guidance wish to hear. Once a forger masters his subject's handwriting idiosyncrasies and ways of thinking, Irving claims, sheer quantity is no problem. "Once you do one page," he says, "you can do 20. Once you do 20, you can do a book...
There is a usually unspoken professional admiration between the masters of such analysis and the masters of the fabrications. In his revealing account, Great Forgers and Famous Fakes, Autograph Dealer Hamilton quotes a letter from Forger Arthur Sutton, whom Hamilton had helped to expose, causing Sutton to plead guilty to fraud. "I have always had the greatest respect for you," wrote Sutton, who crafted the signatures of famous figures from Sitting Bull to Richard Nixon and Marilyn Monroe. "I am glad I have been caught and can promise I will never forge any autographs ever again." Admitted Hamilton...