Faking it up

Martin Allen is an unhappy man. He has written three books (no mean feat given the pressure for publication in acamedia these days) but alas, all the evidence for his historical arguments have been shown to be fakes.

The claims made by Allen seem believable enough. It is well known that the British upper classes had a soft spot for Adolf, the Daily Mail still regarded him as a force for good right up until 1938 and their attraction for fascism occassionally bursts forth - take Prince Harry's Nazi officer disguise and the Max Mosley spanking scandal below for instance. So Allen was on solid enough ground. He claimed that, "British agents used the royal family to deceive the Nazis into expecting a pro-German putsch. The Duke of Windsor leaked secrets to help Hitler. And, most sensationally of all, SS chief Heinrich Himmler was murdered by secret agents on Winston Churchill's orders." Apparently these were 'sensational' claims. To me, they seem just boringly probable.

As it turns out the evidence was not what it seemed. "Details of an investigation by the National Archives into how forged documents came to be planted in their files have uncovered the full extent of deception. Officials discovered 29 faked documents, planted in 12 separate files at some point between 2000 and 2005, which were used to underpin Allen's allegations."

The strong implication is that it was Allen himself who planted these forged documents in a desperate attempt to boost his publication ratings, especially when it is considered that Allen was the only person to have handled all the files that contained the forged documents and that the forgeries themselves were, er, not very well done.

Case closed then it would seem. But there remains a lingering sense of doubt. For a start, we learn that the forgeries were poorly cobbled together affairs that looked fake with a capital F. Letters were printed on the wrong kind of paper, with laser printers and spelling mistakes. Now it seems to me that if you're a historian (ever the sceptical paranoic types) even a historian in a hurry and anxious to slip in a bit af helpful evidence into the archives, that you would put the effort in and get it right. Because if you're job depends on the quality of your fakes, these fakes had better be pretty accurate. It could well be, of course, that Allen is not just a poor historian but an inept forger as well. At the moment he is a very unwell man and unavailable for comment and perhaps that is the most likely interpretation.

However, we live in a country steeped in lies and deception. 45 minute WMD claims, BAE, Navy not in Iranian waters, the Belgrano, the Stockwell shooting, PFI, Liar loans to reel off just a few things. This is not to justify Allen (if he has carried out fakery) but to withold belief on this story. After all, there is nothing to prevent one thinking that, in fact, Allen's story was true but that the evidence he had used was noted by Special Branch, who lifted it from the National Archives and then replaced it all by crude "amateurish" forgeries. The aim being to discredit Allen and his dangerous reminders of the British ruling class' love affair with fascism. If so, the ruse worked beautifully. The Guardain swallowed the line uncritically and poor Allen is left out to dry.

Maybe all historical archives are opertated along these lines.