Thank God for fakers! Matchless as deflaters of human and institutional pretension, they furnish us rich measures of malicious glee at the red-faced victims. Pause here to honor Konrad Kujau, whose forged Hitler diaries burst upon the world twenty years ago, fooling the editors of Stern, and of Newsweek.

Kujau churned out the diaries in longhand in the back of his shop in Stuttgart, slopping tea over the pages to lend the requisite touch of antiquity, spurring his weary imagination to such daily entries as "Meet all the leaders of the Storm Troopers in Bavaria, give them medals.... Must not forget tickets for the Olympic Games for Eva.... Because of the new pills I have violent flatulence, and--says Eva--bad breath."

Kujau never did get his Gothic lettering right and used the initials F.H. instead of A.H. It didn't make any difference. Stern's experts pronounced them genuine and so, to his lifelong embarrassment, did the late Lord Dacre, a k a Hugh Trevor-Roper, who, as the designated expert hired by Rupert Murdoch's London Sunday Times, gave them his scholarly endorsement.

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