Military History Museum in Dresden
Photo: Oliver Killig / picture alliance / dpa
It is the nightmare of all museums: counterfeits in their holdings.
Now the Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr in Dresden has been hit, according to its own statements, one of the most important history museums in Europe.
It concerns the covers of two official letters - allegedly from 1942 and 1943, both signed by Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the Hitler assassin of July 20, 1944.
The museum had shown the documents in 2019 as part of the special exhibition "The Führer Adolf Hitler is dead", which addressed the failed attempt at overthrow.
Almost 30,000 visitors saw the show.
After a tip from Johannes Tuchel, the director of the German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin, the letters were removed from the current exhibition.
One had a wrong house number in the letterhead;
At that time there was no Bendlerstrasse 54 in Berlin.
Stauffenberg - at the time Chief of Staff of the General Army Office - is also said to have addressed the State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Economics Friedrich Landfried as an "honored party member" in this official letter, although Stauffenberg was not a member of the NSDAP.
The State Criminal Police Office of Saxony (LKA) has now examined the letters as part of a request for official assistance from the museum and confirmed the suspicion of forgery, as Museum Director Armin Wagner and curator Magnus Pahl report in the latest edition of the »Military History Magazine«. The letters are undoubtedly falsified and originate from the period after 1945. The LKA is a little more cautious in its assessment and declares that it is "with a high degree of probability" forgeries.
In their essay, Wagner and Pahl point out that comparable, forged documents have apparently been in circulation since the mid-2000s. Cover pages with the signatures of well-known personalities would be copied and sold. Presumably, the forger (s) assume that with fake cover sheets, there is less risk that they will be revealed as fake. The copying of extensive documents, on the other hand, requires precise knowledge of historical facts.
The Dresden Museum acquired the two Stauffenberg letters in 2015 from the Foundation for Art and Science in Neubrandenburg, according to its own information, along with 24 other documents. According to Pahl and Wagner, the papers were in a leather folder with the imprint »20. July 1944 «stapled. The foundation told SPIEGEL that it had not previously known that the papers were forged; in 2008 she bought them in good faith "from a private collection". It is incomprehensible that the Dresden Museum had not approached the foundation and informed them of the suspicion of falsification.
In their essay, the Foundation and the museum people make contradicting statements about the details of the purchase. The museum filed a criminal complaint on October 27, 2020 on suspicion of fraud. With reference to the ongoing investigation, it does not want to comment further. The LKA is investigating further documents from the purchase.
