10 Fascinating Historical Artefacts (That Weren't Real)

Adolf Hitler (né Shicklgruber) continues to exert a creepy influence over a darkly fascinated public, which means idiots will pay huge amounts of money for anything associated with the insecure Austrian art school dropout.

One of the people selling such Nazi memorabilia was a West German chancer named Konrad Kujau, and Konrad was on the lookout for a big score. Perhaps purely to see if he could get away with it, he wrote sixty volumes of diaries allegedly by Hitler's own hand, and managed to sell it to the German magazine Stern for the equivalent of almost £2.5 million.

Unfortunately, everyone at Stern was too busy revelling in their scoop of the century to actually check if the diaries were real, or at least weren't blatant fakes.

Their enthusiasm was quickly revealed to be no more than wishful thinking when the Diaries were tested and shown to be such crude forgeries Kujau might as well have written them with a Biro, and everyone involved ended up looking like a Nazi-obsessed imbecile.