Forgery: The crime of falsely and with fraudulent intent making or altering a writing or other instrument.
—Webster's Third
If it were only sexier, it might have rated recognition as the world's oldest profession. Ever since humankind became literate, civilization has been bedeviled by the forger's determination to deceive by mimicking the writing of others. When a pharaoh first fashioned a seal to protect the identity of his scribblings, a forger lurked with intent to melt, alter and reseal. Around the 5th century B.C. the Athenian poet Onomakritos was expelled from that ancient city for tampering with the oracles of Musaeus. His crime, unlike those of most forgers, had an unintended benefit. Thereafter, whenever a prophecy failed to materialize, the oracle could angrily proclaim that the prediction had been concocted by that forging scoundrel Onomakritos.
Throughout history, scholars have been forced by the forgers' wiles to sift the real from the spurious in the written record. Great literature, from Homer to Shakespeare to Frost, has been lifted by forgers, some unmasked, some forever anonymous. Religions have been undermined, the reputations of races besmirched, nation set against nation, scientist against scientist, banker against depositor, even lover against the beloved, all by forgers' clandestine deceptions. Phony works of art have debased culture. Crass counterfeiting has threatened the stability of currency.
The forgers' skills, sharpened by greed, malice, political zeal or simply the sheer joy of confounding learned scholars or esteemed institutions, have called into being an opposing set of skills: those of the patient, persistent document sleuths, who squint through magnifying glasses and microscopes at each potential telltale squiggle on yellowed pages or pristine documents in countless offices, from police station houses to great universities and national archives.
Last week, in one of the publishing sensations of the century, the document sleuths clearly won a victory over the forgers who seek to reap wealth while recasting history. The editors of the West German photo-weekly Stern had on April 22 dramatically announced the astounding discovery of 62 volumes of Adolf Hitler's alleged long-secret diaries. Bound in black imitation-leather covers, the magazine-size books purported to chronicle the Nazi Führer's years from 1932 to 1945. Hailed by Stern as "the journalistic scoop of the post-World War II period," the diaries were offered to other publications for serialization at up to $3 million. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., the parent company of London's Sunday Times, agreed to pay $400,000 for British and Commonwealth rights. Paris Match and Italy's Panorama, both weeklies, signed on at undisclosed prices. Newsweek, which declined to buy serialization rights after extensive negotiations, devoted a cover story to the diaries and their contents and trumpeted it in a series of national ads.
As an international furor arose over the authenticity of the diaries, Stern's editors would say only that their trusted correspondent Gerd Heidemann, 51, had acquired the priceless documents and that he would not disclose who gave them to him or who had hidden them for