A bank holiday weekend is probably as good a time as any to announce less than positive news. With the majority of workers enjoying the time off, bad-news is bound not to get noticed as much.
With the government still feeling the aftershock of disastrous local election results or Microsoft deciding to drop its takeover bid for Yahoo, there was also a fascinating article in the FT this weekend. It detailed the story of how at least 29 forged documents had been slipped into the National Archive records and how professional research had revealed the documents to be duds. The bad-news part of this is that police say the case will stay unsolved.
The FT article by Ben Fenton, an accomplished researcher himself, details how between 1999 and 2005 a series of files were planted in the records. You may be familiar with the case.
The documents said that under the highest orders of the British Government plans were made and carried out to assassinate SS leader, Heinrich Himmler.
Fenton’s outline details the evidence for forgery was overwhelming. Apart from factual inaccuracies, there are physical traces of foul play. This included pencil marks under signatures and questionable phraseology used between correspondents. The letterhead on the documents used, was created from a laser printer.
The documents themselves were cited as evidence in the books by historian Martin Allen. Allen himself claims to have no knowledge of the forged documents and says he was ‘the victim of a conspiracy’.
The real stink of this is the 13 month police investigation yielded nothing but a decision to abandon prosecution as it wasn’t in the public interest.
Trust in the work you use, catalogue and preserve is vital, without it the efforts of information professionals across the spectrum are undermined. This is very much in the public interest.
If criminal proceedings aren’t an option then perhaps an inquiry is needed to ensure further breaches of trust aren’t allowed to happen and the reputation of the National Archives restored to its rightful place.
This scandal asks questions of how we define 'Public Interest' for prosecution and what the Prosecution Authorities consider to be important. The point is that the enquiry took a very long period of time. Now, doubtless during this time there were murder and counter-terrorism enquiries which attracted the attention of the police and lawyers. But once Mr Allen is dead, opportunities to question him are gone.
ReplyDeleteMore important, a conviction would have scotched rumours of the discredited 'Himmler execution' from spreading. Now, as the FT article ominously mentions, holocaust deniers are questioning everything in the National Archive, a ludicrous thesis. Ludicrous because this fraud was detected and because each forged document was marked with a slit near the punch hole for easy insertion in to the file - so the practice is not commonplace and is easy to check.
We must guard against those who are motivated to attempt to change history and not hesitate to prosecute - no matter the state of the accused.