Dresden (dpa / sn) – A 51-year-old man is said to have sold counterfeit documents from the Nazi era to the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden. This applies, among other things, to several documents from or to people who were involved in the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler and the attempted coup of July 20, 1944, the police and public prosecutor announced on Friday in Dresden. There is a suspicion that these and other documents were produced either by the accused himself or with his knowledge by a previously unknown third party in order to then sell them.
The Dresden public prosecutor first reported the suspicion in the summer of 2021. At that time, a forgery was initially assumed for two documents. The documents were offered to the museum in 2015 and 2016. It is being investigated on suspicion of fraud and forgery of documents. The museum had filed a complaint.
According to the investigators, searches were carried out in connection with the investigations on Thursday in Neubrandenburg. Extensive evidence was seized, including six typewriters, old ink, stamp ink, old paper, a laptop, a cell phone and various storage media.
The forged documents concern, for example, a letter from Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg to the Army General Staff dated May 26, 1942 and a letter from General Friedrich Olbricht, dated 1943. “As a result of extensive investigations carried out by an expert from the Saxony State Criminal Police Office, It can be assumed that at least 24 documents purchased by the Military History Museum in Dresden are very likely to be forgeries,” it said.
When the documents were sold in 2015 and 2016, the accused is said to have fooled the museum into believing that the documents were authentic, “although he knew that a significant proportion of the documents were forgeries,” the authorities said. A total of 14,900 euros is said to have been paid to the accused by the Military History Museum.
On July 20, 1944, an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler failed in the “Wolfsschanze”, the headquarters of the Nazi powerhouse in East Prussia. On the same day, Stauffenberg and some co-conspirators were shot.