Going back to the earlier post about the differences between archival and oral history, there’s another danger in both sources that I didn’t mention before. Sometimes people lie.

In the case of the Second World War, there might have been honorable reasons for falsehoods. There were plenty of occasions during the war when respectable people lied in order to protect someone. In fact, resisters lied all the time. We now consider it to be part of their heroic defense of freedom, but at the time it was flat out lying to the authorities. There were even occasions when the authorities in the person of police or municipal officials falsified official documents in order to hide someone or help the resistance.

There’s another type of lying about the Second World War, however, that is harder to spot and more insidious: the creation of a personal legend about what one did during the war. It’s more likely to show up in memoirs or interviews after the events than in documents created at the time. But it depends on the liar. It was entirely possible to start such a legend during the war.

The most famous of such legends belong to notorious war criminals who managed to reinvent themselves as victims and maintain the illusion for decades before being caught. John Weidner and some of his Dutch-Paris colleagues spent a couple years ferreting such people out from among the mass of displaced Dutch people at the end of the war.

At the same time, there were a few people who were not war criminals or Nazis but still created a false personal legend of their wartime heroics. They managed to take some small act of kindness or resistance and spin it into impressive heroics. It wouldn’t have been hard for a man or woman with a flair for self-promotion to do. After all, resistance had been clandestine. How many people actually had the knowledge to say that, absolutely, so and so did nothing in the resistance? Very, very few. And if someone asked for evidence, all the self-proclaimed hero had to say was that they hadn’t kept records for obvious reasons or that all his colleagues had been killed by the Gestapo. Who could argue with that?

Actually, the French, Belgian and Dutch governments tried to argue with that by requiring that everyone who applied for a “resister card” verify his or her activities in the resistance. Usually a signed letter from a recognized resistance leader was enough, but sometimes the police launched a full investigation into a claim. That might have stopped the self-proclaimed hero from collecting medical benefits, but it did not stop the writing of fraudulent memoirs or giving of false answers in interviews.

That is why historians use as many sources as they can find and cite them carefully in their footnotes. We’re lining our documents up like witnesses in a trial.