German critic of historical sources, we don’t know so much as the date of his birth; he was born in 1889 in Hannover, Germany. He died in 1959 in Arnstadt (Thuringia, former East Germany). He was a lawyer by trade and had worked in Hannover as a notary. He had taken part in World War II and was taken prisoner.
After that, he lived in Arnstadt, which became his family’s new home after the destruction of their Hanover residence during the war. All his post-war life, he had been afflicted by poverty and state repression in DDR.
The job of a notary provided Kammeier with an excellent basis for the critical research of old documents, which he became fascinated with in 1923. By 1926 he had completed his 292-page manuscript entitled “The Universal Falsification of History,” where he subjects historical documents serving as the basis for the medieval history of Germany to rigorous criticism. However, it had taken him many years to find a publisher for this critique.
He sent a brief summary of the key points related to the manuscript to the Prussian Academy of Sciences with a request to be given the opportunity of making a public speech in front of the historians. This request was rejected under a formal pretext that private persons weren’t allowed to address the Academy, with no substantial argumentation given. The mere fact that Kammeier had not held an office in an academic institution sufficed for the rejection of a well-reasoned critique.
Kammeier’s manuscript got published only as late as 1935. This was followed by a brochure, where the criticisms of historical sources were taken further, encompassing the entire medieval period in Europe and seven more brochures on the same subject. This work became a bibliographic rarity.
It was published again in a small number of copies as part of the book that also includes the following works of Wilhelm Kammeier dating from 1936-1939: “Enigmas of Global History – an Answer to my Critics”, “The Mystery of Mediaeval Rome”, “Dogmatic Christianity and the Falsification of History”, and “The Foundation of the Roman Ecumenical Church”.
Finally, Kammeier’s manuscript on the “sources” of early Christianity and their falsification, previously unpublished and presumed lost, came out as a book. Official science had only been reacting critically to Kammeier’s works during the first few years that followed the release of his first book.
His critic Professor Heimpel, accused Kammeier of having no positive conception of history: “If we see the entire historical conception of the Middle Ages disintegrate and transform into a spot of impenetrable darkness, or indeed a gigantic question mark, we shall naturally end up with feeling inner resentment against Kammeier’s criticisms, well-reasoned or not.”
Kammeier’s counter-argumentation was that it hadn’t been his fault that the history of Germany and the entire Ancient World proved a work of fiction to a tremendous extent, the literary and documental sources of the epoch being forgeries.
Kammeier pleaded guilty to discovering this historical falsification, mentioning the necessity to live with a new historical truth that new generations of historians would inevitably face (as we know, they still shudder at the mere thought).
However, after the reasoned refutation of the historians’ criticisms by Kammeier, the learned scholars have switched to the tried and viable tactics of obstruction and concealment (after all, things that remain unknown to the general public may as well be nonexistent).
The world war that broke out around that time greatly aided this obstruction. Kammeier’s participation in military action, his captivity, and the unsettled state of his post-war life had interrupted his active research for a long time.
The only job Kammeier managed to find in East Germany was that of a schoolteacher. As soon as circumstances allowed, he resumed his research of the “ancient” documents, concentrating all of his attention on the documental foundations of the history of early Christianity.
Kammeier was wrong to count on a benevolent attitude towards his research from the part of an atheistic East Germany; instead, as soon as he had offered his critique of early Christian documents to the historians of the DDR, he lost his job, the manuscript of his book was confiscated and presumed lost for a long time; his estate was nationalized, and his family forced to dwell in hunger and poverty.
Kammeier’s research of the “ancient” documents begins with the trivial remark that every donation document (the most common kind of medieval documents; donations could assume the form of estate, privileges, ranks, etc.) must contain information about the nature of the gift, the date of the donation, the names of the benefactor and the receiver and the place where the document was written.
Documents with blank fields (the date, the name of the donation’s receiver, etc.) are null and void from the legal point of view and can only serve as historical sources indirectly (in the research of historical falsifications, for instance).
Documents kept in libraries often fail to correspond to the following criteria: One finds documents with no date or a date that was obviously introduced later – alternatively, the date can be incomplete or transcribed in a manner that fails to correspond with the presumed epoch of the document’s creation. Better yet, the Documents dating to the same day would often be “signed” in different geographical locations.
The analysis of places and dates leaves us with the following picture: all German emperors, regardless of age, health, and basic human logic, didn’t reside in any capital but kept on the move all the time, occasionally covering gigantic distances in a single day, in order to make more and more donations to their loyal subjects.
The German emperors often managed to be present on the same day in two mutually distant locations. For instance, Emperor Conrad is presumed to have been present in 2 or 3 different cities at the same annual Christian feast for 50 years in a row.
The family name of the donation’s recipient is absent from a great number of documents (this is the case with up to half of all surviving documents for some epochs) – one can, therefore, speak of headers at best, valid official documents being a far cry.
Naturally, Kammeier wasn’t the first to discover forgeries during the research of ancient (or presumably ancient) documents. His primary merit is that he had managed to recognize the more or less systematic large-scale activities of whole generations of hoaxers serving the Catholic Church or individual feudal rulers and grasp the real scale of the historical falsification campaign.
These hoaxers have destroyed a great many old originals and replaced them with forgeries. The old text would often be erased with a new one taking its place on an ancient parchment, which would make the forgery look like an “authentic ancient relic” in the eyes of the hoaxers. It would often take a very minor alteration to change the original meaning of an old document completely.
According to Kammeier, the key goal of this prolonged and massive campaign for the falsification of historical documents had been the concealment, distortion, and arbitrary extension of the pre-Christian history, with all the achievements of the pagan epoch ascribed thereto.
Apart from that, “legal” acknowledgment of the possession rights must have been in high demand among the new feudal rulers, whose property was acquired from lawful pagan owners rather recently and in a violent manner. Falsified donation documents were necessary to declare ancient rights of possession; their authorship could be traced to one of the great Christian rulers of antiquity – fictitious entities invented for this specific purpose in many cases.
The general condition of historical sources at the moment can be described as follows: the number of forgeries is mind-boggling, and every “ancient” work of history lacks an original (this is hardly a chance occurrence). However, historians keep using forgeries in lieu of official documentation – possibly due to the fact that their inveracity has not been proven irrefutably yet, or that such irrefutable proof does exist but remains concealed from the scientific community.
Dr.Kammeier reached the following corollaries in the course of his research of medieval documents: the humanists took part in the massive falsification of history alongside the Catholic clergy striving to create some proof of the historical significance attributed to their church; this process falls on the XV century for the most part :
-The documents related to the pagan “German” history have been destroyed and replaced by Gallic and Romanic forgeries.
-The existence of Catholic Pontiffs before the so-called Avignon captivity is of a fragmental nature through and through.
-Historical events that preceded the XIII century are beyond reconstruction since all of the earlier documents have been destroyed and replaced by counterfeits.
-The pre-Papal wars between national churches were subsequently presented as a struggle against the heretics and the apostates.
-“Ancient” literature is as much of a forgery as medieval documents. One of such fake literary works is “Germany” by Tacitus.
-The Catholic clergy can be credited with the invention of the New Testament, or at least a radical rearrangement thereof.
-The Church kept on manufacturing counterfeited “ancient” manuscripts in order to “prove” the authenticity of Evangelical texts and their great age with the aid of the new “findings.”