Word: hoax
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...hoax, as the French charged, a fake accident staged and executed by Hitler's own henchmen to bring the Führer close to martyrdom and thus rally waning popular support for the regime? Was it another Reichstag fire? What about the mysterious and providential changes in plan? What about the fact that not a single big-shot Nazi remained in the beer hall even though the Führer's prompt departure was unforeseen? Despite these startling coincidences, this theory was hardly more credible than the German charge that Winston Churchill sank the Athenia...
...London the Berlin Chancellery's charge that British agents launched the armistice hoax was called "fantastic" at the British Foreign Office, where an official spokesman cracked: "The allegations should be dealt with in the special jokes department." Nevertheless, it was a pretty compliment, and an eminently justifiable one, to the potent British espionage-propaganda system which, by the tearful post-war testimony of Generals Ludendorff and Hindenburg, did more to undermine German resistance in 1918 than all the Allies' guns...
...microphone for all Rumania to hear: "Attention! Calinescu has been assassinated. The action was carried out by Iron Guards." It so happened that the Premier's wife, who was staying at their country place, was listening to this broadcast, which she at first took to be a hoax. She set out for Bucharest with her 16-year-old son. On arrival, she was told that her husband was dead with five bullets through his body and one through an eye.* At the sight of his body she fainted, the boy suffered nervous collapse...
Your article about Science Fiction magazines brings to mind a little-considered result of the now famous Orson Welles Martian-menace-hoax broadcast of last fall. Many of the Science Fiction pulps now on sale owe their success to the publicity given the Martians at that time. Martians, you know, are very essential to Science Fiction...
...seen in his championing scientific underdog Robert Hooke. Moreover, his step is firm, his voice vigorous, and his tall figure is neither gaunt nor flabby. He retired from the Princeton faculty and became a professor emeritus six years ago, but that is a sort of pious hoax. He is as active as ever...