Two original copies of the fake edition of the newspaper Le Soir printed and distributed on 9 November 1943 by Belgian resistance fighters, will soon be auctioned in Brussels.
On 16 and 17 October Arenberg Auctions will put up the Second World War-era newspapers, theauction house announced on Tuesday and reported by the Belga News Agency.
The offices of Le Soir were taken over during the Nazi occupation on 18 May 1940.
The newspaper was then relaunched by collaborationist journalists like Horace Van Offel and Raymond De Becker, with an editorial line sympathetic to the German occupation forces.
The idea for a fake version was thought up by Marc Aubrion on 19 October 1943, who shared the idea with René Noël.
The idea was to publish and distribute a fake issue of Le Soir on 11 November, which would be the 25th anniversary of the German defeat in the First World War.
The images were prepared in a building in Anderlecht which houses the temporarily-closed National Resistance Museum. The copies were printed at the print works at the rue de Ruysbroeck in central Brussels on the night of 6/7 November.
Today, a first edition described as "extremely" rare with the ‘incorrect’ date of 23 September and a copy with the date crossed out will be auctioned.
The starting price is set at €250, but the auction house expects this amount to increase "considerably".
"This was one of the most spectacular coups of the resistance during the Second World War. In one night, 50,000 copies of the Faux Soir were distributed to all the newsstands in Brussels, to the delight of the population," recalls Henri Godts, an expert at Arenberg Auctions.
Unfortunately, this story, generally considered to be the first case of "media hacking", had a less happy ending.
"The Gestapo managed to identify the printing press that had been used and nearly 20 people involved in producing the Faux Soir were arrested, five of whom died in concentration camps," Godts added.
Over two pages, the Faux Soir mocked, sometimes subtly, sometimes openly, the Nazi occupiers and their propaganda.
The Faux Soir episode will also be the subject of a feature film by Belgian director Michaël R. Roskam.
