History’s biggest lies – from Hitler’s art career to royal family being German

It’s lazy – but it feels good to write the Windsors off as “others” and bring them down a peg or two. And it’s not a new one either.

I found references to our ‘German royals’ in the Ladybird books of my childhood – but the idea is far older than that.

The story starts in 1702 with childless Queen Anne coming to the throne. An act was passed, ensuring succession to German-born George I.

But since his son George II, every King and Queen (since 1760) has been British.

Matters aren’t helped by events in 1917, when the Royal Family changed their name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. That fuelled the idea they had something to hide.

There are some more recent German-born members of the Royal Family. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband and the current Queen’s great-greatgrandfather, came from Saxony.

But who defines the nationality of a family based on one or two ancestors born more than 150 years ago?

Nigel Farage has two German great-great grandparents but nobody calls him German.

Boris Johnson and David Cameron are both descended from George II but we don’t write them off as Germans either.

Our misunderstanding of genealogy extends to our own families. For example, having an ancestor who once tended cattle does not give you an intuitive understanding of cows.

In 2016, while appearing on the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? Danny Dyer was shocked to learn he was a direct descendant of King Edward III. Danny loved those royal credentials.

But if you’ve got some fairly recent British ancestors, there’s a very good chance that you are descended from Edward III too.

Hitler was a ‘failed artist’

In many ways, this was the obvious place to start. I have long been uncomfortable at the way in which films, TV documentaries and the “Nazi cottage industry” persist in keeping the “Adolf Hitler legend” alive.

Chief among the tropes is that Hitler was a failed artist. It’s a notion many believe and one that was started by Hitler himself.

He sets out the case in his rambling manifesto, Mein Kampf, written in 1925, making much of his “undeniable talent” and explaining how the artistic elites conspired to crush him.

But here’s the thing – while Hitler thought he was a great artist, nobody else seems to think he had any particular talent.

He was twice turned down by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. A critic who saw his work in the 1930s called it “painful”.

In researching the book, I approached an art dealer who described them as having “minimal or no artistic merit” and the general consensus over the last 70 years – even in blind appraisals – always brings up “nil points” for Hitler’s pictures.

We need to stop mythologising the man. In truth, he was not so much a failed artist as a failed human being.

People used to think the world was flat

This is a great example of how fake history seeps in through the stories of childhood.

For years, story books in the US and UK peddled the idea that Christopher Columbus sailed West to prove the world was round and found America by mistake – so logically, prior to 1492, everyone believed that.

It’s a great story – the only problem is that Columbus wasn’t doing that because (almost) everyone knew it already.

As far back as 200BC, a Greek chap named Eratosthenes had worked out the size of our planet and it’s likely it had been worked out long before that.

Columbus went West to get rich and got lost on the way. When he arrived in the West Indies, he thought he was off mainland China.

He was a terrible navigator who exploited almost everyone he came into contact with – to the point where he was arrested and sent back to Spain, where he died aged 55.

Bizarrely, flat-Earthery has come back into vogue in recent years.

We can lay a lot of the blame for it at the feet of American author Washington Irving who, in 1828, wrote about Columbus’s life and depicted him as a saint-like figure who set out to prove the world was round.

It was nonsense. But people liked the story and sought to keep it going.

We’d all speak French

We’ve all heard someone say that if Napoleon had won at Waterloo, we’d all be speaking French. But in truth, the idea is a very silly one indeed.

As I set out to investigate it, I realised this lie is not so much about language– more about how old propaganda still shapes our world.

There’s a line, attributed to the Duke of Wellington, that the “Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields at Eton”.

But there’s no record of Wellington ever saying that. He hated Eton and when he was there, there were no playing fields.

Thanks to 19th century cartoonists like James Gillray, many Brits still think of Napoleon as “Little Boney” – a raving loon, stomping about Europe in oversized boots.

The truth is a bit more nuanced. For a start, at 5ft 5in, Bonaparte wasn’t little but above average height for the time.

The instigator of reforms which laid the groundwork of our modern age, he was as much the embodiment of the enlightenment as a tyrant who conquered half of Europe.

But history is written by the winners and so his defeat at Waterloo turns into an event that could have changed the whole course of British history and culture.

If he had won, we are told, everyone in Britain would have been eating better pastries and speaking French.

Well, no. If Napoleon had won at Waterloo, it would have been but one more battle in an ongoing war.

And as for the language bit… well, if winning sides in wars always made the losers speak their language, the French would currently be speaking English.