False documentation is the process of creating documents which record fictitious events. The documents can then be used to "prove" that the fictional events happened. A common propaganda tool, false documentation is often used by management groups and totalitarian governments for four basic reasons: U.S. propaganda poster from WWII depicting a Nazi stabbing a Bible. ... Management (from Old French ménagement the art of conducting, directing, from Latin manu agere to lead by the hand) characterises the process of leading and directing all or part of an organisation, often a business, through the deployment and manipulation of resources (human, financial, material, intellectual or intangible). ... The concept of Totalitarianism is a typology or ideal-type used by some political scientists to encapsulate the characteristics of a number of twentieth century regimes that mobilized entire populations in support of the state or an ideology. ...

1. to have a basis for accusations against groups or individuals who oppose those in authority,
2. to invoke hatred against certain racial, ethnic or religious groups (appeal to bigotry),
3. To support the actions of those in power (appeal to patriotism), and
4. To cover the mistakes of those in power (deniability).

Perhaps the best illustration of false documentation is Nazi Germany, where the authorities falsified documents for all four reasons. This article is about race as an intraspecies classification. ... An ethnic group is a group of people who identify with one another, or are so identified by others, on the basis of a boundary that distinguishes them from other groups. ... Religious is a term with both a technical definition and folk use. ... Defense of the homeland is a commonplace of military patriotism: The statue in the courtyard of École polytechnique, Paris, commemorating the students involvement in defending France against the 1814 invasion of the Coalition. ... In politics and espionage, deniability is the ability of a powerful player or actor to avoid blowback by secretly arranging for an action to be taken on their behalf by a third party. ... Nazi Germany, or the Third Reich, commonly refers to Germany in the years 1933–1945, when it was under the firm control of the totalitarian and fascist ideology of the Nazi Party, with the Führer Adolf Hitler as dictator. ...

There are three basic methods for falsifying documentation. One way, of course, is to create an entirely fictional event and write it down. The other is to misrepresent an actual incident by embellishment or exaggeration so that the blame for the incident is misplaced. The third is to refuse to document an actual event, thereby exonerating the instigators for lack of proof.

The practice of false documentation rests on the fallacy, promoted by management organizations and governments, that whatever has been written down is unquestionably true. In business, it rests on a further bias: the tendency of management to believe managers rather than to collect and objectively judge evidence. As folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand points out, when a story or a claim appears in print, it gains an air of authority. Many people are skeptical of spoken rumors, but few doubt the veracity of stories appearing in the news media. Folkloristics is the formal academic study of folklore and mythology. ... Jan Harold Brunvand (born 1933) is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Utah in the United States who is best known for spreading the concept of the urban legend, or modern folklore. ...

A related fallacy is, of course, that whatever has not been documented must not have happened. Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In reality, whether any given event happened is entirely independent of whether it was documented.

In George Orwell's novel 1984, the Ministry of Truth has an entire department devoted to altering past editions of newspapers in the belief that changing documentation will change the public's perception of history. One of the novel's greatest ironies is that the Ministry of Truth deals exclusively in lies. Eric Arthur Blair (June 25, 1903 — January 21, 1950), better known by the pen name George Orwell, was a British author, and journalist. ... 1984 (MCMLXXXIV) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Ministry of Truth (or Minitrue, in Newspeak) was one of the four ministries that govern Airstrip One, Oceania in George Orwells novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. ...