Falsifiers of History was a book published by the Soviet Information Bureau, edited and partially re-written by Joseph Stalin, in response to documents made public in January 1948 regarding German–Soviet relations before and after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Background on Nazi–Soviet Relations documents In 1948, the U.S. State Department published a collection of documents titled Nazi–Soviet Relations, 1939–1941: Documents from the Archives of The German Foreign Office, which contained documents recovered from the Foreign Office of Nazi Germany. The collection included documents from, and about conversations with, Soviet officials during negotiations regarding the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, a 1939 agreement between the Soviet Union and Germany, along with the related 1939 German–Soviet Commercial Agreement. It also included publication of the "Secret Additional Protocol" of that Pact, which divided eastern Europe into "spheres of influence" between Germany and the Soviet Union, executed weeks before each country's subsequent invasion of Poland. The collection further contained "Secret Supplementary Protocols" to agreements between the countries, discussions regarding the 1940 German–Soviet Commercial Agreement, discussions of the Soviet Union potentially becoming an Axis Power and other German–Soviet negotiations and discussions. Publication Falsifiers was published in response to the documents made public in Nazi–Soviet Relations. Joseph Stalin became personally involved in editing the work after receiving a translation of the Nazi–Soviet Relations document collection. On February 3, 1948, Stalin was presented with a typescript titled Reply to Slanderers. Stalin changed the title to Falsifiers of History (Historical Reports). Stalin personally edited the book, including striking and re-writing whole sections by handwritten modification. Falsifiers originally appeared as a series of articles in Pravda in February 1948. It was subsequently published in numerous languages and distributed worldwide. Separately, the Soviet Union later published a collection of documents it captured from German archives titled Documents and Materials Relating to the Eve of the Second World War. Themes and issues Falsifiers pointedly ignored Soviet relations with Germany, making no attempt to directly counter or deal with the documents published in Nazi–Soviet Relations. Rather, the main theme of the booklet is Western culpability for the outbreak of war in 1939. It argues that "Western powers" aided Nazi rearmament and aggression, including that American bankers and industrialists provided capital for the growth of German war industries, while deliberately encouraging Hitler to expand eastward. It depicted the Soviet Union as striving to negotiate a collective security against Hitler, while being thwarted by double-dealing Anglo–French appeasers who, despite