MI5 files reveal mystery over Chaplin’s birth

According to the papers, made public today, British intelligence officers looking for alleged communist links could find no documents confirming the film star was born in London in April 1889, while information passed to police claimed he may have been born near Paris.

The MI5 files also revealed how Nazi forgers succeeded in flooding Europe with fake British bank notes during the Second World War, with the aim of “destroying” confidence in the UK currency.

The mystery of Chaplin’s birth emerged when United States authorities asked MI5 to look into the actor’s background after he left America in 1952 under a cloud of suspicion over his communist links.

He is believed to have been born on April 16 1889 in East Street, Walworth, south London – four days before the birth of Adolf Hitler, whom he lampooned in the 1940 film The Great Dictator.

But after scouring the files at Somerset House in London for his birth certificate, including checks for his supposed alias “Israel Thornstein”, MI5 concluded: “It would seem that Chaplin was either not born in this country or that his name at birth was other than those mentioned.”

Scotland Yard’s Special Branch added to the intrigue by passing on a tip from a source who claimed the actor was born near Fontainebleau, just south of Paris. A police memo to MI5 noted: “There may or may not be some truth in this, but in view of the fact that no documentary proof has been obtained that Chaplin was born in the United Kingdom, it may well be that he was in fact born in France.”

MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, investigated further but found no trace of Chaplin’s birth in either Fontainebleau or nearby Melun, and John Marriott, then head of MI5’s counter-subversion branch, was not convinced the absence of a birth certificate was a matter of concern for the intelligence services.

He wrote: “It is curious that we can find no record of Chaplin’s birth, but I scarcely think that this is of any security significance.”

Having escaped grinding poverty to launch a career in British music-hall, Chaplin moved to the US in 1910 and made a series of hugely successful films in his famous persona of the “Little Tramp”. But in the early 1950s, when Washington was in the grip of McCarthyist paranoia about Soviet infiltration, he was reviled in the US as a communist sympathiser, with additional controversy over his two marriages to 16-year-old girls, failure to take American citizenship, and claims he fathered an illegitimate child and owed $2m in back taxes.

Files released in 2002 showed the British Government blocked Chaplin’s knighthood for nearly 20 years because of US concern about his colourful private life and political affiliations.

The latest papers released by the National Archives also detailed how Europe was inundated by fake British bank notes produced by the Nazis in the Second World War. By 1945 the forgeries were so rife, British bank notes would not be accepted on the Continent.

The Germans began forging the notes in 1940 in preparation for Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain, according to a report drawn up in 1945 by Sir Edward Reid of MI5’s section B1B.

According to a captured German agent, the plan was to scatter the notes over the country from the air “in order to create loss of confidence and general confusion”.

Although Hitler was forced to abandon his invasion plan, the German forgers carried on perfecting their techniques to devastating effect.

“What they subsequently produced was a type of forgery so skilful that it is impossible for anyone other than a specially trained expert to detect the difference between them and genuine notes,” Sir Edward reported.