The findings unearthed in Christiane Schulte’s journal article were a revelation. The first fatality at the Berlin Wall, it showed, had not been human but a police dog called Rex. And a new law forcing East German border guards to keep their canine enforcers on a lead helped prevent a third world war.

Most shockingly, the 26-year-old PhD student revealed that the alsatians that patrolled the Berlin Wall were direct descendants of those deployed by the Nazis in Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, thus maintaining a “tradition of violence”.

In Schulte’s own words, the academic paper she published in a peer-reviewed German journal in December “revealed the prime importance of human-animal studies for contemporary research into totalitarianism”.

But two months after publishing these revelations, the editors of the Dresden-based publication Totalitarianism and Democracy have had to admit that they have fallen victim to an elaborate academic hoax.

In a statement published this week, the editorial team at the Hannah-Arendt Institute for Research into Totalitarianism said they had been “systematically deceived, ie through a faked CV and an apparently academic argumentation, which sought to convince the reader with detailed explanations, extensive footnotes and false archival references”. Christiane Schulte did not exist, and nor did the alsatians with totalitarian tendencies.

The hoaxers have since published their own mission statement. In an article entitled Plea Against Academic Conformism, a group of academics calling themselves “Christiane Schulte and friends” say they had wanted to instigate “a debate on why dedicated social criticism has become such a rarity in the humanities”.

The intention of the article, they said, had been to satirise the “animal turn” in postmodern theory: the attempt to interpret historical events through the perspective of affected animals. Such academic fashions, the group wrote, were “the waste products of leftist social critique which has sought refuge in academia”, but also signs of an “anti-humanist trend in philosophy”. While academics were competing with each other to follow the latest trend, they were failing to do the basic work of criticising social conditions.

The group said one of their members, pretending to be “Christiane Schulte”, had first given their paper at an academic conference in February 2015. Far from attracting ridicule, they said, the talk had inspired a lively discussion and tied in nicely with another lecture on rabbits living on the Berlin Wall’s death strip.

The academics behind the hoax wrote they had deliberately included details that could have got them found out, such as naming the dog shot near the Berlin Wall as “Rex” – the name of a police dog in an Austrian TV show popular in Germany, Kommissar Rex – or suggesting that the planned memorial for the victims of the wall should also include a symbolic dog lead made of steel. “At that point at the latest we had expected objections, doubt or protest. Instead we got applause,” they said.

Florian Peters, a researcher at Berlin’s Institut für Zeitgeschichte who was at the same conference, confirmed that the talk had not been perceived as a satire at the time. The woman pretending to be Christiane Schulte had convincingly passed as a postdoctoral student but left the event soon after delivering her paper. “As a satire, it has certainly hit the spot, particularly among some of the more established historians in the field,” Peters told the Guardian.

Academic advocates of “human-animal studies”, also known as anthrozoology, have since also weighed in on the debate. A working group of German academics called “Chimaira” has published a statement on its website defending its approach, arguing that “while it may indeed seem absurd when people like Schulte call for a memorial for border dogs, it is just as absurd to expect an outcry [against such a proposal] from those who have a different conception of the relationship between human and animal”.

The affair is reminiscent of a hoax by the physics professor Alan Sokal in 1996, who had submitted a paper to a journal of postmodern cultural studies knowing that it was “liberally salted with nonsense” but flattered the ideological orientation of the journal’s editors.

In the wake of the scandal, editors of Totalitarianism and Democracy have apologised for “neglecting academic due diligence” by allowing the piece to be published. The publishers Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht have since removed the article from the journal’s website.