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APRIL 1945: From the ruins of Berlin, a Luftwaffe transport plane takes off carrying secret papers belonging to Adolf Hitler. Half an hour later, it crashes in flames . . .

APRIL 1983: In a bank vault in Switzerland, a German magazine offers to sell more than 50 volumes of Hitler’s secret diaries. The asking price is $4 million . . .

Written with the pace and verve of a thriller and hailed on publication as a classic, Selling Hitler tells the story of the biggest fraud in publishing history.

About the Author

Robert Harris is the author of Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, Imperium and The Ghost, all of which were international bestsellers. His latest novel, Lustrum, has just been published. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages. After graduating with a degree in English from Cambridge University, he worked as a reporter for the BBC’s Panorama and Newsnight programmes, before becoming political editor of the Observer and subsequently a columnist on the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph. The film of The Ghost – for which he co-wrote the screenplay – directed by Roman Polanski and starring Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan, is due to be released at the beginning of 2010. He is married to Gill Hornby and they live with their four children in a village near Hungerford.

Also by Robert Harris

FICTION

NON-FICTION

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

11. Gerd Heidemann with Billy F. Price, Christa Schroeder and Gerda Christian at the launching of a book of Hitler’s paintings

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Wilhelm Arndt: Adolf Hitler’s personal servant, entrusted with escorting the Führer’s ‘testament to posterity’ out of Berlin in April 1945

The Marquess of Bath: Owner of the world’s largest collection of Hitler’s paintings

Barbara Dickmann: Television journalist hired by Stern to help launch the Hitler diaries

Francois Genoud: Swiss lawyer representing the families of Hitler, Goebbels and Bormann

Major Friedrich Gundlfinger: Luftwaffe pilot who flew Wilhelm Arndt out of Berlin in April 1945

Gerd Heidemann: Stern journalist responsible for obtaining the Hitler diaries

Medard Klapper: Arms dealer and confidence trickster who alleged he was in touch with Martin Bormann

Rupert Murdoch: Chairman, News International; owner, The Times, Sunday Times and New York Post

Billy F. Price: Collector of Hitler paintings from Houston, Texas; author, Adolf Hitler: The Unknown Artist

August Priesack: Self-styled ‘professor’ and expert on Hitler’s art, consulted by Fritz Stiefel and Billy Price

Gerd Schulte-Hillen: Manfred Fischer’s successor as managing director of Gruner and Jahr

Wilfried Sorge: Member of the management of Gruner and Jahr, responsible for selling the Hitler diaries to foreign news organizations

Franz Spoegler: Former SS officer, who offered Heidemann forged correspondence between Churchill and Mussolini

Jakob Tiefenthaeler: Collector of Nazi memorabilia who acted as agent for Gerd Heidemann when he tried to sell Goering’s yacht

Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre of Glanton): Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge; Independent National Director, Times Newspapers

SS General Karl Wolff: Heinrich Himmler’s Chief of Staff; Military Governor of northern Italy, 1943–45

Prologue

ON APRIL FOOL’S Day 1983 the distinguished British historian Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, first Baron Dacre of Glanton, was telephoned at his country home in Scotland by the Assistant Editor of The Times, Mr Colin Webb.

Among his many honours, Trevor-Roper had, in 1974, accepted an invitation to become an Independent National Director of Times Newspapers. For nine years his telephone had rung periodically with news of strikes, sackings and closures. But this call had nothing to do with routine Times business. It concerned a discovery of great historical significance. It was strictly confidential. The German magazine Stern, said Mr Webb, had discovered the private diaries of Adolf Hitler.

Trevor-Roper, a former Regius Professor of History at Oxford, was startled and immediately sceptical. ‘I said to myself, there are so many forgeries circulating in the “grey market”: forged documents about Bormann, forged diaries of Eva Braun, falsified accounts of interviews with Hitler . . .’ Besides, it was well known that Hitler disliked putting pen to paper and had virtually given up writing in his own hand altogether after 1933. As far as he was aware there was no evidence, either in the German archives or in the recollections of Hitler’s subordinates, to suggest that the German dictator had kept a diary. If he had, and if it had now been discovered, it would certainly rank as one of the greatest historical finds of modern times: Hitler, as Trevor-Roper himself had written, was the twentieth century’s Genghis Khan, the ‘political genius’ whose murderous influence upon mankind was still being felt four decades after his death. If this diabolical figure, contrary to all accepted beliefs, turned out to have kept a diary, it would provoke a sensation.

Webb explained that Stern was offering to sell the foreign serial rights in the diaries. Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Times Newspapers, was considering bidding not merely for the British and Commonwealth, but possibly for the American rights as well. The syndication negotiations were about to begin. In the meantime the diaries themselves were being kept in a bank vault in Switzerland. Webb said that Murdoch wanted an expert’s opinion before making an offer for the diaries. Would Trevor-Roper, as an authority on the period and a director of the company, be willing to act as an adviser? Would he fly out to Zurich and examine the material?

In that case, said Webb, Stern would expect him in Switzerland at the end of the following week.

By the time Adolf Hitler had passed his fifty-second birthday, there was no longer a human being left in history who could provide a precedent for his impact on the earth. In January 1942, whilst he picked at his customary vegetarian supper at his headquarters in East Prussia, his soldiers were guarding U-boat pens on the Atlantic coast, shivering in dugouts on the approach roads to Moscow, sweating in tanks in the Libyan desert. In less than twenty years, he had passed from brawling provincial politician to imperial conqueror. He was remaking the world. ‘Mark my words, Bormann,’ he announced one evening over dinner, ‘I’m going to become very religious.’

But Hitler was not thinking of himself as a mere participant in some future act of worship: he was to be the object of it.

‘I’m going to become a religious figure,’ he insisted. ‘Soon I’ll be the great chief of the Tartars. Already Arabs and Moroccans are mingling my name with their prayers. Amongst the Tartars I shall become Khan . . .’

When the warm weather returned he would finish off the Red Army. Then he would ‘put things in order for a thousand years’. Giant roads would be built into Russia and the first of twenty million Germans, ‘soldier-peasants’, would start making their homes in a colony whose frontier would extend 250 miles east of the Urals. The Russians, denied churches and schools, educated only to a point at which they could read road signs, would be confined to vast, disease-ridden cities, patrolled from the air by the Luftwaffe. The Crimea would be exclusively German. Moscow would be razed to the ground and turned into an artificial lake. The Channel Islands would be handed over to the Strength Through Joy organization ‘for, with their wonderful climate, they constitute a marvellous health resort’. Every nation would have its part to play in Hitler’s New Order. The Norwegians would supply Europe’s electricity. The Swiss would be hotel keepers. ‘I haven’t studied the problem as regards Sweden,’ joked Hitler. ‘In Finland, unfortunately, there is nothing to be done.’ Opponents would be confined behind barbed wire in the lengthening chain of concentration camps now opening up in the Eastern territories. At the first sign of trouble, all inmates would be ‘liquidated’. As for the Jews, they would simply be ‘got rid of’. The future was a vista of endless conflict. A man’s first encounter with war, stated Hitler, was like a woman’s first experience with a man: ‘For the good of the German people, we must wish for a war every fifteen or twenty years.’ And in Berlin, renamed Germania, at the centre of this ceaselessly warring empire, would sit the Führer himself, in a granite Chancellery of such proportions that ‘one should have the feeling that one is visiting the master of the world’. The Berghof, his private home on the Obersalzberg, would, in due course, become a museum. Here, propped up in bed, while the rest of the household slept, Hitler had found the inspiration for his dreams, gazing out ‘for hours’ at ‘the mountains lit up by the moon’. When his dreams were reality, it would become a place of pilgrimage for a grateful race. ‘I can already see the guide from Berchtesgaden showing visitors over the rooms of my house: “This is where he had breakfast . . .” I can also imagine a Saxon giving his avaricious instructions: “Don’t touch the articles, don’t wear out the parquet, stay between the ropes . . .”’

Almost half a century has now passed since Adolf Hitler and his vision were buried in the rubble of Berlin. All that remains today of the Berghof are a few piles of stone, overgrown with moss and trees. But the repercussions of his career persist. ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice,’ concludes Alan Bullock’s study of Hitler: ‘If you seek his monument, look around.’ The division of Germany, the exhaustion of British power, the entrenchment and paranoia of Soviet Russia, the denials of freedom in the Eastern half of Europe, the entanglement of America in the Western half, the creation of the State of Israel and the consequent instability of the Middle East – all, in a sense, have been bequeathed to us by Adolf Hitler. His name has become a synonym for evil. Even the physical act of uttering the word ‘Hitler’ necessitates a grimace. In 1979, the British historian J. H. Plumb described him as a ‘curse’, the ‘black blight’ that overshadowed his youth:

The trauma of Hitler stretched over fifteen years for my generation, breaking lives, destroying those one loved, wrecking my country. So it has been difficult, well-nigh impossible, to think calmly of that white, moustachioed face, eyes ablaze like a Charlie Chaplin turned into a nightmare. Even now when I recall that face and hear that terrifying, hysterical, screeching voice, they create a sense of approaching doom, disaster and death.

Yet, hard though it may be, Hitler has to be understood. . . .

In an attempt to come to terms with this phenomenon there were, by 1980, according to one estimate, over seventy biographies of Adolf Hitler in existence. There are twice as many biographies of Hitler as there are of Winston Churchill; three times as many as there are of Roosevelt and Stalin. Only Jesus Christ has had more words devoted to him than Hitler. The public appetite for these books is enormous. In 1974, Joachim Fest’s biography sold over 250,000 hardback copies in Germany alone. Two years later, John Toland’s Adolf Hitler sold 75,000 copies in the United States (at $15 each) and went into four printings within weeks of its publication. When David Irving began work on his study he wrote that ‘it was possible to speculate that “books on Hitler” outnumbered page for page the total original documentation available. This proved a sad underestimate.’ By 1979 the British Library and the Library of Congress listed over 55,000 items relating solely to Hitler and the Second World War. There are specialist books about Hitler’s childhood, his years in Vienna and his service in the army; at least half a dozen works are devoted specifically to his last days and death. There have been investigations into his mind, his body, his personal security, his art. We have first-hand accounts from his valet, his secretary, his pilot, his photographer, his interpreter, his chauffeur and a host of adjutants, ministers and generals. From one doctor (Morell) we know all we ever want to know – and considerably more – about the movement of Hitler’s bowels; from another (Giesing), the appearance of the Führer’s genitalia. We know that he liked cream cakes, dumb blondes, fast cars, mountain scenery; that he disliked lipstick, modern art, opinionated women and the screech of an owl.

The detail is immense and yet, somehow, the portrait it adds up to remains oddly unconvincing. Despite the millions of words which have been poured into explaining the gulf between Hitler, the private individual, and Hitler, the political prodigy, the two remain unreconciled. ‘We seem to be left with a phantom,’ wrote J. P. Stern, ‘a centre of Nothing.’ This inner emptiness helped enable Hitler to use himself like a tool, changing his personality with shocking abruptness to suit the task in hand. The charm of an Austrian gentleman, the brutality of a gangster, the ranting of a demagogue, the assurance of a diplomat succeeded one another in a kaleidoscope of performances which left his innermost thoughts a mystery. In the 1930s, an astonished official watched him carefully work himself into an artificial rage for the sole purpose of frightening an English diplomat; the performance over, he returned to his advisers chuckling, ‘Gentlemen, I need tea. He thinks I’m furious.’ Hitler remained an enigma, even to his most intimate advisers. ‘I got to know Adolf Hitler more closely in 1933,’ wrote Joachim von Ribbentrop at the end of the war.

But if I am asked today whether I knew him well – how he thought as a politician and statesman, what kind of man he was – then I’m bound to confess that I know only very little about him; in fact nothing at all. The fact is that although I went through so much together with him, in all the years of working with him I never came closer to him than on the first day we met, either personally or otherwise.

‘When a decision has to be taken,’ Hermann Goering told one diplomat before the war, ‘none of us count more than the stones on which we are standing. It is the Führer alone who decides.’ And General Jodl, at Hitler’s side throughout six years of war, was equally baffled. ‘To this very day,’ he wrote in 1946, ‘I do not know what he thought or knew or really wanted.’ He was utterly self-contained, mysterious, unpredictable, secretive, awesome. He was, as Hugh Trevor-Roper put it, ‘the Rousseau, the Mirabeau, the Robespierre and the Napoleon of his revolution; he was its Marx, its Lenin, its Trotsky and its Stalin.’ What a sensation it would cause if it were now discovered that such a man had left behind a diary. . . .

On Friday, 8 April 1983, exactly one week after his initial conversation with The Times, Hugh Trevor-Roper presented himself at Terminal 2 of London’s Heathrow Airport. There he was met by Stern’s London representative, Peter Wickman, and at 11.15 a.m. they took off for Zurich.

Wickman, plump and garrulous, proved an amiable companion and the sixty-nine-year-old historian was soon launched into one of his favourite topics of conversation: the inordinate superiority of Oxford over Cambridge. (He once said that leaving an Oxford professorship for a Cambridge mastership was rather like becoming a colonial governor.) It was not until the stewardess had served lunch that the two men settled down to business.

Wickman gave Trevor-Roper a twenty-page, typewritten document, bound in a clear plastic cover and entitled Plan 3. Based on the so-called diaries, it told the story of how Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, had undertaken his abortive peace mission to Britain in May 1941. The accepted view among historians was that Hess had made his dramatic flight on his own initiative. But according to the diary entries quoted in Plan 3, Hitler knew of Hess’s intention in advance.

Hess sends me a personal note about the England problem. Would not have thought that this Hess is so sharp-witted. This note is very, very interesting.

28 June: Read the Hess note again. Simply fantastic and yet so simple.

6 July: Hess should work over his thoughts which he has informed me about in his note and I anticipate seeing him for a one-to-one meeting.

13 July: Have also talked to Hess again. As soon as he has thought everything over properly, he will call me back. I would not have thought Hess capable of this. Not Hess.

22 July: Have Goering with me once more. I carefully inquire what range our best planes have. Hess said that one would have to build a special plane and that he was already working on the plans. What a man. He does not want any more said to Goering about his plan.

When it became clear that Hess’s mission had failed, ‘Plan 3’ had duly been adopted. This, according to Stern, was the solution to one of the great mysteries of the Second World War, proof that six weeks before the invasion of Russia, Hitler had made a genuine attempt to negotiate peace with Britain.

Even as he took detailed notes from the document, suspicions began to accumulate in Trevor-Roper’s mind. Stern’s version of the Hess story was in conflict with all the available evidence. Albert Speer, for example, had been outside Hitler’s study door at the precise moment that the Führer had learned of Hess’s flight to Britain. ‘I suddenly heard’, Speer recalled, ‘an inarticulate, almost animal outcry.’ Trevor-Roper had been told the story by Speer in person. He had subsequently described in his own book, The Last Days of Hitler, how the Nazi leadership had been hastily summoned to the Berghof to discuss the damage Hess had done: hardly the behaviour one would have expected if Hitler had known of Hess’s intention in advance. He told Wickman immediately that he thought the Stern story was rubbish and Wickman, who had long nursed his own private doubts, agreed.

By the time the plane landed in Zurich, Trevor-Roper was finding it difficult to keep an open mind about the diaries. He was almost certain it was a wasted journey, but having come so far he thought he might as well at least see them. The two men took a taxi into town, dropped off their luggage at the Hotel Baur au Lac, and while Trevor-Roper waited, Wickman telephoned ahead to the bank where the diaries were being kept. The Stern people were already waiting. Wickman told them that he and the historian were on their way over.

Shortly after 3 p.m., Trevor-Roper was ushered into a ground floor room of Zurich’s Handelsbank. At the end of a long table, three men rose to meet him. One was Wilfried Sorge, the salesman who had flown round the world alerting newspapers in America, Japan, Italy, Spain and Britain to the existence of the diaries. Another was Dr Jan Hensmann, the financial director of Stern’s parent company, Gruner and Jahr. The third German was Stern’s bullet-headed editor-in-chief, Peter Koch.

When the introductions had been completed, Koch gestured towards a side table. On it were fifty-eight volumes of diaries, carefully piled up in a stack more than two feet high. Another set of documents was in a metal safety deposit box. There was a bound volume of original drawings and paintings. There was even a First World War helmet, allegedly Hitler’s. This was no mere handful of notes. It was, as Trevor-Roper later described it, ‘a whole coherent archive covering 35 years’. He was staggered by its scale.

He picked up a couple of the books. They were A4-sized, with stiff black covers. Some bore red wax seals in the form of a German eagle. Others were decorated with initials in gothic script. Most carried typewritten labels declaring them to be the property of the Führer and signed by Martin Bormann. The pages inside were lined, some densely filled with old Germanic script, some bearing only a couple of sentences, some completely blank. At the foot of each page was Hitler’s signature – a jagged oscillation in black ink, like a seismographic record of some distant earthquake.

The Stern men met Trevor-Roper’s queries point by point. They produced three separate reports from handwriting experts authenticating the documents. They described how the diaries had come into their hands. They confirmed that the magazine knew the identity of the supplier. It was enough.

When I entered the back room in the Swiss bank [wrote Trevor-Roper in The Times], and turned the pages of those volumes, my doubts gradually dissolved. I am now satisfied that the documents are authentic; that the history of their wanderings since 1945 is true; and that the standard accounts of Hitler’s writing habits, of his personality, and even, perhaps, some public events may, in consequence, have to be revised.

Twenty-four hours later Rupert Murdoch was sitting in the same bank vault leafing through the diaries with the former head of Reuters at his side translating their contents. By mid-afternoon on 9 April he had offered the delighted Germans $3 million for the world rights.

What happened next is described in detail later in this book: how Murdoch and the Newsweek company fell into an ill-tempered auction which at one stage pushed the price of the diaries up to $3.75 million, until Stern’s greed and Newsweek’s alleged unscrupulousness punctured the whole deal; how Stern nevertheless managed to sell subsidiary rights in the diaries to newspapers and magazines in America, Britain, Australia, France, Italy, Spain, Norway, Holland and Belgium – a contract carefully calculated to squeeze the last marketable drop out of Adolf Hitler, dividing the diaries into twenty-eight separate extracts whose publication would have spanned more than eighteen months; how news of the diaries’ discovery was rushed into print despite growing evidence that some of the material was of post-war origin; and finally how this elaborate but increasingly shaky pyramid of subsidiary deals and serial rights was sent crashing two weeks later by a short laboratory report from the Federal police.

The diaries, announced the West German state archives on 6 May, were not merely fakes: they were ‘eine plumpe Fdlschung’, a crude forgery, the grotesquely superficial (‘grotesk oberflächlich’) concoction of a copyist endowed with a ‘limited intellectual capacity’. The paper, the binding, the glue, the thread were all found to be of post-war manufacture. By the time this was disclosed, the management of Stern, in the course of more than two years, had handed over twenty-seven suitcases full of money to enable their star reporter, Gerd Heidemann, to obtain the diaries. $4 million had disappeared, making the Hitler diaries the most expensive and far-reaching fraud in publishing history, easily dwarfing the $650,000 handed over by McGraw-Hill for the faked autobiography of Howard Hughes. Scores of reputations apart from Trevor-Roper’s were damaged by the diaries fiasco. At least four editors in three different countries lost their jobs as a result.

The affair was a reminder of Adolf Hitler’s continuing hold on the world’s imagination. News of the discovery of the diaries made headlines in every nation; it ran on the front page of the New York Times for five consecutive days. Shrewd businessmen showed themselves willing to pay enormous sums for material of which they had read only a fraction. It did not matter that the diaries’ content was perfunctory and tedious: it was sufficient that it had been written by him. The diaries briefly put Hitler back in the arena of international diplomacy, a weapon in the Cold War which his career had done so much to create. Radio Moscow alleged that ‘the affair of the Hitler diaries clearly reveals the CIA style’. America’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, suspected the communists of producing the diaries ‘to sow distrust between the United States and its German friends’. In the middle of the furore, the East German leader, Erich Hoenecker, cancelled his planned trip to Bonn complaining of a hostile Western press campaign: repeated allegations that the diaries originated in an East German ‘forgery factory’ were bitterly resented in Berlin. When the real forger, Konrad Kujau, confessed to the police on 26 May, it was difficult to believe that so much international confusion could have resulted from the work of this jaunty and farcical figure.

How did it happen? How did a hard-headed German publishing company come to spend so much money on such palpable fakes, and persuade almost a dozen foreign partners to invest in the project? To answer that question, we have to go back more than forty years: back through the expanding market in Hitler memorabilia, back through the activities of the surviving members of the Führer’s inner circle, right back to the figure of Hitler himself, malevolent to the last, but no longer confident of his destiny, preparing for death in his bunker in the spring of 1945.

Part One

Part Two

Geoffrey Chaucer: ‘The Pardoner’, General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales

Part Three

Part Four

Epilogue

A VARIETY OF theories have been advanced to explain the origin of the Hitler diaries. Radio Moscow alleged that the whole affair was a CIA plot ‘intended to exonerate and glorify the Third Reich’. The CIA, claimed the Russians, had provided the information contained in the diaries and trained the forger. Its aim was ‘to divert the attention of the West German public from the vital problems of the country prior to the deployment of new US missiles’ and to discredit the normally left-wing Stern. In this version of events, Kujau was an American stooge:

Half a century ago the Nazis set fire to the Reichstag building and accused the insignificant provocateur Marinus van der Lubbe of arson. Van der Lubbe was supposed to provide proof against the communists, and he did. Now, another van der Lubbe has been found, a small-time dealer, possessed by the mad idea of going down in history, psychologically as unstable as van der Lubbe. Even now the West German bourgeois press predicts that this new van der Lubbe will testify against East Germany. This is not just the normal style of the CIA: one clearly also detects the hand of the [West German] intelligence service and the Munich provocateurs from the circle around Franz Josef Strauss.

(The fact that the writer Fritz Tobias had established more than twenty years previously that the Nazis did not set fire to the Reichstag, and that the blaze was the work of van der Lubbe, is apparently still not officially accepted by the Soviet Union.) The Hitler diaries, wrote Izvestia, ‘parted the curtains a little to reveal the morals of the Western “free press” and the political morality of bourgeois society’.

Henri Nannen, on the other hand, told the New York Times that in his view the affair could have resulted from ‘an interest in East Germany to spread disinformation and destabilize the Federal Republic’. According to Stern’s rival, Quick, East German intelligence concocted the diaries and transported them to the West ‘to provide a spur for neo-Nazis and to resurrect the Nazi past as a means of damaging the reputation of the Federal Republic’. The West German authorities took the allegations seriously enough to ask the central police forensic laboratory to examine the diaries to see if their paper and ink could have originated in the East. The anti-communist hysteria surrounding the fraud was sufficiently widespread to be cited as a reason by the East Germans for cancelling the planned visit to Bonn of their leader, Erich Hoenecker.

Another conspiracy theory was put forward by the Sunday Times in December 1983 after a lengthy investigation into the hoax. According to this account, the Hitler diaries were organized as a fund-raising operation by the SS ‘mutual aid society’ HIAG, which pays out funds to old SS men who lost their pensions at the end of the war. Despite the paucity of evidence put forward to support its thesis, the paper stated flatly that ‘most or all of the money’ paid out by Stern ‘went to HIAG’. The idea was dismissed in West Germany and since appears to have been quietly dropped by the Sunday Times itself: not one word has appeared in the paper about the subject since 1983.

Most of these theories about the diaries reveal more about their authors than they do about the fraud. Because the figure of Adolf Hitler overshadows the forgery, people have tended to read into it whatever they want to see. To a communist the affair is a capitalist plot; to a capitalist, a communist conspiracy; to a writer on the Third Reich, fresh evidence of the continuing hold of the Nazis on West German society. This is not surprising. Hitler has always had the capacity to reflect whatever phobia afflicts the person who stares at him – as the columnist George F. Will wrote at the height of the diaries controversy, Hitler ‘is a dark mirror held up to mankind’. Equally, it flattered the victims of the fraud to believe that they were not gulled by their own paranoia and greed for sensation, but were actually the targets of a massive ‘disinformation’ operation or giant criminal conspiracy, trapped by something too complex, powerful and cunning to resist. How else could a successful and worldly publication like Stern have fallen for such obvious fakes? How else could they have paid out so much money? How else could the story have been bought by someone as shrewd as Rupert Murdoch and launched, unchecked, in such a distinguished publication as the Sunday Times? Anyone who took the magnitude of the fiasco as their starting point was bound to look for an appropriately sophisticated plot as the only possible explanation. When Konrad Kujau crawled out from beneath the wreckage of Stern’s million-dollar syndication deals, people refused to believe that such an odd individual could be responsible.

There are many unanswered questions relating to Kujau, of which the most important are how and why did he learn to forge Nazi documents with such skill; his craftsmanship certainly suggests that at some stage he may have learned his trade by working for someone else. But, although it is possible that Kujau may have had an accomplice to help him write the diaries, it would appear, on present evidence, that there was no extensive conspiracy to rob Stern. The fraud swelled to the proportions it did only because of the incompetence displayed within Gruner and Jahr. How could anyone possibly have guessed in advance that the magazine would have behaved so foolishly? The editors, presented with a fait accompli, relied upon the management; the management relied upon Heidemann and Walde; Heidemann and Walde relied upon Kujau; and between them all, they managed to bungle the process of authentication. A competent forensic scientist would have established in less than a day that the diaries were forgeries: any conspirators would have been aware of that. Only the uncovenanted stupidity of Stern, along with a series of flukes, prevented the fraud from being exposed long before publication. The Hitler diaries affair is a monument to the cock-up theory of history. If HIAG or some similar group had really been so desperate for 9 million marks as to contemplate crime, they would have been far better served to have staged an old-fashioned bank raid.

But money need not have been the only motive behind the appearance of the diaries. It has also been suggested that they were concocted in an attempt to rehabilitate Hitler. Gitta Sereny, responsible for the Sunday Times investigation, has claimed that the diaries’ content is ‘totally beyond’ Kujau’s abilities, that a ‘coherent psycho-political line’ emerges, presenting Hitler as ‘a reasonable and lonely man’. The suggestion is that Kujau was told what to write by someone else: the candidate put forward by the Sunday Times was Medard Klapper, ‘the central organizer of the conspiracy’. Again, this now seems highly improbable. In the first place, it greatly exaggerates the sophistication of the diaries. They read like the handiwork of a fairly uneducated man, obsessively interested in Hitler, who has cobbled together whatever he can lay his hands on from the published sources – they read, in other words, like the handiwork of Konrad Kujau. Secondly, the idea that Medard Klapper of all people might be the political brain behind the whitewashing of Hitler seems somewhat unlikely. Is the man who promised to introduce Heidemann to Martin Bormann once he had undergone a ‘Sippung’ any more credible as an author of the diaries than Kujau? HIAG would have had to be desperate.

But above all, it is the crudity of the forgery which belies the idea that it might be the product of a Nazi conspiracy. If this was a serious attempt to present an untarnished Hitler, one would at least have expected the conspirators to have taken some elementary precautions. They would not have used paper containing chemical whitener; they would have avoided such Kujau touches as plastic initials and red cord made of polyester and viscose; they would not have relied so completely on the work of Max Domarus as to have copied out his errors.

What is sobering is to speculate on what might have happened if these precautions had been taken. After all, Stern and News International stopped publication only because of the conclusiveness of the forensic tests carried out in the first week of May. If those tests had found nothing substantially wrong, the diaries would have been printed and would now stand as an historical source. No doubt they would have been dismissed by most serious scholars, but nevertheless they would have been bought and read by millions. Thomas Walde and Leo Pesch would have produced their book on Rudolf Hess and become rich men; Gerd Heidemann would have retired with his Nazi memorabilia to southern Spain; and Konrad Kujau, ex-forger of luncheon vouchers, having thrown students of the Third Reich into turmoil, would no doubt have continued flooding the market with faked Hitler memorabilia.

Instead of which, on Tuesday 21 August 1984, after more than a year in custody, Heidemann and Kujau were led out of their cells and into a courtroom incandescent with television lights and photographers’ flash bulbs to stand trial for fraud. Heidemann was accused of having stolen at least 1.7 million of the 9.3 million marks handed over by Stern to pay for the diaries. Kujau was charged with having received at least 1.5 million marks. Edith Lieblang, although not being held in prison, was also required to attend court with her lawyer, accused of helping to spend Kujau’s illegal earnings.

The two men had both been transformed by the events of the past sixteen months. Heidemann looked worn out and seedy. He had grown a beard in captivity which only gave further emphasis to the unhealthy prison pallor of his skin. His first act on arriving in the courtroom was to head for the corner. When anyone spoke to him, he would look away. It was common knowledge that he had suffered some kind of nervous collapse in jail.

Kujau, in contrast, had developed into something of a star. He had sold his life story to Bild Zeitung for 100,000 marks. He gave regular television interviews from his prison cell. He slapped backs, exchanged jokes with his warders, kissed female reporters, and happily signed autographs ‘Adolf Hitler’. And he lied: expertly, exuberantly and constantly. Every reporter who interviewed him came away with a forged diary entry as a souvenir and a different version of his career. He drove Heidemann mad with frustration. While the reporter sat alone in his cell, poring over a meticulous card-index of the events of the past three years, trying to work out what had happened, he could hear Kujau regaling a reporter with some new account of his adventures; occasionally, like a tormented beast, Heidemann would let out a howl of rage. He would not speak to Kujau; he would not look at him. It was a far cry from the days when Gerd and Gina and Conny and Edith would meet and toast with champagne their good fortune at having met one another.

On its opening day, the Hitler diaries trial drew an audience of 100 reporters, 150 photographers and television crewmen and around sixty members of the public. It was front page news for the first couple of days; thereafter interest dwindled until eventually the audience numbered only a half dozen regular court reporters and a handful of curious day trippers. The proceedings became so monotonous that in the middle of September one of the magistrates had to be replaced because of a chronic inability to stay awake.

Heidemann denied stealing any of Stern’s money. However, from his private papers and known bank accounts, the prosecution had no difficulty in establishing that he had spent almost 2 million marks more than he had earned since 1981, even allowing for the 1.5 million marks paid to him as ‘compensation’ for obtaining the diaries. The prosecutor also told the court that, although he would only be attempting to prove the smaller figure, he believed Heidemann could have stolen as much as 4.6 million marks. Heidemann’s defence was that the money had been paid to him by four anonymous investors as payment for a stake in one of the reporter’s Nazi treasure hunts. As Heidemann refused to name these gentlemen, his story lacked credibility. His defence lawyers managed to persuade the court to accept as evidence a series of tape recordings made by Heidemann of his telephone conversations with Kujau. These had been edited together by the reporter and effectively proved his contention that he had not known the diaries were forged. Unfortunately, whenever the discussions turned to the matter of payments, the tapes abruptly ended, strengthening the prosecution’s case that Heidemann had not handed over all of the money.

Kujau’s defence was handled by a lawyer of feline skill and left-wing opinions named Kurt Groenewold. At first sight Groenewold was an unlikely choice to defend a Nazi-obsessed forger: he was one of West Germany’s leading radical lawyers, a friend of the Baader–Meinhof group, a solicitor who numbered among his clients the CIA ‘whistleblower’ Philip Agee. But it turned out to be an inspired partnership. Groenewold’s defence of Kujau was based on the argument that he was a small-time con man who had been lured into forging the Hitler diaries only by the enormous sums offered by the capitalists from Bertelsmann. Whilst Groenewold dragged Stern into the centre of the proceedings, exposing the negligence which had allowed the fraud to reach the proportions it did, Kujau was able to play the role of a likeable rogue whose cheerfully amateurish work had been exploited by the salesmen from Hamburg.

On Monday 8 July 1985 the media returned in force to Hamburg to record the verdict. After presiding over ninety-four sessions of testimony from thirty-seven different witnesses, the judge found all the defendants guilty. Heidemann was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison. Kujau received four years and six months. Edith Lieblang was given a suspended sentence of one year. The judge said he could detect no evidence of a wider conspiracy. Stern, he announced, had acted with such recklessness that it was virtually an accomplice in the hoax.

More than two years had passed since the diaries were declared forgeries. More than 5 million marks of Stern’s money remained – and, at the time of writing, remains – unaccounted for.

The Hitler diaries affair had a traumatic effect upon Stern. Its offices were occupied by journalists protesting at the management’s appointment of two new conservative editors. There were hundreds of abusive letters and phone calls. The overwhelmingly left-wing staff found themselves being greeted on the telephone by shouts of ‘Heil Hitler!’ Politicians treated them as a laughing stock; prominent West Germans pulled out of interviews; young East German pacifists refused to cooperate with a planned Stern feature article on the grounds that the magazine was ‘a Hitler sheet’. Circulation slumped. Before the scandal, the magazine reckoned to sell around 1.7 million copies. This figure climbed to a record 2.1 million in the week in which the diaries’ discovery was announced. After the revelation that they were forgeries, circulation fell back to less than 1.5 million. Apart from the loss of advertising and sales revenue, the cost to the magazine was estimated by the Stern Report as 19 million marks: 9.34 million for the diaries; 1.5 million for Heidemann; 7 million (before tax) as compensation to the two sacked editors; and miscellaneous costs, including agents’ fees, publicity and the expense of destroying thousands of copies containing the second instalment of the Hess serialization.

Gradually, most of the main participants in the story left the magazine. Dr Jan Hensmann departed at the end of 1983 to become a visiting professor at the University of Munster. Wilfried Sorge resigned in the spring of 1984 to run a small publishing company. Thomas Walde left Hamburg to work in another outpost of the Bertelsmann empire. Leo Pesch went to Munich to work for Vogue. Manfred Fischer, who initiated the purchase of the diaries, is currently the chief executive of the Dornier aircraft corporation. Felix Schmidt is now editing the main West German television guide. Peter Koch, at the time of writing, has not re-entered full-time employment. Gerd Schulte-Hillen, however, is still the managing director of Gruner and Jahr: he must be a very good manager indeed.

In Britain, Frank Giles returned from his holiday to find himself the target of a vicious whispering campaign. In June 1983, ‘after discussions with Mr Rupert Murdoch’, it was announced that he was to retire prematurely as editor and assume the honorific title of editor emeritus. According to a story which did the rounds at the time, Giles asked what the title meant. ‘It’s Latin, Frank,’ Murdoch is said to have replied. ‘The “e” means you’re out, and the “meritus” means you deserve it.’

Newsweek, which ran the Hitler diaries on its front cover for three successive weeks, was widely criticized for its behaviour. ‘The impression created with the aid of provocative newspaper and television advertising’, said Robert J. McCloskey, the ombudsman of the Washington Post, ‘was that the entire story was authentic.’ The morality of selling Hitler ‘bothered us’, confessed Mrs Katherine Graham. William Broyles appeared to disagree: ‘We feel very, very good about how we handled this,’ he told the New York Times. Seven months later, he resigned as Newsweek’s editor. Maynard Parker who had been expected to succeed him, was passed over. Insiders blamed the Hitler diaries. ‘That episode killed Parker,’ said one. ‘There were expressions of high-echelon support, but it was poor judgement and everyone knew it.’

In the aftermath of the Hitler diaries affair, David Irving’s American publishers tripled the print run of his edition of the Führer’s medical diaries. Excerpts were published in Murdoch’s New York Post and in the National Enquirer. But all publicity is not necessarily good publicity: not long afterwards Irving was arrested by the Austrian police in Vienna on suspicion of neo-Nazi activity and deported from the country; he is still banned from entry.

In 1985, Hugh Trevor-Roper published a collection of his work entitled Renaissance Essays. It was hailed by most critics as ‘brilliant’. The Hitler diaries, tactfully, were not mentioned.

Fritz Stiefel, Kujau’s best customer until Heidemann appeared, announced that he would not be suing the forger for damages. ‘I have one of the biggest collections of fakes in the world,’ he said, ‘and that, too, is worth something.’

Adolf Hitler as Painter and Draughtsman by Billy F. Price and August Priesack was banned in West Germany, but appeared in the United States at the end of 1984 as Adolf Hitler: The Unknown Artist.Newsweek

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