In a way, Adolf Hitler is the Genghis Khan of our time. What he did and how he was able to do it still strikes us as a cryptic truth, and he an oddly fascinating character. He is the epitome of evil, as the writer Robert Harris says, a “dark mirror” with the ability to reflect any phobia that contemplates it.
In the 1970s, this led to a true Hitlerwelle, which is what the Germans call this morbid and for some almost compulsive interest in the “Nazi universe”. Movies, series and books were made that fed fanciful conjectures; the most hackneyed, who did not commit suicide in 1945.
One of those who fell for this spell was the German reporter Gerd Heidemann, who had all the numbers for it to happen to him. His colleagues at Stern magazine called him “the bloodhound” because when taking up a subject he didn’t know when to stop investigating it. Several times he ended up following a futile lead thinking he would discover something spectacular. Many times, his exclusive attempts ended with his colleagues having to finish writing what he had left halfway.
Hitler’s life was one of those things that always seduced him. It’s not that he was a neo-Nazi – during the war his family had been apolitical – but, as historian Eric Rentschler explains in an article about him, he had dangerous friendships. Like SS generals Karl Wolff and Wilhelm Mohnke, who were witnesses at his wedding.
He met them thanks to Edda Göring, daughter of Hermann Göring, with whom he had begun a sentimental relationship after interviewing her in 1973 for a piece in the magazine. Heidemann ended up buying the Carin II, a yacht that had belonged to the all-powerful head of the Luftwaffe, and there he organized parties at which the guest of honor was usually some gyrfalcon from the National Socialist period.
Trying to sell that ship to Fritz Stiefel, a collector of World War II relics, in 1978 he first heard of the diaries affair. In The Hitler Diaries: Fakes That Fooled the World (1991), a book that broke down the case, the historian and graphologist Charles Hamilton tells how that revelation inflamed Heidemann’s spirits almost to the point of madness.
What would it be like to have a diary in which the Führer had been writing down, day by day, what he really thought about the Holocaust, about Neville Chamberlain and his policy of appeasement or about some of his closest collaborators? Its existence would force us to rewrite that period of history, the reporter thought.
Plus, apparently, it contained intimate details that any publisher would pay a fortune for. An entry from June 1941 reads: “At Eva’s wish, my doctors have examined me thoroughly. The new pills cause me violent flatulence and, says Eva, bad breath”.
Heidemann wanted the manuscript. It was the scoop he had been chasing for so many years. He struggled, but in the end he managed to contact the original source, the person who had shown Stiefel the journals.
This was Konrad Kujau, a collector who at the time ran a Third Reich “souvenir” shop in Stuttgart. Or so he said, because it was hard to believe that those manuscripts that he exhibited were really by Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, among others.
Kujau was a compulsive liar, an eccentric character who would do anything to get attention, including walking around town in an SS uniform. After one of his plentiful bar fights, he told cops that he was actually a retired colonel turned college professor.
Heidemann ignored this, and also the complaints that Kujau accumulated for petty thefts. To convince himself that the documents were genuine, the story that they came from that famous plane crash that occurred in 1945, when the Junkers Ju 352 plane that was evacuating Hitler’s last personal effects in Berlin, crashed near the Czechoslovak border, was enough for him. That’s why they were in East Germany, Kujau argued, and why he needed extra cash to bribe his border contacts.
The money would come from Gruner Jahr, the publisher that published Stern magazine. The details are explained by Robert Harris in Selling Hitler: History’s Greatest Publishing Scam: The Hitler Diaries Scandal (2020).
The decision was made in 1981, at a meeting between Manfred Fischer, the CEO of Gruner Jahr, and Jan Hensmann, the managing director; no one else, not a historian, not a graphologist, not someone who could verify that the source was legitimate. As soon as they had the first originals, Fischer allocated a million marks for the following installments – they would be purchased in installments – and even set up a secret office for the news team.
No one outside of this group was to know, not even Stern’s legal department or management. Because? As Harris explains, because they feared a leak. Apart from a former archivist of the Nazi party and the historian Eberhard Jäckel, who, after a first reading in 1979, had judged the diaries as authentic, they preferred that no other expert see them for the moment.
Despite the secrecy, Heidemann could not help showing his friend Wilhelm Mohnke a passage referring to the beginnings of the party and the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (Führer’s personal guard), of which Mohnke was one of the first members. Then, the general warned him that both the dates and the events reported did not correspond to what he remembered. Heidemann ignored it. According to Harris, by now he had ceased to be rational on this matter.
That was not the worst. When they were already twelve volumes, he informed Gruner Jahr’s management that his source had raised the price to a minimum of 100,000 marks per installment. It was not true, and throughout 1981 and 1982 he kept the surplus.
At the end of 1982, the company was already studying a publication date, so some scientific analysis was deemed necessary. Heidemann and his colleague Thomas Walde did the job, sending samples to the German Federal Archives, the forensic department of the Zurich police, and an American expert named Ordway Hilton, who, by the way, couldn’t read German.
Furthermore, they only provided them with one page out of the hundreds they had and, for comparison, a manuscript by Hitler which it turns out Kujau had also sold them. With that information, everyone agreed that the two texts were by the same author.
With bad arts, Heidemann managed to get the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, a renowned specialist in National Socialism, to give them up. His secret was to fabricate a chemical study and assure the British scholar that he knew the Wehrmacht officer who had recovered the plane crash documents.
By early 1983, Stern was signing million-dollar deals with various publishers for the rights. The communication magnate Rupert Murdoch was going to pay them one million two hundred thousand marks; the French magazine Paris Match, 400,000; the Spanish conglomerate Grupo Zeta, 150,000…
For April 25, Stern planned a press conference that he supposed was glorious, but that would end up turning into a circus. As skeptical specialists mushroomed, on the night of the 23rd, the editor of The Sunday Times telephoned Trevor-Roper in case he wanted to write a piece defending the find. To his surprise, he too had changed his mind. Unsure what he was going to put on the cover, his next call was to Rupert Murdoch, the owner, who famously told him: “Fuck you, run it!”
Already in Hamburg for the big media spectacle, on April 24 Trevor-Roper had the opportunity to storm Heidemann. Since he didn’t even want to tell him what the source was, the historian decided to try to save himself and prepare an honorable exit for the next day.
Faced with astonished Stern executives, in the press call the British acknowledged that the documents had not been properly analyzed. Moreover, he went so far as to affirm that historical rigor had been sacrificed in favor of the “perhaps necessary requirements of a journalistic exclusivity.”
It turned into an operetta when David Irving, future Holocaust denier, stood up to ask how the Führer could have written the entries after July 20, 1944 if he had just suffered an attack and had a disabled right arm. What’s more, the mere fact that the originals were handwritten was suspicious: it was well known that the dictator always typed.
None of the speakers could, either, explain whether the ink used had been examined. As security guards led him out of the room, Irving yelled, “The ink, the ink!”
Dogged, both Stern and The Sunday Times spent the next week releasing exclusives on Hitler’s life, like it was nothing. They had to stop on May 6, when a second analysis of the German Federal Archive – this time with the complete volumes – revealed something as simple as that the ink and paper used did not exist in Germany in the 1940s.
Stern, who had already published two installments, hurriedly tried to save face, but was beaten to the punch by the German prosecutor’s office, who announced legal action. At that point, Konrad Kujau had fled to Austria with his wife and his mistress (at first he told her that this was his cleaning lady).
He was there when he read in the press that the publisher had paid Heidemann nine million marks for the diaries. Furious at learning that he had been teased with the amounts, he agreed to turn himself in at the border and tell the whole truth.
He had started making the forgeries in 1978 using previously published information about the chancellor’s day-to-day activities. As he was left with a rather tedious collection of anecdotes, he added some details from his imagination. He didn’t even bother to use period materials.
The notebooks were bought in a kind of “everything for a hundred” in East Berlin, and the initials that he pasted on the cover were made of plastic made in Hong Kong. For the ink he used Pelikan brand bottles, which he mixed with water so that he would use a pen instead of having to buy a pen…
Heidemann was arrested on May 26 and, like Kujau, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison at a trial a year later. Of course, most of the money was never recovered.
The poverty of the forgery was a blow to the credibility of all the media involved. At Stern there were layoffs and a sit-in by the newsroom, who felt management had made them all look like amateurs. As a brand, it took almost ten years to regain its prestige.
This same month, the public television channel NDR has published the content of the fanciful diaries on its website. That crude literature conveyed the image of a supposedly benevolent Führer ignorant of the Holocaust. The managers of Gruner Jahr, convinced that they were going to launch the exclusive of the century, completely lost their roles.
