The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  That date was supposed to be 11 May, but Stern was panicked into bringing publication day forward nearly three weeks when, on 21 April, its rival, Der Spiegel, rang to enquire whether it was true it was in possession of Hitler’s diaries. Stern could not afford to lose the scoop of breaking the news. This, of course, affected what The Times would do. It had been agreed that The Times, rather than the Sunday Times, would run the story first in Britain. In any case, it had been The Times that had taken the initiative from the first and Murdoch noted the extent to which Douglas-Home was ‘so excited and thought it was an incredible story’. In contrast, the Sunday Times’s editor, Frank Giles, was far less enthusiastic. The two papers remained protective of their respective independence. Murdoch thought this was because Giles ‘didn’t like it because it came out of The Times’ and resented the proprietor’s insistence that his Sunday paper should serialize it after the daily had made the running.8 At the Sunday Times, Philip Knightley – remembering the Mussolini saga of 1968 – raised his doubts and even contacted Dacre by telephone to seek, and gain, some reassurance.9 Without enthusiasm, Giles bowed to his proprietor’s will.

  The positive phraseology on the front page of The Times on Saturday 23 April was unfortunate. ‘Hitler’s secret diaries to be published’ ran the front-page headline. Readers’ attention was drawn to the serialization commencing in the following day’s Sunday Times. It had fallen to the usually perspicacious Michael Binyon to write the article and, although he mentioned in passing that two leading West German historians (who, unlike Dacre, had not seen the diaries) had cast doubt on their veracity, the tone of the opening sentence – ‘Sixty volumes of hitherto unknown diaries kept by Adolf Hitler throughout his 12-year dictatorship have been discovered …’ – implied there was not much room for doubt. In fact, Binyon’s original copy had been much more guarded. His opening sentence had stated that ‘hitherto unknown diaries allegedly kept by Adolf Hitler’ had been discovered, but Charles Wilson, the pugnacious deputy editor, scored out the qualification. Wilson told Binyon, in blunt language, that News Corp. had not spent $1.2 million on anything ‘allegedly’ newsworthy.10

  The comment page that day was almost entirely given over to Lord Dacre to expound upon the ‘Secrets that survived the Bunker’. With each assertion the eminent historian dug himself deeper and deeper into a bunker of his own devising: ‘I am now satisfied that the documents are authentic,’ he informed readers. The sheer volume of material was compelling evidence in itself as was the story behind their salvage from the wreck of the plane sent out on Hitler’s birthday in April 1945 to take them to safety. Taken together, this ‘seems to me to constitute clear proof of their authenticity’. While others might argue that the sheer scale of the archive was incompatible with Hitler’s known aversion to writing, Dacre turned logic on its head: ‘If Hitler (as he said in 1942) had long ago found writing by hand a great effort, that may be not so much because he was out of practice as because he already suffered from writer’s cramp.’11

  The Times had its scoop, but the news that the Sunday Times was about to start serialization prompted its rivals into action. The Observer and the Mail on Sunday both paid David Irving to pronounce in their papers that the Sunday Times had bought a forgery. The German Bild Zeitung offered to fly Irving out to interrupt Stern’s proposed press conference in Hamburg on Monday. Irving and Douglas-Home locked horns on BBC television over the diaries’ authenticity, The Times’s editor attempting to pull rank with the words, ‘I have smelt them. I’m a minor historian and we know about the smell of old documents. They certainly smelt.’12 Doubtless they did, although not of what the minor historian imagined. Indeed, while the opprobrium would soon fall in heaps upon Dacre, Douglas-Home was also not above criticism, having allowed his excitement to overcome his better judgment. He had been particularly impressed by an extract in which Hitler had praised the destruction of the synagogues while being sorry about the loss of ancient glass. ‘Typical Hitler!’ Douglas-Home pronounced.13 This was rather hasty, but he was about to make a sin of omission, whether or not intentionally, that was to do far more serious damage to the reputation of the Sunday Times – so much so that The Times’s role in the fiasco was soon overlooked.

  II

  Dacre’s first doubts struck him on Saturday morning – the same morning in which his lengthy and confidently expressed Times article was gracing breakfast tables the length and breadth of the country. He decided he ought to ring Douglas-Home to tell him. Had he thought about it, the Master of Peterhouse should have recognized it was important to tell Frank Giles at the Sunday Times since its pages of serialization would be going to press later that day. But it was The Times that had commissioned Dacre and its executives were those with whom he had the closest rapport. In any case, it was not unreasonable to assume that if the editor of The Times thought it merited a call he was capable of ringing the editor of the Sunday Times himself. On telephoning The Times, Dacre was put through to Colin Webb, who telephoned Douglas-Home at his home with the news that Dacre was having second thoughts. Eventually Douglas-Home got back to Webb to double-check what had been said. Nobody telephoned the Sunday Times. Webb imagined Douglas-Home would do it. Perhaps Douglas-Home imagined Webb had already done it (but did not ask him if this was so).14 With Sunday’s deadline approaching, Dacre thought it odd that nobody at the Sunday Times had rung to discuss the situation with him, but he did not take the trouble to pick up the telephone himself. It was certainly a muddle.

  It was after 7 p.m. when the sound of a telephone ringing could be heard deep within the Peterhouse Master’s Lodge. It was Frank Giles on the line. The first edition of the Sunday Times had just gone to press and he was calling from his office where he was having a celebratory drink with his senior colleagues. He was not telephoning to check on Dacre’s doubts – he did not realize they existed – but to ask if the eminent professor would like to pen an essay dismissing the sceptics for the following week’s paper. Giles’s glass-clinking audience froze as they realized the telephone conversation was moving from cheery salutation to staccato interjections and then to longer pauses. The colour drained from Giles’s cheeks as he said, ‘But these doubts aren’t strong enough to make you do a complete 180-degree turn on that?… Oh. I see. You are doing a 180-degree turn.’ Having been leaning against the wall, Brian MacArthur started sliding slowly down it.15

  After a quick council of war, MacArthur got through to Murdoch in New York to seek his sanction to stop the presses. But the proprietor, having placed credence on Dacre’s original endorsement, was cutting about his eleventh-hour doubts and told MacArthur to publish. He should have added ‘and be damned’; 1.4 million copies rolled under the banner headline ‘WORLD EXCLUSIVE: How the diaries of the Führer were found in an East German hayloft’.16

  Frank Giles was distinctly unhappy to discover that neither Douglas-Home nor Colin Webb had passed on Dacre’s doubts during the vital hours of Saturday 23 April. When he demanded an explanation, Douglas-Home claimed Dacre had been in such a ‘condition of doubt and perturbation’ that it had been difficult to gauge exactly what his opinion had been on that day. Giles later concluded:

  Like Murdoch, he [Douglas-Home] too seems to have become so immersed in the business of wanting the diaries to be genuine that he was unable to face the possibility that they were not. The rub for me that fateful Saturday was that it was I and the Sunday Times, not Douglas-Home and The Times, who had to pay the price for his clouded judgment.17

  If Dacre’s doubts had made an impression upon Douglas-Home, he was carefully concealing it under his patrician demeanour. On the Sunday evening, Robert Fisk went off to a press award dinner at the Savoy accompanied by his Finnish girlfriend, an air hostess with SAS Airlines. A fluent German speaker, she had been reading the diary extracts in the morning paper and was adamant that they were forgeries – Hitler simply did not express himself in the phraseology used, she insisted. The original German was all wrong. As the dinner got underway, Doug
las-Home arrived wearing a jacket that he claimed had once belonged to the Kaiser. He pulled up a chair and sat down next to Fisk and his girlfriend. She assured him that he was making a big mistake and that the diaries were forgeries. The editor of The Times brushed aside the air hostess’s analysis ‘no, no I can tell you, they smell of history,’ he repeated.18

  Meanwhile, while the public waded through page after page of Sunday Times analysis and brief extracts of Hitler’s views on Hess, Chamberlain, Himmler and others, Dacre caught a flight to Hamburg accompanied by Paul Eddy, Anthony Terry and Brian MacArthur, who would act as minders and would ensure that if he had anything to denounce in public he should save it for the front page of the following week’s Sunday Times. Dacre was to dine with the Stern executives in the evening as their guest of honour. But he went first to see Gerd Heidemann. When the reporter refused to disclose the identity of the Wehrmacht officer in whose possession the diaries had supposedly rested for the past thirty-eight years, Dacre turned the conversation into an interrogation that ended with Heidemann storming out. Over dinner, Dacre was astonished to discover that Peter Koch claimed not to know the handler’s identity either. Could these methodical Germans really have taken so much on trust? It was one thing not to disclose one’s sources, quite another not to know who the sources were in the first place. Dacre was taken aback, but did not reveal his hand to his hosts. Afterwards, he came across Sir Nicholas Henderson (Britain’s former Ambassador to Bonn and Washington) in the hotel bar. ‘Nico’ offered an old friend some advice – the diaries were clearly fake and the sooner he denounced them publicly the better. Dacre decided to sleep on it.19

  The next morning, Stern’s press conference commenced in hubristic triumph. There was an introductory film presentation then the sixty volumes of diaries were theatrically brought in procession towards the front of the hall. Flashlights blazed away. Twenty-seven television crews jostled for space alongside swarms of newspaper journalists. It was the very definition of a world ‘media circus’. Then the platform party introduced Dacre to the press – and the smooth operation began to fall apart. As the Stern management listened with mounting horror, he confessed he had been misled about the diaries having been positively traced all the way back to the plane crash. Stern should have scented trouble – of which Brian MacArthur and Michael Binyon had a sniff – by the fact that the press conference’s start had been delayed because of Dacre’s late appearance (he had initially locked himself in his hotel room and had refused to come out).20 Douglas-Home had telephoned him that morning and forcefully advised him that ‘so long as there was any chance that the diaries might prove genuine’ he should not formally denounce their authenticity.21 In consequence, he veered between restating ‘the provisional conclusion that these documents are genuine’ and raising the possibility that their authenticity was ‘shaky’, adding, ‘As a historian, I regret that the normal method of historical verification has, perhaps necessarily, been to some extent sacrificed to the requirements of a journalistic scoop.’ This fired the starter gun for a descent into anarchy. From the floor, David Irving denounced the diaries. The Stern organizers tried to switch off his microphone. Furiously scribbling down the scene for The Times from his vantage point in the hall, Binyon observed that, ‘As a throng of cameramen and reporters pressed round Mr Irving, a fight broke out when Stern’s staff tried to prevent Mr Irving giving a rival press conference in the same room. The hubbub lasted for some time.’22

  The Times was now moving in tandem with Lord Dacre – which is to say that it was back-pedalling fast. It seemed odd that Stern had deployed The Times’s expert at their press conference. Where was their reputable historian? Who was their authenticator? The Times started giving equal coverage to both sides of the debate. The letters’ page began to fill up. Immanuel Jakobovits, the Chief Rabbi, wrote to express his disgust at the ‘mercenary exploitation’ which would allow Hitler to justify his crimes, adding, ‘In the name of decency, morality and truth, I call upon men of good will everywhere to prevent this proposed affront to the past and depraved threat to the future.’ Those less persuaded that they were about to hear Fascism’s authentic voice took a more whimsical view. Pointing to the fact the diaries comprised sixty identically bound volumes, one correspondent wondered if Hitler had benefited from a ‘large order’ discount when making his purchase, while another asked whether there was no identifiable fingerprint on any of the pages. Michael Holroyd wanted to know what efforts Stern had made to seek out ‘Herr Hitler’s copyright holders to obtain their permission to publish and negotiate fees?’.23

  It would have taken only three days for Stern to get the paper and ink of the diaries comprehensively tested. Instead, only half-hearted attempts at verification had been made. The failure to undertake a proper scientific examination was explained away on the grounds that doing so risked news of the diaries’ existence leaking out and ruining the scoop. But once the story was in the public domain the requests to undertake proper testing could not be refused. On 6 May, the results came in. There were factual errors and a handwriting expert demonstrated inconsistencies with the real Hitler’s style. But what proved conclusive was the discovery that the paper used for the diaries contained a whitener created in 1955 while the ink had been applied within the past two years. Thus the diaries were incontrovertibly fraudulent. As soon as the news reached London, News International issued a press release that stated, ‘The Sunday Times accepts the report of the German archivists’ and would, consequently, be dropping its serialization. There was no mention of The Times’s original role and press rivals chose to focus on the Sunday Times where Frank Giles had gone off on holiday leaving Hugo Young to pen a much derided note of ‘sincere apology’ to ‘our readers’. Not unnaturally, rival newspapers had great fun at the Sunday Times’s expense, many concluding that it was the price paid for being owned by the likes of Rupert Murdoch. The proprietor himself showed extraordinary sang-froid about the whole matter. Charles Wilson was with him when the news was brought to him that the diaries had been confirmed as forgeries. Murdoch digested the news and paused, lost in thought. There was absolute silence. After a moment he made his only comment. ‘Well,’ he mused, ‘you can’t win them all.’24

  The Times reported with measured detachment the news of the forgery on its front page but no leading article ever appeared on the subject. When Robert Harris’s compelling book on the subject, Selling Hitler, was published in 1986, the Times Literary Supplement was the only News International publication to review it (Professor Norman Stone considering it ‘a very funny story … very well told’). Harris’s account was subsequently made into a television series with Alan Bennett playing Lord Dacre and, yet more improbably, Barry Humphries swapping the persona of the Melbourne society housewife Dame Edna Everage for Rupert Murdoch.

  In their defence, Times Newspapers and Lord Dacre could point to the extent to which the supposedly reputable Stern had deceived them. The tone of certainty expressed in The Times on 23 April rested not only on Dacre’s overhasty pronouncement but on the claims by Stern that ‘it had conducted chemical analyses of the paper and ink’ that showed them to be appropriate to the period. Without this false assurance, neither Dacre, Douglas-Home nor Murdoch might have been quite so quick to part with their reputations and their money. Nonetheless, at a personal level, it was Dacre who lost most from the episode. He had recanted his authentication days before the scientific tests had determined the diaries’ fate. By contrast, David Irving, who had done much to improve his intellectual standing by initially denouncing the hoax had, by then, come round to supporting the diaries authenticity, possibly because they did not implicate the Führer closely in the Holocaust. Irving, however, was a maverick with recognized extremist views. It was Dacre who had a valuable reputation to lose. In the immediate aftermath he claimed to feel ‘like an Arabian adulterer, pinioned in the sand and awaiting the next, perhaps fatal, volley of stones’. He tried not to cast the blame elsewhere, later telling Graham
Turner, ‘I wanted to protect Douglas-Home and, in any case, it would have been undignified. I assumed that the other people involved would admit their errors.’ To his disappointment he found that “the only person who behaved quite well in it all was Rupert – he did send me a genuine, if private, letter accepting part of the blame’.25

  In accepting the request to look at the diaries, Dacre had sought to do The Times a favour, an act of charity that rebounded against him. His reputation was battered – to the ill-disguised merriment of much of his academic peer group. After he retired from Peterhouse, waspish undergraduates there gathered once a term to commemorate his Mastership by founding a dining club called ‘The Authenticators’. Some dons joined in as guests. Given his various and distinguished career it was a needlessly ungracious final act when The Times announced his death on 27 January 2003 under the page two headline ‘Hitler diary hoax victim Lord Dacre dies at 89’.26 It was not how he would have wished to have been remembered, especially from a newspaper upon whose board he had diligently sat between 1974 and 1988. Yet, those at Gray’s Inn Road had grounds for feeling he had landed them in a huge mess. However rushed he may have felt in being asked for an opinion, there was no need for him to express such certainty on the basis of only an afternoon looking at manuscripts he could scarcely read. Sadly, because of this he did end up performing the role of useful scapegoat, thereby deflecting criticism from The Times’s editorial decision making.

  Gerd Heidemann protested he did not realize the diaries were fakes. Nonetheless, he was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison for embezzling a large share of the money Stern had paid out through him to what they believed was the diaries’ custodian. The custodian was the forger, Konrad Kujau, who appeared to enjoy the attention accorded him in the courthouse and, between sessions, found time to joke with Michael Binyon: suggesting that if he’d known earlier the Bonn correspondent was from The Times, he would have knocked off some forged diaries especially for the paper. He was sentenced to four years and six months but released after serving three years. Seeking to build upon his minor celebrity status, he ran (unsuccessfully) to succeed Manfred Rommel, the son of Hitler’s field marshal, as Mayor of Stuttgart. He subsequently paid for medical treatment by copying great works of art in a Hitlerian style and opened a gallery of his own derivative work. He died in 2000.