Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  But following Frau Winter’s death, in 1972, these supposedly worthless items were put on sale at an auction in Munich. Telephone bids were taken from all over the world for lots which included family photographs, an eleven-word note for a speech and a War Loans savings card. Prices were reported to have ‘exceeded all expectations’. The average price simply for a signed Hitler photograph was £450.

  In the succeeding years the Nazi memorabilia market took off spectacularly. Hitler’s 1940 Mercedes touring car – five tons of armoured steel and glass, twenty feet long with a 230 horsepower engine and a 56-gallon fuel tank – was sold in Arizona in 1973 for $153,000. A rug from the Reich Chancellery fetched $100,000. A millionaire in Nevada paid $60,000 for the crateful of Hitler’s personal property rescued from the basement of the Führerbau. The Marquess of Bath acquired Himmler’s spectacles, removed from his body after his suicide. He also bought a tablecloth which had belonged to the Commandant of Belsen concentration camp. A military dealer in Maryland, Charles Snyder, sold locks of Eva Braun’s hair for $3500, and – following a deal with the official American executioner – strands from the ropes which hanged the Nuremberg war criminals.

  It was against this background, in 1973, with the Hitler Wave at its height, that Mr Billy F. Price of Houston, Texas, heard of a new prize about to come on the market. Mr Price – owner of Hitler’s napkins and cutlery and on his way to possessing one of the world’s largest collections of Hitler paintings – discovered through contacts in Germany that Hermann Goering’s old yacht was for sale. Price expressed an interest. But before he had time to put in a bid, the boat was sold. The purchaser, he learned later, was a figure hitherto unknown in the close-knit memorabilia market: a German journalist named Gerd Heidemann.

  Part Two

  ‘For in his male he hadde a pilwe-beer,

  Which that he seyde was Oure Lady veyl:

  He seyde he hadde a gobet of the seyl

  That Seint Peter hadde, whan that he wente

  Upon the see, til Jhesu Crist hym hente.

  He hadde a croys of latoun ful of stones,

  And in a glas he hadde pigges bones.

  But with thise relikes, whan that he fond

  A povre person dwellynge upon lond,

  Upon a day he gat hym moore moneye

  Than that the person gat in monthes tweye;

  And thus, with feyned flaterye and japes,

  He made the person and the peple his apes.’

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

  FOUR

  THE BOAT WAS lying low against the harbour jetty when he first saw her, ageing and dilapidated, with the freezing waters of the River Rhine seeping into her hold. She had been built in 1937 and presented as a gift by the German motor industry to Hermann Goering, architect of Hitler’s rearmament programme and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe. The sumptuously finished motor yacht took its place amongst the other trappings of the Reichsmarschall’s grandiose lifestyle: his luxurious private train, his 100,000 acre hunting estate, his enormous hoard of looted art treasures. In honour of his first wife, who had died prematurely in 1931, Goering named her Carin II. The yacht survived the wartime air raids guarded by three soldiers in a private anchorage in Berlin. She also survived the death of her owner in Nuremberg in 1946. During the Allied occupation she was impounded by Field Marshal Montgomery and presented to the British Royal Family who rechristened her the Royal Albert. Following the birth of the Prince of Wales, she was renamed the Prince Charles. In 1960, after more than a decade in the service of the British Rhine Flotilla, the Queen returned the yacht to Goering’s widow, his second wife, Emmy.

  It was on a bleak day in January 1973, thirteen years later, that Gerd Heidemann found her moored on the waterfront in the West German capital, Bonn. She now belonged to the owner of a local printing works. More than eighty feet long, expensive to maintain and in need of extensive repairs, the yacht had become a financial liability. The owner told Heidemann he wanted to sell her.

  Heidemann subsequently maintained that at that time he had no particular interest in the Nazis. He was a photographer and reporter on Stern and had simply been commissioned to take pictures of the boat for a feature article. He was forty-one years old, his third marriage had recently collapsed, and he was looking for an opportunity to make some money. He concluded that the yacht, once renovated, could be sold for a large profit. A few weeks later, in March, he bought her for 160,000 marks. It was a huge sum of money for an ordinary journalist to find. He had to mortgage his house, a bungalow in the Hamburg suburb of Flottbeck, to raise it.

  Heidemann knew little about sailing. For help he turned to an acquaintance, a twenty-five-year-old seaman named Axel Thomsen who was studying for his captain’s qualifications at the naval school in Hamburg. ‘I went down to Bonn and saw the ship,’ recalled Thomsen. it was in a miserable condition. Of the three engines, only one diesel was working. She was also taking in water and had constantly to be emptied.’ She was too badly damaged to withstand the open sea, and late that summer the two men sailed her back to Hamburg along the inland waterways of northern Germany. She had to be put in dry dock for a year to be made watertight.

  Heidemann soon had cause to regret his impulsive investment. He had hopelessly underestimated the amount of work which Carin II’s restoration would involve. By 1974 he was in a financial trap: he could hope to sell the boat only if he completed the repairs; he could pay for the repairs only by selling the boat. Meanwhile, interest rates on the money he had already borrowed and the cost of keeping the yacht in dock bit deep into his salary. ‘He permanently seemed short of money,’ said Thomsen ten years later. ‘He was always trying to pump loans out of other people. He was worried that things were going to be taken off him because he hadn’t paid his debts.’ In desperation, Heidemann even asked Thomsen to lend him 15,000 marks. Word went round the Hamburg shipyards that the naive and over-confident new owner of ‘Fat Hermann’s boat’ was financially shaky. Neither for the first time in his life nor the last, Heidemann was in danger of making a fool of himself.

  Gerd Heidemann was born on 4 December 1931 in the Altona district of Hamburg, the illegitimate son of Martha Eiternick. When his mother married a former sailor turned policeman called Rolf Heidemann, Gerd took his stepfather’s surname. His parents were apolitical. Gerd, like most boys his age, was a member of the Hitler Youth. When, at the end of the war, the Allies produced evidence of the scale of the Nazis’ atrocities, he went through the same sequence of emotions as millions of his fellow countrymen: disbelief, anger, guilt and a desire to reject the past.

  A quiet and unassuming adolescent, Heidemann left school at the age of seventeen to become an apprentice electrician. The passion of his life was photography and eventually he found work as an assistant in a photographic laboratory. He went on to become a freelance photographer for the German newsagency DPA, for Keystone and for various Hamburg newspapers. In 1951 he won his first commission from Stern. On 1 September 1955 he became a permanent member of the magazine’s staff.

  Twenty-eight years later, when his bewildered and humiliated employers were pressed into holding an internal inquiry into his activities at Stern, they found there was almost nothing to say about his early days on the magazine. ‘His colleagues do not have any particular memories of him, except that he used to enjoy playing chess,’ reported the inquiry. His shyness effaced him to the point of anonymity.

  Stern had been founded in 1948 by a charismatic journalist and businessman named Henri Nannen. The magazine prospered on a diet of scandal, consumerism, crime and human interest, skilfully designed to appeal to a war-weary population. The picture stories Heidemann worked on give an idea of the quality of the magazine at that time. One was ‘Germany’s Starlets’; another, ‘Hospitals of Germany’. He investigated organized crime in Sardinia and smuggling on the border between Holland and West Germany. On one occasion he was dispatched to Goettingen to locate the son
whom Chou En Lai was rumoured to have fathered during the 1920s when he was studying in Germany. Heidemann found a woman who had once had an affair with a Chinese student called Chou; their son was killed in the war. Unfortunately, as Heidemann reported to Nannen, her lover turned out to be Chou Ling Gui – a different Chou entirely. Nannen’s reply, according to Heidemann, was ‘Chou is Chou’ and the story appeared beneath the dramatic headline, ‘Chou En Lai’s Son Fell For Germany’. Looking back on his work during this period, Heidemann described it as ‘mediocre’.

  In the mid-1950s Nannen was astute enough to recognize that the shock and humiliation of the immediate post-war era was gradually being replaced by a growing public interest in the Nazis. Heidemann became involved in features about the Third Reich: Auschwitz, fugitive war criminals and the reminiscences of the widow of Reinhard Heydrich. ‘Heidemann’s routine activities were generally speaking outside my daily concern,’ Nannen told police in 1983. ‘I had the impression that he was a competent researcher. I didn’t know of any mistakes in his work.’ There was something about this intensely serious young man, with his pale complexion and earnest expression, which reminded Nannen of a priest fresh from a seminary.

  From 1961 Heidemann worked abroad as a war photographer. He saw action in the Congo, in Biafra, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Uganda, Beirut and Oman. In 1965 he won an international press award at the Hague for the year’s best photo-report: a feature about white mercenaries in the Congo. He frequently worked in a partnership with Randolph Braumann, a Stern reporter of the macho school, known to his colleagues in Hamburg as ‘Congo Randy’. ‘We both enjoyed war reporting and enjoying life and experiencing danger away from Europe,’ recalled Braumann. In 1970 they covered the Black September civil war in Jordan and were almost killed trying to run from a Jordanian tank to a German embassy car Heidemann had parked nearby. Even Braumann was impressed by his photographer’s exuberance under fire:

  We jumped out of the tank and were immediately shot at from a house a few hundred metres away. I threw myself to the ground but Heidemann marched up to the bullet-ridden car and shouted to me: ‘Randy! Come on! It’s just like Kismet!’

  Braumann was awed by his composure. ‘The man had absolutely no fear.’

  Back in Hamburg, Heidemann attempted to recapture the excitement of his foreign adventures. According to Braumann:

  He used to collect war games and toy soldiers. In the cellar of his house was a great panoramic battlefield with enemy infantry and tanks, columns of pioneers, rocket silos, fighter aircraft – I really don’t know where he got the time to build up such a huge installation. He used to buy the toys from all over the world. He had catalogues from New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong.

  Visitors to the Heidemann household would be taken down to the cellar by their host to be shown the toy battlefield. Later, upstairs, if they were particularly unlucky, Heidemann would bring out mementoes from his trips abroad.

  In the sixties [recalled Braumann] he’d collected everything he could about the Congo rebels. He had recordings, notebooks, photographs. As I knew quite a lot about them, I found it quite interesting when he played all his recordings for me. You could hear a lot of shooting on them. He called them ‘Conversations Under Fire’. Other guests – among them his wife at the time, Barbara – found the whole thing idiotic. I was the only one amongst his friends who knew what it was like to drive round with these rebel convoys.

  Basically, we were both always longing to escape from Europe.

  Heidemann’s obsessional nature inevitably had its effect upon his personal relationships. He had first married in 1954, at the age of twenty-three, and had a son. A year later he and his wife were divorced. In 1960 they remarried and had a daughter. But in 1965 the marriage finally foundered. Divorced once more, in 1966 Heidemann married his second wife, Barbara. This relationship lasted for five years, until Barbara too tired of his collections, his stories and his frequent absences abroad. The couple separated in 1971.

  As a journalist, Heidemann was a curious amalgam of strengths and weaknesses. In research he was indefatigable, hunting down documents and interviewees with a dogged persistence which earned him the title ‘der Spürhund’ – the Bloodhound. His approach was uncritical and indirect. He flattered and insinuated and was often rewarded with the sort of confidences that a more aggressive approach would have failed to solicit. But this tendency to submerge himself in the opinions of others was Heidemann’s principal failing. He was such a compulsive collector of information that he never knew when to stop, and although he strove to be more than a photographer and researcher, he failed to become one of Stern’s major writers. He lacked any sense of perspective. Invariably the editor would end up asking him to hand over his boxes of files and transcripts. Someone else would have to boil down the mountain of information into a story. According to Stern’s 1983 inquiry: ‘He never actually wrote any of his reports himself.’

  In 1967 Heidemann became involved in an exhaustive investigation to try to uncover the real identity of the German thriller writer, B. Traven. Long after the essentials of the story had been published in Stern, Heidemann continued his researches, to the exasperation of the magazine’s editors who wanted him to work on other projects. He went to Chicago, San Francisco, Mexico and Norway. He toured German antique shops collecting Traven memorabilia. ‘I acquired everything I could,’ said Heidemann. Even the patience of Congo Randy became strained. ‘Heidemann would talk about nothing else but Traven,’ he later complained. In 1972, Heidemann asked Braumann to help him turn his information into a book.

  He showed me everything that he’d collected about Traven. There must have been at least twenty ring-folders full of material. I said: ‘My dear friend, I’d have to read for half a year before I could even start.’

  Undeterred, Heidemann spent almost a decade immersed in the Traven story. By the time he had finished he had seventy files of information. He became convinced that the writer was the illegitimate son of Kaiser Wilhelm II. As proof, he showed Braumann two photographs: one of a man he believed to be Traven, and another of the Kaiser’s eldest son. ‘Don’t they look similar?’ he asked. Braumann was not impressed. ‘I thought the story was far too improbable. It was typical of Gerd Heidemann that he should believe in something so crazy and unlikely.’

  Braumann thought it was equally ‘crazy’ that Heidemann, short of money and ignorant of ships, should have plunged himself into debt to buy Hermann Goering’s yacht. But knowing this restless, diffident, obsessive man as well as he did he was not in the least surprised by what happened next. ‘I knew that after the mercenary phase and the Traven phase there would be a new phase for Heidemann: the Nazi phase.’

  By 1974, Carin II had at least been rendered watertight. She was taken out of dry dock and moored in a Hamburg marina. ‘Only the most urgent repairs had been done,’ recalled Axel Thomsen, ‘because Herr Heidemann was deterred by the high cost involved. He said that further work was too expensive.’

  With the yacht’s renovation temporarily halted for lack of money, Heidemann set about researching her history. In Munich he made contact with Goering’s daughter, Edda. She was in her mid-thirties, attractive, unmarried and devoted to the memory of her father. According to his colleagues, Heidemann had always been remarkably successful with women. Apparently Edda too saw something in this tall, slightly pudgy, quietly spoken journalist who listened so attentively to her stories of her father. Shortly after their first meeting, when Heidemann visited her to show her photographs of Carin II, the couple began having an affair.

  Slowly, imperceptibly, through his ownership of the yacht and his relationship with Edda, Heidemann began to be drawn into a circle of former Nazis. A Stern reporter, Jochen von Lang, introduced him to former SS General Wilhelm Mohnke, the last commander of the German garrison defending the Reich Chancellery. The sixty-three-year-old General had lived quietly since his release from Soviet captivity in 1955. He even declined to attend the r
eunions of the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, the Führer’s bodyguard, of which he was a founder member. One reason for Mohnke’s low profile was that the British still had an outstanding war crimes charge against him, alleging he had been responsible for shooting prisoners at Dunkirk. Mohnke, silver-haired and craggy-featured, still lithe and powerful, looked as if he had stepped out of a Hollywood war film. ‘Herr von Lang took me to the yacht,’ stated Mohnke, ‘where, among others, I met Edda Goering.’ He and Heidemann established what he called ‘a very friendly rapport’ and were soon addressing each other with the familiar ‘du’.

  Another SS general introduced by Jochen von Lang became friendly with Heidemann around this time: Karl Wolff, one of the most senior of the surviving Nazis. Wolff had been Himmler’s liaison officer with Hitler. He was sufficiently close to the SS Reichsführer for Himmler to call him by a pet name, ‘Wolffchen’, an endearment which Heidemann later adopted. In Minsk in 1941, on the one occasion Himmler steeled himself to stand at the edge of a mass grave and watch his SS troops massacre a hundred naked men and women, it was Wolff who caught hold of him when he seemed to faint and forced him to carry on watching. Wolff was heavily implicated in the Final Solution. As the Nazis’ military governor in Italy, he was alleged to have sent at least 300,000 Jews to the Treblinka death camp. He was also accused of arranging the liquidation of partisans and Jews in the Soviet Union. Wolff saved his neck by secretly negotiating with Allen Dulles the surrender of the German forces in Italy to the Americans. In 1946 he was sentenced to four years’ hard labour but spent only a week in prison. In the 1950s Wolff became a successful advertising agent in Cologne. But in 1962 he was rearrested. Fresh evidence was produced, including a letter written in 1941 in which he professed to be ‘particularly gratified with the news that each day for the last fortnight a trainload of 5000 members of the “Chosen People” has been sent to Treblinka’. He was found guilty of complicity in mass murder and sent to prison, but in 1971, in view of his ‘otherwise blameless life’, he was released. He was seventy-four when Heidemann met him: charming, energetic and unrepentant.