Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  Stiefel still kept the 1935 diary in his safe, but his importance in the affair now lessened. He disapproved of Stern’s left-wing reputation and refused to help Heidemann by revealing the identity of the diary’s supplier. Tiefenthaeler, who had already acted as Heidemann’s agent in his attempts to sell Carin II, now supplanted him. His motive was almost certainly financial. He admitted that Heidemann told him it would ‘not do him any harm’ to help Stern find the diaries; in 1983 Kujau referred to him, with a laugh, as ‘Mr Ten Percent’. It was in the summer of 1980 that Tiefenthaeler told Heidemann that the diary had been brought into the West by a Herr Fischer of Stuttgart. Heidemann and Walde had then spent hours trawling through the local telephone book. (The reason they never found him was that the Kujau’s home in Ditzingen was listed in the directory under Edith’s surname, Lieblang.) A few months later, after their return from Boernersdorf in November, the Stern men had renewed their contact with Tiefenthaeler and asked him to transmit an offer to ‘Herr Fischer’ on their behalf. Tiefenthaeler did so in a letter to Kujau dated 29 November 1980:

  Dear Conny,

  I’ve got something to tell you which I don’t think we should discuss on the telephone because you never know if the line is bugged or not. I assume that you’ll be absolutely quiet about this matter and that you won’t talk to anyone about it.

  A large Hamburg publishing company has come to me with a request that I should establish contact between you and them. It’s about the diaries of A.H. which you have or could obtain. I was quoted an offer of 2 million marks which would be paid [for the diaries]. In addition, these gentlemen were not so much interested in possessing the diaries as in taking photocopies. The diaries could stay, as before, in your possession. Should you indicate that you are interested in making contact, this would be done as quickly as possible. The whole thing would, of course, be handled in strict confidence and silence on both sides is a precondition. Should you prefer gold to currency, there would be an unlimited amount.

  I would be very grateful if you could let me know as soon as possible what you decide – but please, not on the telephone.

  Perhaps I should also mention that the wealthy company would take any risk entailed in publication as well as any legal consequences which publication might entail. The source of these volumes would never be named – in the case of a legal battle (the Federal Government versus the publishing company) the company would plead press confidentiality.

  I have been officially assured of all these things and they are ready to conclude a contract with you in which all parties would be legally secure. Perhaps you would also allow me to point out, my dear Conny, that none of these gentlemen has been given your name by me. They know that a Herr Fischer is the key to these volumes, but they know neither your first name nor your address and they will not discover them from me, lest you take a negative view of this project….

  Please don’t even mention this to Fritz [Stiefel].

  Kujau was already wealthier than he had ever been, thanks to his activities as a forger. But considering that two million marks represented almost ten times the amount he was to make from his best customer, Fritz Stiefel, it is scarcely surprising that he succumbed to this offer. Even if this ‘wealthy company’ discovered that he was passing on fakes, he stood an excellent chance of getting away with something. His anonymity was guaranteed. If anything went wrong he could always fall back on the excuse that he was merely handling material which originated behind the Iron Curtain. Thus it was that at the beginning of 1981 he gave Tiefenthaeler permission to divulge his telephone number and his address in Aspergstrasse.

  On 15 January a man calling himself Gerd Heidemann telephoned him in Ditzingen. They discussed the diaries. Kujau repeatedly stressed that he had to have a guarantee of absolute secrecy and that he would deal only with Heidemann personally. True to his past form he also embroidered the story, promising the reporter not simply diaries but a genuine Hitler opera and a third volume of Mein Kampf. Kujau knew that the more improbable his inventions sounded, the more likely people were to believe that he could not possibly be lying. He knew what he was doing. He knew Heidemann’s type. He recognized beneath the affected calm the note of longing that signified the suspension of disbelief. It was all too easy.

  Sure enough, on Wednesday 28 January, at about 7.15 in the evening, the telephone rang again. Kujau had a brief conversation, then turned to Edith. ‘That was Heidemann,’ he told her. ‘He’s on his way over.’ Within five minutes he was opening the door to his latest, eager, moon-faced victim, who clutched in his hand a suitcase full of money.

  Part Three

  ‘Swastikas sell – and they sell better and better.’

  Sidney Mayer, publisher

  ELEVEN

  THIS FIRST ENCOUNTER between Kujau and Heidemann lasted for more than seven hours. To begin with, Heidemann later testified, Kujau appeared reluctant to agree to a deal. He told the reporter that he had already had an offer of $2 million for the diaries from America and that the Hearst newspaper group was considering serializing them. According to Edith Lieblang, Heidemann then opened up the suitcase and displayed ‘a huge amount of money’. He offered it to Kujau as a down payment for the diaries. He repeated that his company was willing to pay 2 million marks for all the volumes. As an added inducement, Heidemann also produced the Goering uniform, which appears to have excited Kujau even more than the money. ‘I had to have it,’ he said later. ‘I had all the other uniforms – Hitler’s, Himmler’s, Rommel’s. My one thought was: “How do I get this uniform off this man?”’ Kujau, according to Lieblang, promised the reporter ‘that he could provide the diaries’.

  After that, the atmosphere relaxed somewhat. Heidemann, whisky in hand, boasted of his contacts with famous Nazis like Karl Wolff and Klaus Barbie. He described how he had tracked down the crash site in Boernersdorf. He then started recounting his experiences as a war correspondent. By about midnight Edith was beginning to fall asleep. She went off to bed. But Heidemann and Kujau stayed up talking until almost 3 a.m., when the reporter at last left to drive back to his hotel in Stuttgart.

  After snatching a few hours’ sleep, at 10 a.m., he was back with Kujau again, this time in the Aspergstrasse shop. His main concern was the diary held by Fritz Stiefel. He was worried that word of its existence would leak out to a rival newspaper. According to Edith, he was ‘insistent’ that they should go and retrieve it. Kujau, who was worried about souring his relations with Stiefel, managed to put him off by telling him that the industrialist was on holiday in Italy. Heidemann was anxious to conclude at least some sort of legal agreement with Kujau before he left. He suggested that he should make contact with Kujau’s lawyer and arrange for him to come to Hamburg to sign an agreement with the Gruner and Jahr legal department – an offer which Kujau hastily declined. Instead, the two men parted with a tentative verbal understanding. Kujau would deliver the books, Heidemann the money. He would call the reporter when he heard from his brother in the East. As a gesture of good faith, they swapped gifts. Heidemann left his genuine Goering uniform behind and returned to Hamburg bearing a faked Hitler oil painting. The relationship had started on an appropriate note.

  At 11.30 the following morning, in Stern’s elegant riverfront headquarters – known, irreverently, around Hamburg as ‘the monkey cliff’ – Heidemann went in to see Wilfried Sorge to report on the outcome of his trip to Stuttgart. The supplier of the diaries, he told Sorge, was a ‘wealthy collector’ of Nazi memorabilia whose brother was a general in East Germany. Some of Hitler’s diaries were already in the West. Initially they had come over the border in ordinary travel luggage. Now they were being smuggled across hidden inside pianos (pianos being one of East Germany’s main exports to the West). The general would at once cease supplying the diaries if he thought they were for publication in Stern. Heidemann was therefore posing as a Swiss collector. He repeated: it was imperative that the company maintain absolute secrecy.

  In Stuttgart, meanwhi
le, Konrad Kujau was having to do some explaining to Fritz Stiefel, not about the Hitler diaries, but about the other pieces of so-called Hitler writing he had sold to the collector.

  Eberhard Jaeckel and his co-editor, Axel Kuhn, had gone ahead and reprinted material from Stiefel’s collection in their book of Hitler’s writings from 1905 to 1924. The book had been published the previous autumn. To their embarrassment, Anton Hoch of the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich had pointed out that some of Hitler’s ‘poetry’ was obviously fake. In particular, ‘Der Kamerad’, a poem supposedly written by Hitler in 1916, was actually lifted straight out of a book of verse entitled Poems of the Old Comrades by Herybert Menzel, published in 1936. It might have been possible to argue that Hitler himself had merely copied the poem from some earlier edition of Menzel’s work. But unfortunately, as Hoch pointed out, Menzel was only ten years old in 1916. Jaeckel contacted Stiefel to demand an explanation. The outraged Stiefel contacted Kujau.

  On 5 February, exactly a week after concluding his agreement with Heidemann, Kujau joined Stiefel and Jaeckel for an emergency meeting in the professor’s office in Stuttgart University. What most perturbed him, said Jaeckel, was the fact that ‘Der Kamerad’ had been accompanied by a letter on official Nazi stationery, signed by a party official, stating that the poem was unquestionably genuine. The fact that ‘Der Kamerad’ was such an obvious forgery meant that the letter was also probably faked. And similar letters had been attached to dozens of pieces of Hitler writing belonging to Stiefel which Jaeckel had printed in his book. It had to be assumed that they were all forged.

  This was a nasty moment for Kujau. According to Jaeckel he ‘seemed very unsettled by my doubts’. But he handled the situation adroitly. In view of the aspersions which had been cast, he said, he was prepared to be more specific about the source of the material. He then proceeded, with considerable cheek, to recount to the two men the story of the crashed Hitler plane exactly as it had been described to him for the first time by Heidemann the previous week. Kujau, recalled Jaeckel,

  told me in detail what had only been suggested in general before: that the pieces came from a plane that had crashed near Boernersdorf in 1945 on its way from Berlin to Salzburg…. To strengthen his case he said that the journalist Gerd Heidemann had seen the graves of the plane’s crew in Boernersdorf.

  Having used the evidence of one victim in an attempt to soothe the anxieties of another, Kujau then retreated to his customary last line of defence. According to Jaeckel ‘he said he couldn’t add very much more because he was only the middleman. He didn’t really know much about the documents or their historical context.’

  There was little more that could be done. Jaeckel had no alternative but to begin preparing an announcement to place in an academic journal admitting that he had been duped. He advised Stiefel in the meantime to submit his material for forensic examination. As for Kujau, he went home to Ditzingen to begin forging the first volume of Hitler diaries for Gerd Heidemann.

  To sustain him through his labours over the next two years, Kujau, like any conscientious professional writer, established a regular routine. He would get up at 6 a.m. followed, half an hour later, by Edith Lieblang. The couple would have coffee together and then she would drive off to Stuttgart to her job in the Café Hochland. Kujau would cook himself a heavy breakfast of fried potatoes and two fried eggs and, thus fortified, retire to his studio where he would work right through the day, without even stopping for lunch. When the police raided his premises in 1983 they carried out ten cartons full of books and articles accumulated by Kujau to help him establish Hitler’s daily activities. There were 515 books and newspapers in his workroom, 106 additional periodicals in his cellar. Stuffed into them were thousands of bookmarks – playing cards, blotting paper, old bills and tickets, visitors’ cards and toilet paper – marking passages required for the concoction of the diaries. Kujau would write out a rough draft in pencil and then transfer it in ink into one of the school notebooks kept in his cellar. His work became more sophisticated with time. To start with, he confined himself to writing about Hitler’s early years in power – years full of laws and decrees with which he could fill the Führer’s empty days and which did not require much research into complex political issues. In the evening, when Edith returned from work, she would cook them both a meal. ‘Conny would lie stretched out on the sofa,’ recalled Edith. ‘We’d watch television and often he’d fall asleep. I had no idea what he did during the day. We gave one another a lot of space.’ This sedentary regime was to last until the spring of 1983.

  According to Kujau, he finished the first three volumes about ten days after the meeting with Stiefel and Jaeckel. To dress them up, he stuck a red wax seal in the shape of a German eagle on the covers, together with a label, signed by Rudolf Hess, declaring them to be Hitler’s property. He bashed them about for a while to age them, and sprinkled some tea over the pages. He then rang Heidemann to tell him he had the books. Walde said later that these early diaries were not supposed to have come from East Germany ‘but from the United States, where “Fischer” had offered them through a lawyer to an interested party’. Kujau flew up from Stuttgart with the diaries to be entertained by Heidemann on board Carin II. To celebrate the arrival of the first books, the enthusiastic reporter opened a bottle of sparkling white wine.

  Only five men at Gruner and Jahr knew the secret of the diaries’ existence. For them, Wednesday 18 February was a memorable day. Shortly before 10 a.m., four of the initiated – Gerd Heidemann, Thomas Walde, Jan Hensmann and Wilfried Sorge – trooped into the office of the fifth, Manfred Fischer. The doors were closed, Fischer instructed his secretary to make sure they were not disturbed, and Heidemann laid the diaries before them.

  It appears to have been a moment of almost religious solemnity. Hensmann picked up one of the diaries. It was ‘bound in black’, he recalled, ‘1·5 centimetres thick’. Like most of the others, he could not read the old Germanic script in which it was written, but it undoubtedly felt genuine. ‘I held it with great care in my hands,’ he said later. Manfred Fischer was also impressed by the slightly battered appearance of the books. ‘They were a little bit damaged,’ he remembered. ‘The tops of the pages were bent.’ For Fischer, the arrival of these first Hitler diaries was ‘a great moment’ in his life: ‘It was a very special experience to hold such a thing in your hand. The certainty that this diary was written by him – and now I have it in my grasp….’

  The diaries cast a spell over the room. The intense secrecy of the meeting; the thrill of handling contraband, smuggled at great cost and danger from the site of a wartime aircrash; above all, the presence of Adolf Hitler as contained in this unknown record of his intimate thoughts – all these elements combined to produce a highly charged atmosphere, a mood which in its turn created what Fischer subsequently called ‘a sort of group psychosis’. The prospect of possessing something once owned by the Führer affected these cool, modern-minded North German businessmen just as it did the obsessive, ex-Nazi collectors in the South. ‘We wanted to have them,’ said Fischer of the diaries. ‘Even if we’d only believed that there was a 10 per cent chance that they were genuine, we’d still have said, “Get them here.”’ Of all the figures in history, perhaps only Adolf Hitler could have exercised such an hypnotic fascination.

  In this atmosphere, the five men now took a series of decisions which were to have profound consequences. Both Heidemann and Walde urged on the group the importance of maintaining absolute secrecy. If the slightest hint of the existence of the diaries leaked out, they told the three businessmen, the East German general would cease shipping the material. Heidemann, according to Hensmann, went further: ‘He didn’t merely warn of the need to protect his sources, but of the danger that human life itself might be threatened.’ For this reason the two journalists argued strongly against bringing in any experts from outside to examine the diaries until the full set was in the company’s possession. ‘These reservations’, stated So
rge, ‘were accepted. They led to the decision to obtain further volumes before authentication tests were carried out.’ Not even Henri Nannen and the three editors-in-chief of Stern would be told what was going on until all the transactions had been completed; that would probably, said Heidemann, be in mid-May.

  All these proposals were accepted. ‘It was unanimously agreed,’ stated Hensmann, ‘that we should continue with the project.’

  The five men were now effectively bound together in a conspiracy against Stern. Without consulting a handwriting expert, a forensic scientist or an historian, Fischer that day committed the company to the purchase of 27 volumes of Hitler’s diaries at a price of 85,000 marks each; plus a sum of 200,000 marks to be paid for the third volume of Mein Kampf. The total cost of the project would be 2.5 million marks. As the company’s managing director, he signed a document authorizing the immediate transfer of i million marks from the company’s main account for the obtaining of the diaries.

  ‘We all had a kind of blackout,’ he commented afterwards.

  For all this talk of mental aberration, the businessmen’s behaviour was not totally irrational. As publishers they knew the size of the potential market for any venture connected with the Third Reich. In Britain one publisher, Bison Books, had been built entirely on the strength of the public’s fascination with the Nazis. Hitler’s Wartime Picture Magazine was simply extracts from the Nazi propaganda magazine Signal stitched together in a single volume: it sold over a quarter of a million copies in Britain and the United States; between 1976 and 1978 it was reprinted eight times. Another picture book from the same publisher, Der Führer, edited by a former SS officer, Herbert Walther, was bought by more than 50,000 people. Bison’s flamboyant founder, Sidney Mayer, was quite open about the reason for his success: