Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  Heidemann also received from Kujau three hundred oil paintings, sketches and watercolours supposedly by Hitler; Nazi Party uniforms, flags and postcards; and 120 so-called Hitler documents. In addition, he acquired what he believed to be the actual revolver which Hitler had used to shoot himself. Attached to it was a label in Martin Bormann’s handwriting stating that ‘with this pistol, the Führer took his own life’. Heidemann proudly showed it to Wilhelm Mohnke and Otto Guensche. The gun was one of the most palpable fakes in his collection: it was a Belgian FN, whereas Hitler was known to have used a much heavier weapon, a 7.65 millimetre Walther. Both men said as much to Heidemann. Guensche, in particular, was in a position to know. He had helped carry the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun out of the bunker. Indeed he had actually picked up the suicide weapon from the bunker floor where it had slipped from Hitler’s fingers. But as with the diaries, Heidemann could not be swayed from his belief in its authenticity. He seemed to read great significance into the fact that only one of the revolver’s bullets had been fired.

  Heidemann felt that such treasures should be exhibited in a setting worthy of their value. During his meetings with Werner Maser in June he raised the possibility of buying Hitler’s childhood home in Leonding. Maser, who knew the area well from his earlier researches, offered to help. On 1 July, the historian and his wife, together with Heidemann and Gina, drove into Austria where Maser had arranged a meeting with the Bürgermeister and town council of Leonding. According to Maser:

  Heidemann offered to buy Hitler’s parental home. A large sum was mentioned as the purchase price – I think it was 270,000 marks, I’m not sure exactly. Heidemann said that money was no problem and patted his wallet. It seemed to the gentlemen of the town council of Leonding rather dubious that a journalist from Germany should be travelling around with so much of his own money in his pocket…. I asked Herr Heidemann on this occasion where he got the money from. He insisted it wasn’t money from Stern but from his wife who had sold two hotels for about 9 million marks.

  From Leonding we drove on together to Braunau. Heidemann wanted to look at Hitler’s birthplace and possibly even to buy that. For my part, I declined to put Heidemann in touch with the town authorities there. I had slight doubts about Heidemann. For a start, I was worried by the fact that he was wandering around with so much money and saying that the price was no object. The other thing was that the behaviour of Herr and Frau Heidemann rather repelled me when they talked about Hitler.

  As part of their tour that summer, the Heidemanns and the Masers also visited Berchtesgaden where they spent a while poking around in the rubble.

  The idea of buying the house in Leonding was not a mere whim. Heidemann was serious. After his return to Hamburg, on 13 July, he wrote to the town council to repeat his proposal ‘once again in writing’. Hitler’s childhood home, said Heidemann, ‘always meant more to him than his birthplace in Braunau’:

  Adolf Hitler had a decisive influence on the history of our century. The world and the events of today are a consequence of his politics and his war. A complete knowledge of all the threads in his life and the politics of this man is the basic precondition for the understanding of history. In my opinion, the house of Hitler’s parents is an ideal site for an historical museum, to be supervised by a trustee from your town to ensure that the presentation is strictly factual.

  If the town authorities agree, I will purchase from the town, for an agreed sum, the relevant house and land. I accept the conditions this would entail – for example, not altering the use to which the property is put without the express approval of the town authorities.

  Should there be any complications in selling this piece of land to me as a citizen of West Germany, an Austrian historical institute could be found who would become the legal owner of the land and museum.

  I ask you to consider this offer in a positive way. I await your answer and remain yours, etc, etc.

  The town council met to discuss Heidemann’s offer three days later. Despite his assurances that his Hitler museum would be ‘strictly factual’ there was something about the reporter and his proposal which the burghers of Leonding found faintly sinister. Heidemann’s scheme was rejected.

  Thwarted in his plan to install his collection in Leonding, Heidemann had a new idea. He decided to investigate the possibility of moving his Hitler memorabilia to South America and in the summer of 1981, he sought the advice of Klaus Barbie.

  Heidemann had met Barbie in Bolivia two years previously, during his honeymoon tour with Gina and General Wolff. The two men had enjoyed a friendly relationship. Unfortunately, from Heidemann’s point of view, a year after his return, in October 1980, Stern had decided to salvage at least something from the trip which they had financed. There had been a military coup in Bolivia in which Barbie, correctly, was suspected of having played a part. Despite strong opposition from Heidemann, the transcript of his interview with ‘the Butcher of Lyons’ had been used by another reporter as the basis for an article entitled ‘New Power for Old Nazis’. The piece depicted Barbie as a brutal SS torturer. Barbie had not been pleased.

  Hoping for a reconciliation, Heidemann wrote to him on 22 August 1981. He sent his condolences on the recent death of Barbie’s son. ‘I am very sorry’, he added, ‘that I have also caused you some sorrow.’ He then explained how the transcript of their interview had been taken off him by Stern’s editors and given ‘a completely different slant’:

  Of course I tried with all the means at my disposal to prevent publication – sadly, in vain. For me, the matter has been a continuing source of embarrassment and my wife reproached me for it for months. If she could not understand my dilemma, I can, of course, expect even less understanding from you and your wife. I can only ask for your forgiveness. I regret very much the loss of your friendship as a result of this stupid affair.

  Nevertheless I would like to entrust you with an important matter, and seek your advice on it.

  I have succeeded in securing a large part of Hitler’s property – extremely interesting notes, watercolours and oil paintings executed in his own hand; the pistol with which the Führer killed himself in the bunker (a handwritten letter from Bormann guarantees it); crates with documents from the Reich Chancellery; and, above all, the Blood Flag, still in its original case with the memorial plaque to the fallen of 1923. In my view, these relics of the National Socialist movement should, at the very least, be kept in a safe place by reliable men. You will understand that I do not want to store the flag for too long in Germany: here, the relevant laws and statutes are always getting tighter and tighter and there are frequent house searches for Nazi relics. Perhaps you can advise me where I could place these relics for safety?

  In the hope that you will still be prepared to have anything to do with me, I await your answer and will then give you more details about my finds. With best wishes to your wife from my wife and myself;

  Yours,

  Gerd Heidemann.

  There is no record of Barbie’s reply.

  FOURTEEN

  ON 1 JULY Manfred Fischer left Hamburg to take up his new appointment in Guetersloh as managing director of Bertelsmann. He was now in the first rank of European executives, controlling a company with an annual turnover of more than $2 billion. Bertelsmann had expanded so rapidly during the 1970s, growing by as much as 15 per cent a year, that its capital base had become thin; a period of retrenchment was required. Mohn had decided that Fischer was the best man to oversee this new policy: he did so on the basis of Fischer’s reputation as a cost cutter. Similarly, to replace Fischer at Gruner and Jahr, Mohn chose another businessman supposedly with an ability to enforce stringent economy.

  Gerd Schulte-Hillen was only forty years old. After leaving school he had spent a year in the Bundeswehr, then qualified as an engineer, joining Bertelsmann in 1969. He was promoted rapidly, from assistant manager in Germany, to technical manager of printing plants in Spain and Portugal. He was put in charge of printing for the whole of Gr
uner and Jahr and built a huge new factory for the group in the United States. Schulte-Hillen’s appointment as managing director came as something of a surprise. He was a highly respected technician, but he had little experience of handling journalists, of whom he was felt to be slightly in awe. He was quickly initiated into Gruner and Jahr’s great secret. ‘I think it was in June 1981,’ he recalled, ‘that Dr Manfred Fischer swore me to secrecy and then told me that the Hitler diaries were being bought by the company.’

  He was soon deeply involved in the operation. On 29 July, Heidemann received 345,000 marks for the next batch of diaries. A week later, on 5 August, he picked up another 220,000 marks. This meant that since January he had removed a total of six suitcases full of cash from the Deutsche Bank, containing 1.81 million marks. There were now eighteen diaries in the management safe.

  The next day, Hensmann and Sorge went to see the new managing director in his office. Before any further payments could be made, they explained, Schulte-Hillen had to sign a fresh authorization for the transfer of the company’s funds. Without hesitation, he signed a document endorsing Sorge to use another i million marks of the company’s money. According to Schulte-Hillen:

  Somehow I thought – oh, you don’t have to worry too much about that. I was still feeling my way into the job. I said to myself – well, two million has already been spent, it must be OK. Fischer himself did it, and now he’s on the overall board of the company and is my boss. Who was I to question it? That was a mistake. The next time I was asked to give my approval for the payment of another million, the room for manoeuvre was even smaller.

  Manfred Fischer, the man who had initiated the operation, was 150 miles away, grappling with the day to day running of a multinational company. Schulte-Hillen, a relatively inexperienced businessman in a new job with little experience of journalism, was merely carrying on what Fischer had started. Hensmann was a weak man. The finance director, Kuehsel, did what he was told. Sorge’s objectivity was compromised by his friendship with Thomas Walde. Walde and Heidemann, both expecting to make a fortune when the books were published, were the last men to call a halt to the delivery of the diaries. The editors were sulkily refusing to show much interest in the management’s scoop.

  The whole project was out of control.

  The only person who seemed to be showing any financial sense was Edith Lieblang in Stuttgart. She took charge of the envelopes full of cash which Heidemann was delivering and invested them in bricks and mortar. When it came to money, she said firmly, ‘We didn’t have “mine” and “yours”.’ In May the couple bought a new apartment in Wolfschlugen for 235,000 marks, together with a garage for 18,000 marks. In July she paid 230,000 marks for a flat in Schreiberstrasse. This was on the ground floor of a substantial, heavy masonried, four-storey block, tucked away at the end of a quiet street near the centre of Stuttgart. Schreiberstrasse became Kujau’s new shop. He bought a large building at the back for 120,000 marks, installed heavy steel shutters and a security camera to scan the courtyard, and transferred to it his entire collection from Aspergstrasse. He hired a local taxi company to do the removals.

  Kujau continued to work on the diaries during the day at home. Edith knew he was supplying Hitler diaries to Stern but claimed, somewhat implausibly, that she thought they were genuine: she did not know, she said, what Kujau was up to during the day when she was out working at the Café Hochland. ‘I don’t know what he did in my absence. I rarely went into his workroom. He used to clean it himself.’

  Once he had done the research, it took Kujau, on average, only four and a half hours to forge a complete diary. His favourite source was a weighty, two-volume edition of Hitler’s Speeches and Proclamations 1932–45, a daily chronology of the Führer’s activities, compiled in 1962 by the German historian Max Domarus. Working against the clock to satisfy Heidemann’s demand for diaries, Kujau resorted to wholesale plagiarism, copying out page after page from Domarus. The Hitler Diaries – the object of one of the most extravagant ‘hypes’ in the history of journalism – were for the most part nothing more interesting than a tedious recital of official engagements and Nazi party announcements. Nine-tenths of the material being so carefully hoarded in the Gruner and Jahr safe was unpublishable. These, for example, are the entries for the first seven days of September 1938 – a typically uninspired week in the life of the Führer, as recorded by Konrad Kujau:

  1. The Reich Air Defence Federation received its own insignia and flag. The founding of the ‘Federation for the unity of Germany and Poland’ was today announced by the Polish Prime Minister.

  2. Opening of the exhibition ‘Great Germany’ in Japan (telegram). A youth delegation from Japan is received in Munich by Schirach (telegram).

  Reception at the Berghof for Henlein. Conference.

  3. Admiral Horthy has kept his word. As from today there is compulsory military service in Hungary.

  4. Opening of the Party Rally ‘Great Germany’.

  Reception in the Nuremberg town hall.

  5. Opening of the Party Congress. Proclamation. Handing over of Reich insignia to the mayor of the town of Nuremberg. A cultural meeting.

  6. Call to the Reichs Labour Service. Diplomatic reception in the Hotel Deutscher Hof.

  The bulk of the diaries, especially the early ones, consisted of padding of this sort – a technique which reached a pinnacle of improbability in the entry for 19 July 1940, when Hitler was supposed to have devoted five pages to copying out the entire list of senior promotions in the German armed forces following the fall of France.

  At the end of each month’s entries, Kujau had ‘Hitler’ write a set of more general notes headed ‘Personal’. It was in these sections of the diary, unfettered by chronology and so less vulnerable to checks for accuracy, that Kujau allowed the Führer to think aloud about the state of his affairs. There were occasional revelations: that the burning of the books in May 1933 ‘was not a good idea of Goebbels”; that some of ‘the measures against the Jews were too strong for me’. But overall, the tone remained relentlessly trivial. Health was one recurrent theme: ‘My health is poorly – the result of too little sleep’ (April 1933); ‘I suffer much from sleeplessness and stomach pains’ (June 1934); ‘My stomach makes it difficult to sleep, my left leg is often numb’ (July 1934). Eva Braun was another regular source of concern: ‘Although I have become Reichs Chancellor, I have not forgotten E’s birthday’ (January 1933); ‘She is the sporty type – it has helped her very much to be in the fresh air’ (October 1934). Occasionally, as in June 1941, these twin preoccupations met: ‘On Eva’s wishes, I am thoroughly examined by my doctors. Because of the new pills, I have violent flatulence, and – says Eva – bad breath.’ It was for material of this sort that Stern was to end up paying roughly £50 per word.

  Kujau turned out the diaries so quickly that he had soon exhausted the stock of school notebooks in his cellar. In the summer of 1981 he flew to West Berlin, crossed into the East, and in a taxi travelled from shop to shop, buying up the old-fashioned, black-bound volumes. He returned home the same day bearing twenty-two of them. The whole lot cost him 77 marks.

  Shortly afterwards Kujau passed on to Heidemann some wonderful news from his brother in East Germany. Contrary to their initial estimate, it now appeared that there were more than twenty-seven diaries. The haul of Hitler writings salvaged from the Boernersdorf crash was much larger than had been thought.

  Heidemann returned to Hamburg to tell Gruner and Jahr of this latest development.

  On 23 August, less than two and a half weeks after he had been asked to authorize payment of i million marks, Schulte-Hillen had to sanction a second transfer of money, this time of 600,000 marks. Heidemann reported that the price of the diaries had shot up to 200,000 marks each. The East German general, he said, was now having to pay money to members of the Communist government as well as to other corrupt officials. The company once again felt that it had no option but to pay up. Indeed, perversely, the price rise increased the com
pany’s confidence that the diaries were genuine. ‘We weren’t surprised,’ said one of the managers later. ‘In fact, we expected it. Once you’ve bought part of a collection, you naturally want the rest. It’s worth that much more to you. The seller knows that and takes advantage of it. It’s normal commercial practice.’

  Schulte-Hillen was hopelessly out of his depth. Every so often, Heidemann would come into his office, escorted by Sorge, and read extracts from the latest diaries out loud to him. The banality of the content meant nothing to the technically minded managing director. ‘I didn’t concern myself with the question of whether they were sensational or not. That wasn’t my affair.’ For Schulte-Hillen, struggling to read himself into his new job, the diaries were an exotic project bequeathed to him by his predecessor. ‘I didn’t really worry about the details,’ he confessed. ‘Sorge and Walde were Heidemann’s principal points of reference.’

  Heidemann now began fantasizing about his role as middleman between Stern and the diaries’ supplier. Simply flying down to Stuttgart, handing over the money and picking up the diaries did not accord with his vision of himself as a sleuth reporter. He decided to glamorize the story. ‘I remember a very hot day in the summer,’ said Walde later. ‘Gerd Heidemann arrived in the office in a blue suit looking unusually worked-up.’ According to Heidemann, the lorry driver who used to bring the diaries out of East Germany had been replaced. Heidemann said he was now having to drive into the East himself and smuggle the documents illegally over the border. ‘The whole thing seemed very dangerous to him,’ said Walde. ‘He didn’t know what to do when he got to the frontier. He just put the envelope containing the diary under the car’s mat.’