Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  For the benefit of Schulte-Hillen, Heidemann further elaborated on the story. He told the managing director that he would drive down the autobahn to Berlin. At an agreed point on the journey, another car would draw alongside him with its passenger window open. With both cars travelling at the same speed, Heidemann would toss the packet of money through the open window. The vehicles would then exchange positions and the driver of the other car would throw him the diaries. The managing director had never heard anything like it. He told Heidemann he was ‘crazy’: ‘I said he shouldn’t do it, especially in view of his family responsibilities.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ Schulte-Hillen remembers Heidemann telling him, ‘I’ll do it.’

  Despite his misgivings for Heidemann’s safety, Schulte-Hillen was impressed, and now treated the reporter with even greater respect. He would not hear a word said against him. He would rebuke anyone who expressed doubts about Heidemann’s heroism: ‘When a colleague puts himself in personal danger in order to obtain things,’ he used to say, ‘he should be entitled to the trust of others.’ When Heidemann complained to Sorge that his own car was too dilapidated for this kind of work and that he was having to use Gina’s, Schulte-Hillen arranged for him to be given a brand new company Mercedes.

  In fact, Gruner and Jahr had a strong motive for believing Heidemann’s story. If they could swear on oath that the money for the diaries had been paid outside West Germany, they would enjoy substantial tax concessions. In November, there was a month-long series of negotiations to provide Heidemann with a special life insurance policy at Gruner and Jahr’s expense. Heidemann insisted on a clause providing for the payment of ransom money in case they should have to buy him out of an East German jail. In the event of his death, his share in the profits from Hitler’s diaries was to be given to his heirs. Heidemann joked that this generous policy might induce his wife to ‘separation, Italian style’. This farce carried on until the first week of December, when Heidemann announced that the piano shipments had resumed.

  Around this time Heidemann also complained to Schulte-Hillen that he had not received a salary increase for several years. He hinted that he might be forced to leave the company unless something was done. The managing director immediately called in Peter Koch, Felix Schmidt and Rolf Gillhausen and instructed them, in Koch’s words, ‘to take better care of Heidemann, to motivate him more’. The editors had not recommended Heidemann for a rise because they had not thought his work merited one. Now, under pressure, they once again started paying him regular annual increments. Schmidt was also told by Schulte-Hillen to give Heidemann a special bonus payment of 20,000 marks. ‘The man needs recognition,’ Schulte-Hillen told him, ‘and he needs to be treated with special care.’ Schmidt gritted his teeth and arranged this reward for the reporter who had spent a whole year deceiving his editors. ‘Recognition… special care….’ ‘These words of the management’, said Schmidt two years later, ‘still ring in my ears.’

  Heidemann’s fiftieth birthday coincided with a call from Kujau to tell him that more diaries were ready for collection. Heidemann decided to take Gina down to Stuttgart with him and the couple spent the evening of 3 December having a celebration dinner with Kujau and Edith in the local Holiday Inn, close to the Munich motorway exit. It was the first time all four of them had been together. They got on well; Gina particularly liked Edith – ‘a very nice lady,’ she called her, ‘very bourgeois’. There was champagne, and at midnight the gregarious ‘Dr Fischer’ led them in the singing of ‘Happy Birthday’. Amid warm embraces, Gina presented her husband with a solid gold Rolex watch.

  It had been a good year for the couple. Heidemann had at last found the recognition he craved so desperately. Soon he would be able to present the world with his magnificent story and he and Gina would be wealthy for life. The Heidemanns beamed at Kujau, the source of their good fortune. ‘We owe you so much,’ said Gina. Kujau grinned.

  FIFTEEN

  THE NEW YEAR of 1982 witnessed further large withdrawals of cash from the Adolphsplatz bank by Gerd Heidemann: 400,000 marks on 14 January; 200,000 on 27 January; 200,000 on 17 February. On 1 March, after picking up another 400,000 marks, he and Walde were taken out to dine at Hamburg’s Coelln Oyster Restaurant by Gerd Schulte-Hillen.

  According to Walde, the purpose of the meal was for Schulte-Hillen ‘to show some recognition to Heidemann and to get to know me better’. Between mouthfuls of oysters, the three men discussed the Hitler diaries. There were already more than two dozen volumes in the management safe. There seemed no sign of an end to the stream of books emanating from behind the Iron Curtain. Even so, the time was approaching when decisions would have to be taken about the form of publication. Obviously there would be those who would seek to denigrate Stern’s scoop. Some form of independent authentication would have to be obtained – not because there were any doubts about the material in the management’s mind, merely to ensure there was a weapon available with which critics could be silenced.

  Walde had already made contact with West Germany’s two main police organizations, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) and the Zollkriminalinstitut. Without mentioning the Hitler diaries specifically, he asked them in general terms what sort of tests had to be done to determine the age of documents and the authenticity of handwriting; who could do such tests; how much they might cost; what materials the experts would require for testing. ‘Because neither of these two authorities does work for private individuals, I tried to arrange for people who work there to do tests for us in a private capacity.’ He had then rung the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and the Federal Archives – the Bundesarchiv – in Koblenz, to make arrangements to collect copies of Hitler’s handwriting; this could then be sent to the experts for comparison with Stern’s material. It should be possible to organize such tests within the next few weeks.

  Assuming, as they all did, that the Hitler diaries would quickly pass through the formality of authentication, Walde, Heidemann and Schulte-Hillen discussed how the books might be marketed. Their discovery was a scoop, but their content, it had to be admitted, was meagre. Each diary contained an average of only 1000 words. Added together, Gruner and Jahr’s two dozen volumes scarcely added up to a couple of chapters, never mind a book. The three men agreed that the material could not be printed as it stood. It would have to be ‘journalistically worked on’, setting quotations from the diary in their historical context. This would have to be done whilst the diaries were still arriving, in complete secrecy and without outside help – an enormous undertaking, especially since neither Heidemann nor Walde was a qualified historian.

  Two days after the meeting with Schulte-Hillen, on Wednesday 3 March, Walde and Wilfried Sorge were invited round for the evening to Heidemann’s flat. The reporter wanted them to meet an important contact of his who could provide Stern with important Nazi documents. According to Sorge Heidemann said ‘he needed our presence if he was to appear to be negotiating seriously on Stern’s behalf’. That night in the elegant Elbchaussee apartment they were confronted by a seedy and furtive character in his mid-fifties, whom Heidemann introduced as Medard Klapper.

  Medardus Leopold Karl Klapper exerted a hold over Heidemann similar to that exercised by Konrad Kujau. He spun large and elaborate fantasies about the Third Reich in which Heidemann believed and in which he invested large sums of Stern’s money. Klapper claimed to have joined the SS in 1944 at the age of seventeen and to have been one of Hitler’s bodyguards in the final days of the war. He was now an arms dealer in Karlsruhe in southern Germany. Apart from the Nazis, Klapper’s other obsession was with cowboys and Indians: his shop in Karlsruhe, called The General Gun Store, was designed to look as if it belonged in the American wild west. Heidemann had made his acquaintance in 1971 when he was working on crime stories for Stern. Klapper was a police informer. Like Kujau, Klapper dealt in Nazi memorabilia and occasionally ran a stall selling militaria in the Flea Market in Konstanz. When Heidemann was short of money in the late 1970s Klapper had sold a fe
w Goering mementoes on his behalf: a French collector bought a silver cigarette case and some silver picture frames for 20,000 francs.

  Klapper’s speciality was buried Nazi treasure. He promised Heidemann he could lead him to a hoard of enormous value. It would not only provide the reporter with a great story for Stern, it would also make him rich. On 19 August 1981 – shortly after the collapse of his attempts to buy Hitler’s childhood home – Heidemann opened up his suitcase to Klapper, paying him 25,000 marks in cash. ‘He said he now had money “like it was growing on trees”,’ recalled Klapper. ‘He showed me his pocket which was stuffed with 1000-mark notes.’ In return for the money, Klapper provided Heidemann with a photocopy of a map, purporting to show the whereabouts of 450 kilos of gold and platinum, dumped by the Nazis at the end of the war in the Stolpsee, a lake in East Germany. A few weeks later, Heidemann signed an agreement with some East German representatives. He put up an undisclosed amount of money in return for which the East Germans promised to provide the manpower to search the Stolpsee; the proceeds would be split fifty-fifty. Eventually forty engineers from the East German army equipped with tons of dredging machinery were involved in searching the lake; all they sucked out of the water, Heidemann later complained to Klapper, was 350 cubic metres of mud.

  Undeterred, Heidemann continued to believe the arms dealer’s stories. Confiscated receipts suggest that over the next eighteen months he paid him almost 450,000 marks. In particular, he believed the gun salesman’s claim that Martin Bormann was still alive: this story, after all, accorded with his own, earlier obsession of 1979. Klapper played on Heidemann’s gullibility, assuring him that eventually he would take him to ‘Martin’. According to him, Bormann led a nomadic existence, shuttling between hideouts in Argentina, Paraguay, Spain, Egypt and Zurich (where he was being watched by the Israeli secret service). Klapper told Heidemann that if he was willing to undergo a secret ceremony called a ‘Sippung’, he would be admitted to Martin’s inner circle. As far as Heidemann was concerned, Klapper was clearly a very important individual indeed, which was why he wanted to introduce him to Herr Walde and Herr Sorge, his colleagues from Stern.

  Klapper was more restrained in his storytelling when there were others present than he was when he had Heidemann on his own. He told Sorge and Walde that Bormann had set up a secret Nazi archive in Madrid, administered by a Spanish lawyer named Dr Iquisabel. Among other things, these documents allegedly proved that the Germans had built three atomic bombs by the end of the war. These documents could be made available to Stern, free of charge, providing the magazine agreed to deal with the material ‘objectively’. Walde and Heidemann signed a contract promising to abide by this undertaking and in return Klapper pledged to deliver the documents from ‘Dr Iquisabel’ by the end of the month.

  Needless to say, nothing came of this agreement. But Klapper maintained contact with Heidemann and the reporter continued to believe his stories: for example, that he had met Bormann and Josef Mengele at Madrid airport and that Bormann lived in a big house with a garden and a car park in Zurich. Heidemann gradually became certain that through Klapper he was talking to Bormann, and that ‘Martin’ had chosen him to be his intermediary with the outside world. This fantasy became inextricably linked in Heidemann’s mind with the discovery of the Hitler diaries until, by April 1983, when Stern eventually launched its scoop, Heidemann confidently believed that Bormann himself would appear at the magazine’s press conference to authenticate them.

  While Heidemann pursued these shadows from the Third Reich, Thomas Walde organized the submission of the diaries for expert analysis.

  This should have been the moment at which Kujau’s fraud was exposed. The forger, after all, had failed to take even the most rudimentary precautions. The diaries were written in ordinary school notebooks stained with tea. The initials on the front of at least one volume were made of plastic. The labels, signed by Bormann and Hess, stating that the books were ‘the property of the Führer’ were supposed to span thirteen years but were all typed on the same machine. The diaries’ pages were made of paper manufactured after 1945. The binding, glue and thread which held them together all contained chemicals which proved them to be postwar. The entries themselves, dashed off by a man with no academic training, were pitted with inaccuracies. The ink in which they were written was bought from an ordinary artists’ shop. Logically, the Hitler diaries hoax should have collapsed in the spring of 1982, the moment the experts started work. Instead, Kujau was once again saved from exposure by the behaviour of his victims.

  Inside Stern, the idea that the diaries might be forgeries was unthinkable. The project had been allowed to reach a stage where cancellation would ruin careers and cost millions of marks; successful completion, on the other hand, would bring the participants enormous financial and professional rewards. From the start the Stern men had been prepared to suspend disbelief, to have faith that the books were genuine. Now, subconsciously, their minds had become closed to any other possibility. All of them, from Manfred Fischer and Gerd Schulte-Hillen downwards, had a vested interest in the diaries passing the experts’ scrutiny as great as Konrad Kujau’s: the trickster and his dupes were on the same side.

  If Stern had been properly sceptical, the magazine would have commissioned a thorough forensic examination of a complete diary volume. Instead, they concentrated on securing the bare minimum of authentication felt necessary to satisfy the rest of the world. The process, consequently, was flawed from the start.

  ‘The security precautions surrounding the authentication had to be very tight,’ recalled Walde. ‘We had to prevent word leaking out and jeopardizing the life of “Fischer’s” brother in East Germany.’ It was considered too risky to part with an entire book. A single page was cut out of the special volume devoted to the flight of Rudolf Hess which had been delivered to Stern the previous November. The page consisted of a draft, supposedly in Hitler’s hand, of the Nazi Party’s official announcement of Hess’s flight to Scotland. This tiny sample was considered sufficient to determine the authenticity of the entire hoard of diaries. The text of the Hess statement was selected for analysis because it was already well known; the diary page on which it was copied out was to be passed off simply as a hitherto undiscovered Hitler document, part of a larger find which the magazine wanted checked. None of the experts was told that what they were actually authenticating were Hitler’s diaries. This duplicity on Stern’s part, the product of its anxiety to safeguard its scoop, was to lead it to disaster.

  On Monday, 5 April, Heidemann and Walde visited the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz to meet two of the archive’s senior officials, Dr Josef Henke and Dr Klaus Oldenhage. They gave them what purported to be a handwritten draft by Hitler of a New Year greetings telegram, dated i January 1940, addressed to General Franco: this was one of the documents Kujau had supplied to Heidemann along with the diaries. The two journalists told the archivists that it was one of a set of documents which Stern believed it could obtain from sources outside the Federal Republic. In return for an assurance that after Stern had finished with it the material would eventually be donated to the Bundesarchiv, Dr Henke agreed to submit the telegram to the West German police for an official handwriting and forensic analysis. The following day, Walde sent the archivists two further original documents: a speech draft dated 29 December 1934 and a letter to Hermann Goering dated 17 October 1940. These too were drawn from the archive accompanying the diaries. In a covering note, Walde stressed the need for secrecy:

  Once again we ask you to treat the enclosed documents with absolute discretion and not to reveal the source. Your report should be completed as soon as possible in order to enable us to secure the other material should it prove genuine. Otherwise, we must assume that the documents which are still abroad will be sold to collectors in the United States.

  Only on 7 April, in a postscript to his letter, did Walde announce that ‘Herr Heidemann and I have decided to give you a copy of a further document’. This was the
Hess statement, slipped in casually among the other papers, with no suggestion that it had been cut out of a diary. Two weeks later, on 21 April, the Bundesarchiv sent all the Stern documents (three originals and one photocopy) to the regional police headquarters in Rhineland-Pfalz for a handwriting analysis. For comparison purposes, they enclosed five authentic examples of Hitler writing from their own archives. They would have to wait a month for the results.

  Walde, meanwhile, had embarked on a 7000-mile round trip to commission additional experts to give their opinions. On Tuesday 13 April, accompanied by Wilfried Sorge, he flew to Switzerland to see Dr Max Frei-Sulzer, former head of the forensic department of the Zurich police. Frei-Sulzer was living in retirement in the small lakeside town of Thalwil, but was always willing to undertake freelance work. According to Walde, he advised them not to bother with a paper test: ‘With today’s technology it is possible to make paper look any age you choose.’ He agreed to conduct a handwriting analysis. Walde, swearing him to secrecy, provided him with two photocopies of documents from the Stern hoard: the Hess statement and a draft telegram to the Hungarian ruler, Admiral Horthy. As comparison material, Frei-Sulzer was supplied with the same copies of authentic Hitler writing that the Bundesarchiv had given to the Rhineland-Pfalz police. A third set of documents for comparison was provided by Gerd Heidemann from his private collection: a paper from 1943 recording the promotion of General Ewald von Kleist to the rank of Field Marshal, along with three signed Hitler photographs. Unfortunately for Frei-Sulzer, these supposedly genuine examples of the Führer’s writings were also the work of Konrad Kujau, a confusion which meant that the scientist in some instances would be comparing Kujau’s hand with Kujau’s, rather than with Hitler’s.

  The following day, leaving Frei-Sulzer to begin his examination, Walde and Sorge flew from Switzerland to the United States to see a second freelance expert. They spent the night of 15 April in the Hyatt Hotel in Greenville, South Carolina, and early the following morning headed off to their final destination: the town of Landrum, an hour’s drive to the north.