Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  Ordway Hilton, like Max Frei-Sulzer, was an elderly man, living in retirement, happy to undertake freelance work. He had been employed by the New York Police Department for almost thirty years and was a distinguished member of his own particular fraternity – a contributor to the proceedings of the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners, the American Academy of Forensic Science and the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners. Hilton now operated from his house in Landrum to which, at 10 a.m. on Friday i6 April, he welcomed his two visitors from Germany.

  The American was handed the originals of the two documents copied for Frei-Sulzer: the page from the Hess volume and the telegram for Horthy, together with an accompanying folder of ‘authentic’ Hitler writing for comparison, part of which was genuine and part from Heidemann’s collection of forgeries. ‘Some bore signatures that were his or that they told me were his,’ he later recalled. ‘Some were photocopies they said came from their archives.’ Hilton promised to keep their visit secret and to deliver his verdict as quickly as possible.

  Walde and Sorge began the long journey back to Hamburg unaware that the only result of their four-day mission was to botch one of Stern’s last chances of avoiding catastrophe. If only they had taken the Hess page to a practising forensic expert – for example, Dr Julius Grant, a freelance consultant based in London – they would have discovered within five hours that it contained chemicals of postwar origin and therefore had to be forged. But in their ignorance they chose to depend on the much less reliable and slower process of handwriting analysis. They compounded this error by selecting as experts two men unsuited to the task. True, Frei-Sulzer and Hilton both had international reputations – they were chosen because it was felt their approval would be an advantage in syndication negotiations in Europe and America. But Frei-Sulzer’s speciality was investigating biological microtraces, not handwriting; and Ordway Hilton was handicapped by the fact that he could not even understand the language in which the diaries were written. Neither man was a specialist in Nazi documents. In 1983, an expert who was – Charles Hamilton, a New York autograph dealer – estimated that on the American market only Abraham Lincoln’s signature commands a greater price than Hitler’s. A page of the Führer’s writing might fetch $15,000 and no man’s autograph is more commonly forged: Hamilton reckoned to see a dozen forgeries a year. If Hilton and Frei-Sulzer had been aware of the extent of the market in Hitler fakes they might have been more suspicious of the gentlemen from Hamburg. And as if all this were not enough, Walde and Sorge had crowned the confusion by unwittingly introducing forgeries from Heidemann’s collection into the process of authentication.

  Little suspecting the potential for chaos they had left behind them, the two Germans returned to Hamburg. They remained supremely confident that within a month they would have proof that the diaries were genuine. Once that was in their hands, plans could at last be drawn up for publication.

  SIXTEEN

  AT THE SAME as Walde and Sorge were landing in Hamburg, August Priesack and Billy F. Price arrived in London. They made an odd couple: the impoverished, white-haired Nazi ‘professor’, and the rich, barrel-chested, aggressive Texan, drawn together by a shared obsession for the paintings of Adolf Hitler.

  When Price was not in Europe, searching salerooms and private collections for Hitler’s art, he could generally be found in his native city of Houston, pounding round the artificial-grass running track in the grounds of the Houstonian Country Club, or driving across his farm taking pot shots at squirrels with a Magnum from his convertible Cadillac El Dorado, ‘custom built for Mr Billy F. Price’. (‘Did you give them your design?’ ‘Hell no, boy, I gave them my cheque.’)

  At first sight, Price seems a bizarre figure, but he is not unique. It has been estimated that there are 50,000 collectors of Nazi memorabilia throughout the world, of whom most are Americans, involved in a business which is said to have an annual turnover of $50 million. In the United States a monthly newsletter, Der Gauleiter, published from Mount Ida in Arkansas, keeps 5000 serious connoisseurs and dealers informed of the latest trade shows and auctions. Prices increase by 20 per cent a year. ‘In the States,’ according to Charles Hamilton, ‘the collectors of Hitler memorabilia are 40 per cent Jewish, 50 per cent old soldiers like me and 10 per cent of them are young, fascinated by people like Rudel.’ In Los Angeles, a collector enjoys himself in private by donning Ribbentrop’s overcoat. In Kansas City, a local government official serves drinks from Hitler’s punch bowl. In Chicago, a family doctor has installed a reinforced concrete vault beneath his house where he keeps a collection of Nazi weapons, including Hermann Goering’s ceremonial, jewel-encrusted hunting dagger. In Arizona, a used-car salesman drives his family around in the 1938 Mercedes which Hitler presented to Eva Braun; it cost him $150,000 to buy and he expects to sell it for $350,000.

  In 1982 Billy Price was fifty-two and a multi-millionaire. (‘Hell, if you can’t become a millionaire in Houston, you’re an asshole, boy.’) His money was derived from his ownership of the Price Compressor Company Incorporated, manufacturers of nine-tenths of all compressors used in undersea oil exploration. Like Fritz Stiefel – whom he had met in Stuttgart – Price was a wealthy engineer, no scholar, whose success had given him the means to indulge his interest in Adolf Hitler. He had first become fascinated by the Nazis in the 1950s during his service with the US Army in Germany. While he was stationed in Europe he sought out former Nazis and witnesses from the Third Reich, including Rommel’s widow. In the early 1970s, having made his fortune, he returned to begin buying memorabilia, particularly Hitler paintings, paying between $2000 and $12,000 for each one.

  Hitler seems to hold a special interest for businessmen, particularly when – as in the case of Billy Price and Fritz Stiefel – they are self-made men. Hitler’s career represented the most extreme, as well as the most monstrous, example of what an individual can do if he dedicates himself to the exertion of his will. ‘People say Hitler couldn’t have kept diaries,’ said Price after the forgery had been exposed. ‘They say he couldn’t have done this, he couldn’t have done that – shit, Hitler could paint paintings, he could write operas. Hell, he controlled more real estate than the Roman Empire within three years. There’s nothing Hitler couldn’t have done if he set his mind to it.’ The years of Hitler’s ‘Triumph of the Will’ coincided with the years when the philosophy of self-help was at its height – the Depression was an era of personal improvement courses and guides to success which culminated in 1938 with the appearance of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Everything was possible, given the drive to achieve it. ‘A man is not what he thinks he is,’ wrote the American clergyman Norman Vincent Peale, ‘but what he thinks he is.’ ‘My whole life’, said Hitler in 1942, ‘can be summed up as this ceaseless effort of mine to persuade other people.’ With his studied mannerisms, his cultivated habit of staring into people’s eyes, his hunger to read manuals and absorb technical data, Hitler was self-help run riot. ‘I look at that picture,’ said Price, staring at one of his Hitler paintings, of flowers in a vase, ‘and I just can’t imagine what was going through the man’s mind when he did it.’

  The gates to Price’s farm are thirty feet high and topped by stone eagles – scale replicas of a set of gates designed for Hitler by Albert Speer. Beyond them, on the lawn outside his house, stand a tank and a piece of field artillery. The bulk of his collection is housed in his company’s headquarters close to Houston’s Hobby Airport. On one wall is a portrait of Rudolf Hess in Nazi uniform. In the lavatory is a painting of Hitler. In glass frames are a few small souvenirs – the bill of sale for the first automobile Hitler bought for the Nazi party; a laundry note in Hitler’s handwriting; a letter, on prison stationery, from Goering to his wife at the time of the Nuremberg trial; and a letter from Goering to Field Marshal Milch. On a side table stands a large picture of Goering in a swastika-decorated silver frame. Next to it is a heavy, vulgar birthday card sent by Hitler to SS Gene
ral Sepp Dietrich. There are busts of Hitler. There are two of Hitler’s wartime photograph albums – silverbound with SS flashes and swastikas in the corners and a large eagle on the cover; as one opens a bookplate flutters to the floor: ‘Ex Libris Adolf Hitler’. An ornate cabinet houses Hitler’s cutlery and napkins. Price likes showing off his souvenirs but is anxious not to offend visitors. ‘I do a lot of business with Jews,’ he says. ‘When Jews come I put it all away.’

  The pride of Price’s collection, the fruit of a decade’s labour, takes up an entire wall at the end of his conference room: thirty-three Hitler paintings, insured for more than $4 million, arranged in an illuminated display behind armour-plated glass, protected by a sophisticated array of burglar alarms. The pictures are lifeless and uninspired: clumsy landscapes, fussy reproductions of Viennese buildings, a couple of paintings of flowers, two crude architectural sketches, scrawled in pencil, bought by Price from Albert Speer. The Texan’s favourite is a watercolour of the Vienna City Hall, completed in 1911. ‘Most knowledgeable people say he was not the best artist in the world, but I think he was certainly a good artist considering the amount of training he had.’ Price claims to have bought the paintings ‘in the interests of history’: one day, he thinks, given current advances in technology, ‘it might be possible to feed them into a computer to get a read-out on Hitler’s brain’.

  Price’s dream, for the sake of which he had gone into partnership with August Priesack, was to track down every extant Hitler painting and drawing in order to catalogue them in a book which he would publish himself. Price had no personal liking for his companion: it was a relationship founded on necessity. ‘Sure, I know Priesack’s a Nazi. But if you want to know about Hitler, you have to hire Nazis. Hell, if I was going to investigate cancer, you wouldn’t start saying to me, “Why are you hanging around all those cancer victims?” would you?’ Together the two men had done the rounds of the private collectors in America and Germany. It was this mission which in the spring of 1982 brought them to Britain.

  In the final week of April they drove down to the West Country, to Longleat, one of the finest stately homes in England, ancestral seat of Sir Henry Frederick Thynne, sixth Marquess of Bath. Lord Bath, seventy-seven years old and deaf in one ear, but otherwise remarkably sprightly, took them up in his ancient lift to the third floor, a part of the house closed to the public. He unlocked a door next to the library and led Price and Priesack into a long, narrow room, cluttered with Nazi memorabilia. Dominating the scene at the far end was a life-size wax model of Hitler wearing a black leather overcoat and a swastika armband. But neither this, nor Himmler’s spectacles, nor the Commandant of Belsen’s tablecloth interested Price. What he had come to see was Lord Bath’s private exhibition of Hitler paintings. It ran all along one wall, the finest collection in the world: sixty paintings – worth, in Price’s opinion, $10 million.

  A few days later, back in London, on the afternoon of Thursday 22 April, August Priesack telephoned David Irving in his flat in Duke Street, Mayfair. Priesack explained why he and Price were in Britain and asked him if he would like to come round to their hotel for dinner that night. Irving agreed.

  Priesack had been looking forward to meeting the British historian for a long time. Of all Hitler’s biographers, Irving was the most controversial. In Hitler’s War, published in 1977, he had quoted one of the Führer’s doctors, who described how Hitler had expressed his admiration for an ‘objective’ biography of the Kaiser written by an Englishman. According to the doctor:

  Hitler then said that for some time now he had gone over to having all important discussions and military conferences recorded for posterity by shorthand writers. And perhaps one day after he is dead and buried an objective Englishman will come and give him the same kind of treatment. The present generation neither can nor will.

  Irving was in no doubt that he was the man the Führer had in mind. Hitler’s War, ten years in the making, had been based on a wealth of previously unpublished documents, letters and diaries. Irving’s aim was to rewrite the history of the war ‘as far as possible through Hitler’s eyes, from behind his desk’. This made for a gripping book, but one which was, by its nature, unbalanced. However ‘objectively’ he might piece together the unpublished recollections of Hitler’s subordinates, they were still the words of men and women who admired their ruler. And confined to Hitler’s daily routine, the biography had a curiously unreal quality: the death camps, the atrocities, the sufferings of millions of people which were the result of Hitler’s war were not to be found in Hitler’s War as it was reconstructed by David Irving.

  Irving’s stated purpose was to portray Hitler as an ordinary human being rather than as a diabolical figure of monstrous evil. It was an aim which was bound to arouse offence: ‘If you think of him as a man,’ says one of the Jewish characters in George Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., ‘you will grow uncertain. You will think him a man and no longer believe what he did.’ Irving pilloried earlier biographers who had depicted Hitler as a demon: ‘Confronted by the phenomenon of Hitler himself, they cannot grasp that he was an ordinary, walking, talking human weighing some 155 pounds, with greying hair, largely false teeth, and chronic digestive ailments. He is to them the Devil incarnate.’ Central to Irving’s thesis ‘that Hitler was a less than omnipotent Führer’ was his argument that Hitler did not order, indeed did not even know of, the Holocaust. It was an assertion which provoked uproar. In Germany, after a dispute with his publishers, the book was withdrawn from sale. In Britain, he became involved in a furious row with a panel of academics during a live edition of David Frost’s television chat show. In America, the book was savaged by Walter Laqueur in the New York Review of Books and boycotted by the major US paperback publishers. Irving revelled in the publicity, aggressively offering to pay $1000 to anyone who could produce a document proving that Hitler was aware of what was happening in the extermination camps. He claimed that the book upset Jews only ‘because I have detracted from the romance of the notion of the Holocaust – that six million people were killed by one man’.

  Irving admitted that in writing Hitler’s War he had ‘identified’ with the Führer. Looking down upon him as he worked, from the wall above his desk, was a self-portrait of Hitler, presented to him by Christa Schroeder. He did not smoke or touch alcohol. (‘I don’t drink,’ he would say. ‘Adolf didn’t drink you know.’) He shared Hitler’s view of women, believing that they were put on the earth in order to procreate and provide men with something to look at: ‘They haven’t got the physical capacity for producing something creative.’ He had married and had four daughters, but wished he had remained single: his marriage had been ‘my one cardinal mistake… an unnecessary deviation’. In 1981, at the age of forty-three, he had founded his own right-wing political group, built around his own belief in his ‘destiny’ as a future British leader. With his black hair slanting across his forehead, and a dark cleft, shadowed like a moustache between the bottom of his nose and the top of his upper lip, there were times, in the right light, when Irving looked alarmingly like the subject of his notorious biography.

  When Priesack rang he was hard at work on his latest project: a vastly detailed account of Churchill’s war years, designed to prove his contention that Britain’s decision to go to war with Nazi Germany had been a disastrous mistake. But by 1982, though Irving still had his smart home and his Rolls-Royce he was going through a hard time. He was in the middle of a rancorous and expensive divorce. He was short of money, and smarting from the reception given to his last two books – one of which, Uprising, had been dismissed by a reviewer in the Observer as ‘a bucketful of slime’.

  Irving arrived for dinner at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, overlooking Hyde Park, at 9.45 p.m. Billy Price and his wife were unable to join them, so he and Priesack dined alone. Priesack told Irving that he was in difficulties and needed his help. In October of the previous year he had at last brought out his book of unpublished pictures of the Nuremb
erg rallies. But on 27 November, the Bavarian authorities had decreed that the book contravened anti-Nazi legislation. They ordered that every one of the 5000 copies printed should be confiscated. ‘The printers and every bookshop in Germany were raided in a dawn swoop,’ noted Irving in his diary. ‘On 31 December the order was revoked and the books were returned. On 11 January this year the whole silly confiscation procedure was repeated.’ Priesack asked Irving if he would be willing to appear as a character witness at his forthcoming trial. Irving agreed. ‘It is difficult’, he wrote, ‘to distinguish between these practices and the book burnings of the thirties.’

  But sympathetic as he was to Priesack’s problems, it was another of the ‘professor’s’ stories which most interested Irving that night:

  He is in touch [he wrote in his diary] with a mystery man in Stuttgart whose brother is a major general in the East German People’s Army and about to retire to take over a military museum in Germany.

  They have a nice racket going: Stuttgart man has acquired from his East German sources loads of Hitler memorabilia, for cash. These include the Führer’s Ahnenpass [proof of ancestry], bound in green leather, and revealing that his paternal great-grandfather was identical with his maternal grandfather, 27 half-annual volumes of Hitler’s diary, tooled in silver, including a reference to the 1934 Night of the Long Knives (‘I have dealt with the traitorous swine’), oil and water-colour paintings by Hitler, medals, photographs, letters, etc. In return for this, ‘hard’ West German currency, Saxon and Thuringian medals have been bought for the military collection in East Germany.