Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  Problem is that the Bavarian state might try to seize this hoard if they knew where in the Federal Republic it is now located, as they have laid claim to all Hitler’s properties by means of a spurious postwar ruling setting aside the personal testament signed and witnessed in the Berlin bunker. Therefore nobody on our side is saying where this Stuttgart man is, or who.

  Irving was always interested in documents. Documents were the lifeblood of his career. Probably no other historian in the world had spent as long as he had trawling through the wartime archives in Europe and America. He had tried to track down Eva Braun’s diary in New Mexico. He had spent weeks fruitlessly searching an East German forest with a protonmagnetometer, trying to find the glass jar containing the final entries in Goebbels’s diaries. Over the past twenty years, like the Zero Mostel character in The Producers with his constant trips into ‘little old lady land’, Irving had visited countless lonely old widows in small German towns, perched on countless sofas drinking cups of tea, made hours of polite conversation, waiting for the moment when they would invite him to look at ‘a few pieces of paper my husband left behind’. In this way he obtained a mass of new material, including the diaries of Walther Hewel, Ribbentrop’s liaison officer on Hitler’s staff, and the unpublished memoirs of Field Marshal Richthofen. Priesack’s story of the ‘mystery man in Stuttgart’ naturally intrigued him, and when he returned home to Duke Street that night he made a careful note of the conversation. He decided that when he was next in Germany he would make a few inquiries about these ‘Hitler diaries’.

  SEVENTEEN

  SPREAD BEFORE HIM in his office in South Carolina, Ordway Hilton had nine samples of writing for analysis. His task was to determine whether two of them – the Hess document and the Horthy telegram – were genuine. The other seven pieces of material were supposedly authentic ‘standards’ which he understood had been ‘identified as being in the handwriting of Adolf Hitler’. There were three photocopies from the Bundesarchiv: a short postscript signed ‘Adolf H’ at the end of a typewritten letter dated 1933; a handwritten letter to a party official dated 1936; and copies of eleven Hitler signatures, also from 1936. The other four samples were originals from Heidemann’s collection: a handwritten note recording the promotion of General von Kleist dated February 1943 (‘In the name of the German people as Reichs Chancellor and Supreme Commander, I award Colonel-General Ewald von Kleist the rank, dignity and protection of a Field Marshal of the German Reich…’); and three signed photographs showing, respectively, Hitler with Goering, Schaub and Bormann, Hitler with Konstantin Hierl, leader of the Reich Labour Service, in May 1940, and Hitler standing with a group in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris after the fall of France.

  Hilton quickly noticed a puzzling discrepancy in this comparison material. Using a binocular microscope he could see that in the photocopies, Hitler signed the ‘A’ in Adolf with a cross-stroke ‘slanting downward’. In the originals, this stroke was horizontal. Unfortunately for him and for Stern, he did not pay much attention to this seemingly trivial detail: signatures, after all, often vary over the years and the original documents were all dated at least four years after the photocopies.

  Three and a half weeks after Walde’s and Sorge’s visit, on Tuesday, 11 May, Hilton completed what he described as ‘an extensive examination’ of the documents he had been given. His findings were exactly what Stern had hoped and expected. The Hess document, he wrote in his report, ‘reveals a free, natural form of writing’:

  Letters which should have looped enclosures below the line are more commonly a simple long curving stroke. The legibility and details of the single space letters are poor due to the compression of their vertical height. Variable forms are present such as the ‘t’ with a separate cross stroke and with the closing made by a triangular movement at the letter base to connect the cross stroke to the body of the letter.

  These same habits are found in the known Hitler writing…. The lack of lower loop, the flattened single space letters, the variable use of letter forms, and the interruptions in the words especially at points when the letter forms are connected in other instances are all common to both the known and this page of writing under investigation. The combination of all these factors establishes in my opinion adequate proof that this document was written by the same person who prepared all of the known writings. Further there is no evidence within this writing which suggests in any way that this page was prepared by another person in imitation of the writing of Adolf Hitler, and consequently I must conclude that he prepared the document.

  After studying the Horthy telegram he reached a similar conclusion. He was particularly impressed by the signature. ‘The name Adolf has been condensed to a capital “A” followed by a straight crossed downstroke’; whilst in the signature of the surname:

  The H-form is rotated to the right so that it lies almost horizontal, and the balance of the signature projects downward at a steep angle. This form is typical of the 1940 signatures as can be seen on the photographs and on the von Kleist appointment. Thus all the elements of the signature to the Horthy telegram are consistent with Adolf Hitler’s signature and must have been signed by him.

  Hilton’s report, couched in five pages of professional gobbledegook, was conclusive. But, based as it was on the assumption that all the documents he had been given for comparison were authentic, it was also completely wrong. It was scarcely surprising that the signatures in the Kleist document, the Horthy telegram and the photographs proved ‘consistent’: they were all forged by Kujau.

  At first sight, this mingling of genuine and false material would seem to suggest that Hilton was deliberately misled by the Stern men. In fact, neither the police nor Stern’s own subsequent internal inquiry found this to be the case. According to the Stern Report: ‘Heidemann cannot be accused of imposing material on [the experts]. Walde and Sorge asked him for it.’ Walde confirmed this. ‘Heidemann’, he told the police, ‘left the organization of the authentication tests completely to me and Sorge. I have no reason to believe that he wanted to obstruct or twist the authentication of the documents.’ The bungling of the tests was the result of straightforward incompetence, typical of the negligence with which the whole diaries affair was handled. Walde and Sorge, in commissioning Hilton, failed to differentiate between documents from the Bundesarchiv and material from Heidemann’s collection. And Hilton, working in isolation 3000 miles away, unfamiliar with the script in which the documents were written, did not bother to check.

  The American could at least plead in mitigation that his mistake was based on an initial error by Stern. The police department of Rhineland-Pfalz had no such excuse.

  The police were busy. A routine request from the Bundesarchiv was low on their list of priorities. It was a month before one of their handwriting experts, Herr Huebner, was able to look at the material they had been sent. Huebner had four samples to check: a photocopy of the Hess announcement and originals of a message to General Franco, some speech notes and a letter to Goering. His comparison material, five original Hitler documents from the Bundesarchiv, was unpolluted by Heidemann’s fakes. Nevertheless, in a brief report submitted on 25 May, Huebner declared ‘with a probability bordering on certainty’, that three of the Stern documents were genuine. He could not be quite so positive about the Hess communiqué because he had not seen the original, but in his opinion it was ‘highly probable’ that it was in Hitler’s hand.

  When this news was relayed to the Stern offices in Hamburg, champagne was opened in the history department. The fact that an official government agency had certified that the papers were genuine was an occasion which called for a celebration. There could be no doubt now. The world would have to accept that the magazine had obtained one of the greatest scoops in history. Only Heidemann seemed unaffected by the general jubilation. ‘Aren’t you pleased?’ asked Walde. Heidemann replied that he saw no reason to celebrate: he had known all along that the diaries were genuine.

  On 2 June, Wal
de wrote to Dr Henke at the Bundesarchiv to thank him for sending them the police report. ‘Its result greatly pleased us. With the certainty that it has given us, we are going to intensify our efforts to obtain further original material.’ Walde added that ‘to thank you, and as a gesture to the Bundesarchiv’ Gerd Heidemann would like to make them a gift of the originals of Hitler’s speech notes and of the Franco telegram.

  Nine days later came the third and final handwriting report.

  The meticulous Max Frei-Sulzer had been determined not to rush to a premature conclusion. On 4 June, unwilling to make a judgement on the basis of photocopies, he travelled from Zurich to Koblenz where he was met by Dr Henke and shown original Hitler material from the vaults of the Bundesarchiv. After Hilton had finished his report, Frei-Sulzer was given the originals of the Hess statement and the Horthy telegram, along with the photographs and Kleist document from Heidemann’s collection. He also received a dossier containing copies of Hitler’s writing from 1906 to 1945, pieced together by Heidemann to show how the Führer’s writing had changed over the years; and a guide to the old-fashioned script in which the documents were written. By the time he had finished assimilating all this, he had been working on the project for two months and his analysis ran to seventeen pages.

  ‘The script of Adolf Hitler’, wrote Frei-Sulzer, ‘is highly individualistic and offers a good basis for the examination of questionable handwriting.’ He singled out fourteen special characteristics, analysed the is, the hs and the ts, the gaps between the letters and the pressure that had been applied to the pen. He made large photographic blow-ups of individual passages, and at the end of it all his conclusion on the Hess communiqué and the Horthy telegram was unequivocal: ‘There can be no doubt that both these documents were written by Adolf Hitler.’

  What had gone wrong? The police report certainly appears to have been rushed. The Bundesarchiv’s request had been treated as relatively trivial in comparison with the police department’s real task of dealing with criminals. Their analyst had been provided with only a relatively small sample of handwriting to work on, and in the case of the longest document, the Hess statement, he had only had access to a photocopy. He had no idea that he was putting a seal of approval to what ultimately would be an archive of sixty volumes of Hitler diaries. How was Herr Huebner to know that so much rested on his findings?

  Of the two private experts, one was unable to understand the language in which the documents were written; the other was operating outside his specialist field. Both were misled by the introduction of fakes into supposedly genuine Hitler writing.

  But even after allowance has been made for all these factors, it has to be said that the success of Konrad Kujau’s forgeries casts serious doubts on the ‘science’ of handwriting analysis – or ‘holography’ as its practitioners prefer to call it. Freelance analysts are always under pressure to reach a definite conclusion. Their clients want to hear ‘yes’ or ‘no’, not ‘maybe’. Hilton and Frei-Sulzer were not the first experts to fall into the trap of committing themselves to rash overstatements on the basis of flimsy evidence. In 1971, when Clifford Irving faked his notorious ‘autobiography’ of Howard Hughes, one ‘holographer’ gave odds of a million to one against the possibility that it could be anything other than genuine. The reputable New York firm of Osborn, Osborn and Osborn, specialists in handwriting analysis since 1905, declared that it would have been ‘beyond human ability’ to have forged the entire autobiography.

  The Hitler diaries fiasco has close parallels with the Hughes case. Like Stern, McGraw-Hill, publishers of the autobiography, were obsessed with leaks and failed to commission a handwriting analysis until late in the project: when they finally did so, they allowed the experts to see only a fraction of the material. The tests were not ordered in a spirit of impartial inquiry: they were required as ammunition to fight off the attacks of sceptical outsiders. Kujau and Clifford Irving were both fluent forgers. They did not give themselves away by being over-cautious, copying out words in the slow and tedious manner which produces telltale tremors: Irving, like Kujau, could write in another person’s hand at almost the same speed as he could write in his own. When the discovery of the Hitler diaries was announced by Stern, Irving recognized at once that they were probably the work of a forger like himself. ‘Once you have the mood,’ he commented, ‘you can go on forever. I know that from personal experience. I could write sixty volumes of Howard Hughes autobiography and they would pass. Once you can do one page, you can do twenty. Once you can do twenty, you can do a book.’ Handwriting experts were useless: ‘Nine times out of ten they come out with judgements their clients expect…. They’re hired by people who want an affirmative answer.’

  Clifford Irving and Konrad Kujau succeeded in the same way that most confidence tricksters succeed: by playing on two of the most ancient of human weaknesses – vanity and greed. There came a point during the duping of McGraw-Hill when one of Irving’s confederates found it impossible to accept that a powerful company led by intelligent men could be stupid enough to accept their often ludicrous forgery. ‘It’s got to occur to them,’ he said. ‘How can they be so naïve?’ In his account of the hoax, Irving recalled his answer:

  Because they believe. First they wanted to believe and now they have to believe. They want to believe because it’s such a coup for them…. Can’t you see what an ego trip it is? The secrecy part – the thing that protects you and me – is what they love the most. That takes them out of the humdrum into another world, the world we all dream of living in, only we really don’t want to because we know it’s mad. And the greatest thing for them is that this way they can live in it part time. They’re participating but they’re protected by an intermediary. I’m their buffer between reality and fantasy. It’s a fairy tale, a dream. And the beauty part for them is that they’ll make money out of it, too. Corporate profit justifies any form of lunacy. There’s been no other hoax like it in modern times….

  Twelve years later, the analysis fitted Stern’s behaviour to perfection.

  EIGHTEEN

  WITH THE DIARIES’ handwriting now apparently authenticated as Adolf Hitler’s, work on the project within Stern intensified. Five people were now engaged virtually full time on the operation: Thomas Walde; Walde’s thirty-five-year-old assistant, Leo Pesch; two secretaries; and Gerd Heidemann. To safeguard the secret of the diaries’ existence, the group moved out of the main Stern building to new offices a few minutes’ walk away. The diaries were also moved. Every few weeks, Manfred Fischer would empty the management safe of the latest volumes and take them back with him to his own office at Bertelsmann’s headquarters in Guetersloh. Eventually, fearful of a robbery, Fischer and Schulte-Hillen decided to transfer them out of the country altogether, to a bank vault in Switzerland. Not for the first time, the saga of the diaries assumed the trappings of a cheap thriller. Safe deposit box number 390 was rented from the Handelsbank in Talstrasse, Zurich. Periodically Fischer himself would board Bertelsmann’s private jet carrying a suitcase containing the diaries and fly to Switzerland. Herr Bluhm, director of the Handelsbank, would meet him and the two men would descend into the vaults. Bluhm would unlock two steel mesh doors, retrieve the large metal box, and discreetly turn his back while Fischer filled it with the latest diaries. One key to the box stayed with the bank. The other was taken back to Germany by Fischer and locked in the safe in Hamburg.

  Gradually, a publication strategy for the diaries began to evolve. On Tuesday, 25 May – the day on which the Rhineland-Pfalz police expert concluded that the writing he had been given was Hitler’s – a conference was called to discuss the marketing of the material. Present were Wilfried Sorge, Thomas Walde, Peter Koch, Felix Schmidt, Leo Pesch, Henri Nannen and Gerd Heidemann; Schulte-Hillen presided. Neither of the two editors said very much. Their status within the company had recently been eroded still further, when Stern, humiliatingly, was scooped by its rival, Der Spiegel, over a trade union scandal. Peter Koch, who had originally
turned down the story, had offered to resign. He had been allowed to stay on, but in the aftermath of the affair, neither he nor Schmidt was in a position to argue with the management. The fact that their mishandling of Heidemann had almost cost the company the diaries scoop as well hung, unspoken, over the entire proceedings.

  Thomas Walde put forward the plan which he had discussed with Pesch and Heidemann. One of the most interesting documents so far delivered to Hamburg was the special diary volume Hitler had devoted to the Hess affair. This had been with the history department since November. Entitled ‘The Hess Case’, it consisted of a few pages of notes scrawled in the early summer of 1941, proving that the Führer had known all along of his deputy’s flight to Britain. ‘From November 1940,’ Hitler had supposedly written, ‘Hess was whispering in my ear that he thought as I did that England and Germany could live together in peace, that the sufferings of our two peoples could bring satisfaction to one person, namely the old fox in Moscow, Stalin.’ The content was sketchy – little more than 1000 words – describing how Hess had evolved his plan, how Hitler had been ‘kept informed about preparations’ and how he had been forced to deny all knowledge of the mission when the British had imprisoned Hess.

  Now [concluded ‘Hitler’] the last attempt to reach an understanding with England has failed.

  The English people perhaps understand what the flight of Hess signified, but the ossified old men in London don’t. If Providence does not help our two peoples, the fight will go on until one people is totally destroyed, the English people.

  After the victory, the German people will also be ready to understand the flight of Party Comrade Hess and this will be appreciated for its worth.