Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  16 May 1941

  Adolf Hitler

  Walde’s proposal was that this material should be used as the basis for a sensational story to be published in January, the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler’s accession to power. The Hess volume stood on its own. There was no need to refer to the actual diaries, whose existence could be kept secret for a few more months. The advantage of Walde’s idea was that it would give the magazine a good cover story whilst also enabling it to test the water prior to the launch of the main diary hoard. The plan was accepted by the conference. The only mildly dissenting voice was Henri Nannen’s. Would it not, he suggested, be a good idea to bring in Sebastian Haffner or Joachim Fest, recognized authorities on the Third Reich, to work on the material? The idea was angrily slapped down. This was Stern’s story, and Stern’s men should take all the credit. Neither Nannen nor the editors were aware that Heidemann and Walde had contracts with the management which enabled them to veto the involvement of outside historians.

  Ten days later, on Friday 4 June, Manfred Fischer, Gerd Schulte-Hillen and Jan Hensmann flew down to Munich to meet Olaf Paeschke, the head of Bertelsmann’s international publishing division. It was agreed, without reference to the Stern editors, that Walde and Pesch would first turn the Hess material into a book, provisionally entitled Plan 3. This would then be serialized in the magazine. The idea of marketing the Hess scoop through the book publishing industry was attractive to the businessmen. It would enable Bertelsmann to bring its foreign companies into the action and take control of the syndication negotiations. Shortly afterwards, Paeschke briefed Louis Wolfe, President of Bantam Books in New York, on the contents of the forthcoming manuscript. Wolfe was a lucky man, said Paeschke. Plan 3 would be ‘the publishing event of the century’.

  On 5 July, Leo Pesch went down to Koblenz to hand the Bundesarchiv the original of the Hess announcement and the Horthy telegram which had now been returned to Stern by Frei-Sulzer. These, together with the original documents already in the archive’s possession, were then forwarded to the West German Federal Police for a final forensic examination to confirm the age of the paper and the ink. Stern had hoped for a quick result. But the police laboratories were involved in anti-terrorist investigations and were swamped with work. Weeks passed and despite occasional reminders from Walde, nothing was done. There was no particular sense of urgency in Hamburg. The documents had, after all, been authenticated by three different handwriting experts: the forensic tests were only a safety check.

  Meanwhile, Heidemann carried on draining the company’s special diaries account – 200,000 marks was withdrawn on 29 March, 600,000 marks on 21 May, 400,000 marks on 2 June, 200,000 marks on 10 June – and the Heidemann family spending spree continued. Precise details of what was bought and when will probably never be known. More than 80,000 marks was spent in auction houses, mainly to buy Third Reich memorabilia. Ninety thousand marks went on jewellery and carpets; 37,000 on furniture. A futile attempt to recover Mussolini’s treasure, supposedly dumped in Lake Como at the end of the war, swallowed 185,000 marks. At least a quarter of a million marks was paid into one or another of Heidemann’s six known bank accounts. To house his Nazi relics, the reporter rented a gallery in Milchstrasse, in the heart of one of Hamburg’s most expensive shopping areas. In the middle of April, Gina visited an estate agent. ‘She said she was interested in buying a large house with a view over the Elbe,’ recalled the agent, Peter Moller. ‘The price was no object.’ Over the next year they maintained contact and he sent her details of property costing in the region of 1–2 million marks.

  On 14 July, after Heidemann received the largest single payment for the diaries to date – 900,000 marks – contracts were signed to start the long-awaited renovation of Carin II’s hull. The yacht alone cost Heidemann a fortune. Experts were flown in from England. New engines were installed. The boat was rewired. The interior was refurbished. The total cost exceeded 500,000 marks. To restore the woodwork, Gunther Lutje, a Hungarian boatyard owner who had known Heidemann and Carin II for almost a decade, was paid 300,000 marks.

  In his prosperity, Heidemann did not forget those who had helped him in the past. In June, Axel Thomsen, the young seaman who had sailed Carin II from Bonn to Hamburg, rang Heidemann to ask for a loan. He had heard that the reporter now had plenty of money. ‘He said immediately that he was perfectly willing to lend me 6000 marks,’ recalled Thomsen. ‘Two or three days later he came to my house and gave me the money, in 500-mark notes. It was lying around in his briefcase.’ Encouraged by Heidemann’s readiness to help, Thomsen rang him again two months later to ask for a further 13,000 marks. ‘From his reaction, I could see that he was slightly hesitant, but he said he was willing to lend me the money. He said he felt duty bound to assist me. He said I could have it and that I should go round to his flat in the Elbchaussee to collect it.’ When Thomsen appeared, Heidemann handed him an envelope containing 13,000 marks in cash. Thomsen put the money in his pocket. Heidemann asked him to make sure that Gina did not get to hear about it. Heidemann also remembered Hannelore Schustermann, the secretary from whom, in his hard-pressed days, he had been forced to scrounge money to go to the canteen. She was let into the secret of the Hitler diaries and went to work for Heidemann in his special suite of offices. The diaries, he confided to her, were going to make him a millionaire.

  On 29 July, Heidemann flew to Spain and arranged to buy two holiday villas in the Mediterranean town of Denia, midway between the resorts of Valencia and Alicante. The two houses, which stood next to one another, cost him 390,000 marks in cash. In August, he suggested to Kujau that he should buy one of them. The two villas, he said, both had spacious cellars which could be knocked together to make a large underground vault. Heidemann proposed that they should each move their Nazi collections there. Together they would create the biggest museum of Third Reich memorabilia in the world. The plan came to nothing the moment Edith Lieblang got to hear of it. She told Kujau, in forceful tones, that she was ‘absolutely against’ it. ‘It seemed to me completely worthless,’ she recalled, ‘owning it and only spending a couple of weeks a year in it. For 200,000 marks, I could go on holiday around the world until the end of my life.’ Edith’s word was final and Heidemann’s dream of erecting a monument to the Führer amid the haciendas and cicadas of the Costa Blanca evaporated.

  Not all the money Heidemann spent at this time belonged to Stern; at least some of it was his own. He was now drawing a salary of over 100,000 marks a year. He had received a bonus of 20,000 marks. He had already been given an advance of 300,000 marks by Manfred Fischer and his position as the sole contact between Gruner and Jahr and the ‘antiques dealer’ in Stuttgart meant that he found no difficulty in extracting more. His moodiness and periodic threats to take his great scoop elsewhere were guaranteed to throw the Stern management into a panic. Without him, the flow of diaries from East Germany would dry up. Like wealthy drug addicts, they were prepared to pamper their supplier: to ensure he continued to deal with them, they were willing to give him whatever he asked.

  In June 1982 Heidemann told the company that in order to keep up the pretence of being a Swiss collector, he was having to buy additional material from the communist general: Nazi documents and paintings and drawings by Adolf Hitler. Although as a collector he was naturally interested in obtaining such items, he did not see why he should have to go on paying for them out of his own pocket. Gerd Schulte-Hillen accepted Heidemann’s argument and on 11 June concluded a new contract with him, by which the reporter was to be paid a ‘loan’ of 25,000 marks for each volume of diaries he delivered. To date, there were thirty-five books in the company’s possession. Heidemann was therefore entitled to receive 875,000 marks, minus the 300,000 marks advance paid to him in February 1981, and the 80,000 marks still outstanding for his unwritten books – Bord Gespräche and My African Wars. The money was described, for tax purposes, as an ‘interest-free loan’ to be recovered through ‘profit-sharing and royalty fees’ following ‘the
commercial exploitation of the diaries’.

  But Heidemann wanted more than mere money. Incapable of writing up the stories he researched, he had, throughout his career, suffered from an inferiority complex. Now, as he watched Walde and Pesch start putting together a book based on the material he had gathered, his resentment welled up in a demand for praise for his achievement. He craved respect and recognition. It was like dealing with a child. Gerd Schulte-Hillen had already had to cope with one of these bouts. On that occasion, at the end of 1981, he had forced the editors to give Heidemann a salary increase. In the summer of 1982, Wilfried Sorge warned him once again that the company’s ageing prima donna was proving difficult. ‘He was portrayed to me,’ remembered the managing director, ‘as being rather like a circus horse: because he’d made this find, you had to say “hello” to him and pat him on the head from time to time.’

  Acting on Sorge’s advice, on Monday 28 June, Schulte-Hillen took Heidemann out ‘for a meal on expenses’. They met in the Ovelgonne, a restaurant in a picturesque street overlooking the Elbe. For three courses, Schulte-Hillen listened patiently to Heidemann’s stories. He heard of the reporter’s adventures in Africa and the Middle East, of his experiences with the white mercenaries in the Congo, of his long search for Traven. Finally, over dessert, Heidemann invited him back to his home in the Elbchaussee to see part of his collection. ‘He showed me drawings by Hitler,’ said Schulte-Hillen, ‘and the pistol with which Hitler was supposed to have shot himself.’ The businessman inspected Heidemann’s archive: the shelves full of history books and folders crammed with documents, all neatly arranged and catalogued. He congratulated Heidemann on his professionalism and, after a couple of hours, the two men parted on excellent terms.

  Heidemann was given another opportunity to show off a few weeks later, when Henri Nannen also decided to visit him at home. Nannen had retired from daily involvement in Stern to devote himself to the erection of his own memorial: an art gallery in his home town of Emden, to house his collection of German Expressionist paintings. But to Heidemann – as to most West German journalists – Nannen, despite his retirement, was Stern, and he was determined to impress his old employer. Nannen parked his car beside the Elbe and got out to see Heidemann on his balcony, waving at him with one hand, and raising a glass of iced champagne to him with the other. Climbing the stairs, he suddenly realized that Heidemann not only had the top floor apartment, but the one underneath as well. Inside, the impression of luxury continued. ‘The place was decorated in the very best taste,’ recalled Nannen. ‘There were some superb pieces of furniture – Queen Anne, I think – and on the walls were drawings. The first thing that hit me was the original manuscript of ‘Deutschland über Alles’ by Hoffman. He also had the autographs of Bismark and Moltke, along with other historical documents under glass and in frames. I was astonished. Where has he got all this from? I thought.’ Heidemann told him he had been forced to buy it from the supplier of the Hitler diaries in order to disguise the fact that he was interested only in the diaries themselves. ‘He gave me some convoluted story and showed me thirty or forty Hitler drawings,’ said Nannen. ‘I’m something of an art historian. They seemed to me to be perfectly genuine.’

  After seeing Hitler’s suicide weapon, and a pair of busts supposedly sculpted by the Führer, Nannen inquired about the diaries.

  Heidemann crossed the room, pulled a cord, and a pair of black curtains slid back to reveal a bookcase full of files. These were Heidemann’s private photocopies of the diaries, each sheet protected by a transparent plastic cover.

  ‘What do you want to see?’ asked Heidemann.

  ‘The Roehm putsch,’ replied Nannen.

  He was handed the relevant volumes and read a few pages. He found them ‘unbelievably boring’ – a fact which further convinced him that they must be genuine: ‘I couldn’t believe that anyone would have gone to the trouble of forging something so banal.’

  But although Nannen had no doubts that the diaries were authentic, his visit convinced him that Heidemann was a crook. Unlike Schulte-Hillen – who had known Heidemann for only a year – Nannen had been his employer since the 1950s. The change in the man’s fortunes was startling. It was inconceivable that he could have moved from near bankruptcy to such affluence without robbing the company. Nannen left the Elbchaussee and immediately drove to the Stern building. Within ninety minutes he was in Schulte-Hillen’s office. ‘I’ve just come from Heidemann’s,’ he told him, ‘and he’s shitting on us – from a great height.’ Schulte-Hillen asked if he meant that the diaries were forgeries. ‘No,’ said Nannen, ‘but he’s clearly pocketing our money.’ Privately, Stern’s editors thought the same: Peter Koch had been in no doubt ever since he learned of the expensive renovation work being carried out on Carin II. But they could have warned Nannen that to raise such suspicions with Schulte-Hillen was useless. The managing director regarded himself as a good judge of character; he was convinced of the reporter’s integrity; and having made up his mind, he was unshakeable. He reacted, in Koch’s words, ‘like a man with an allergy’ whenever Heidemann’s honesty was questioned. That afternoon, when Nannen told him of his fears, Schulte-Hillen stared at him with contempt. Heidemann, he said, was being well rewarded for his work: the only sort of person who would think that he was robbing the company was someone who was capable of committing such a crime himself.

  Meanwhile, as the summer wore on, Thomas Walde and Leo Pesch worked hard on the manuscript of Plan 3. Heidemann appeared in the offices occasionally and continued to deliver new volumes of diaries, but they had no time to look at them. To help them with the background for the Hess book, the two would-be historians hired a team of freelance researchers. ‘We employed them without telling them the context in which they were working,’ said Walde. ‘We simply asked them to do some research in certain areas.’ At the beginning of September, after three months’ intensive work, more than half the book was completed. On Monday, 6 September, chapters 2–7 were submitted to the editors of Stern. Walde explained in a memorandum to Felix Schmidt how the book would be structured. The first chapter would be an account of Hess’s life in Spandau and of his relations with his family. ‘We have already won over Hess’s son,’ confided Walde, ‘but not yet Frau Ilse Hess.’ Not until chapter 8 – which had still to be written – did the authors intend to introduce quotations from the Hitler notebook on the Hess affair. Then would come an account of Hess’s experiences in Britain, the Nuremberg trial, and his sentencing to life imprisonment. There was to be no mention of the existence of the diaries.

  Schmidt later described himself as ‘amazed’ at Walde’s proposed treatment. He was a journalist. It was ridiculous, in his opinion, to start publication of the documents with a history lesson on Rudolf Hess. Stern should launch its scoop with an account of the discovery of Hitler’s diaries. Once again the editors realized that decisions had been taken behind their backs. Plan 3 was the child of the Bertelsmann marketing division, not the company’s journalists, part of a long-term commercial scheme to exploit the diaries.

  The sales strategy was based on two premisses. First, to enable the company to recoup its investment, publication would have to be spread over as long a period as possible – somewhere between eighteen months and two years. Secondly, the company would have to find reliable foreign partners to syndicate the material. Plan 3 would enable Bertelsmann to begin earning money, whilst leaving the bulk of the diaries untouched. The manuscript would be sold to news organizations all over the world. Only if they paid promptly, adhered to Stern’s publishing timetable, and generally behaved ‘correctly’, would they be told of the existence of the real prize – Hitler’s diaries – and be offered a share in its exploitation.

  The moment Walde and Pesch had finished the first part of the manuscript, Wilfried Sorge and Olaf Paeschke flew to New York to hold discussions with the management of Bantam Books. The talks took place on Friday, 10 September. They did not go well. The Germans wanted to draw on Bantam
’s experience of the American and British markets. They wanted to know which would be the best magazines and newspapers to approach. As far as Bantam was concerned, their interest was in a book, not a newspaper serial – especially as the two Germans were insistent that they should retain the syndication rights. As paranoid as ever, Sorge and Paeschke refused to reveal the secret of the diaries, leaving the American publishers with a feeling that they were being used. The talks ended, according to one of the participants, with a ‘bitter feeling’ on both sides.

  Sorge flew back to Hamburg over the weekend. On Monday he went in to see Schulte-Hillen to brief him on his trip. The managing director wanted to know how much the diaries were likely to fetch on the world market. This was a difficult question to answer. Sorge had no idea of the total sales potential. The project was unprecedented. After the discussions in New York, it was clear that the only author who might remotely be compared to Adolf Hitler was Henry Kissinger. His memoirs had been syndicated across the globe in 1979 in an intricate network of deals, simultaneous release dates and subsidiary rights, which was a wonder to behold. Hitler was probably bigger than Kissinger – ‘hotter’, as the Americans put it. Certainly, the company was looking at an income of upwards of $2 million.

  Sorge’s report did not please Schulte-Hillen. The company had already paid out 7 million marks – roughly $2 million – to obtain the diaries. Under the terms of the contracts agreed with Heidemann and Walde in 1981, Gruner and Jahr was entitled to only 40 per cent of the revenue from syndication sales. That figure made sense when there were only twenty-seven diaries; but now there were more than forty, the tally was still rising and the costs were going to be more than four times the amount originally predicted. Unless something was done, the company was going to end up making a loss. During a business trip to Majorca, Schulte-Hillen took the opportunity to tell Manfred Fischer that he had decided to renegotiate the original contracts. On 14 October, he summoned Heidemann and Walde to a meeting in a Cologne hotel and explained the problem.