Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  The following Tuesday, Gerd Schulte-Hillen convened a meeting in a conference room on the ninth floor of the Stern building. It was attended by all those involved in the diaries project: Nannen, Gillhausen, Koch, Schmidt, Walde, Heidemann, Pesch, Sorge, Hess and Hensmann. The history department’s flickering hope that the new publication plan might be abandoned was crushed by Schulte-Hillen’s opening words. ‘Gentlemen,’ announced the managing director, ‘the time has come. We intend to publish.’ Nevertheless, Walde, Pesch and Heidemann were determined to make one last stand. The source of the diaries, they warned, would be threatened, and important volumes had yet to be delivered. Walde reported that they had no books from the year 1944: ‘If we did not get hold of those volumes… we would be unable to settle some very important questions about the Third Reich.’ Imagine what Hitler might have written about the German response to D-Day or the July bomb plot. Sorge supported his old schoolfriend. Speaking as a salesman, he would find it much easier to offer the diary archive in its entirety, rather than having to tell customers that part of it had not yet arrived.

  Schulte-Hillen was not convinced. He accepted the argument of Nannen and the editors: to start with the Hess story and not to mention the diaries was the wrong way of doing things. If they delayed any longer there was a danger of leaks. They should go ahead and begin printing the story in May.

  That settled, the conference went on to take a series of decisions on the timetable for publication. The existence of the diaries would be revealed in eight weeks’ time, in Stern’s issue of 5 May. To wring the last ounce of sensation and profitability out of the diaries, serialization would be divided into three separate periods, spaced out over a period of eighteen months. In May and June, the magazine would run eight weekly instalments, covering the story of the diaries’ discovery, the Hess flight and the Nazis’ rise to power. There would then be a break over the summer. In the autumn they would relaunch the scoop with a ten-part series based on the pre-war diaries. This would be followed by a second and much longer interruption while the final extracts were prepared. Finally, in the autumn of 1984, Stern would publish another ten extracts based on the diaries from the war years. Heidemann was instructed to deliver the missing volumes by 31 March. Another Stern reporter, Wolf Thieme, was given the task of putting together the story of how the diaries were found – once again, Heidemann was expected to turn over all his information for someone else to write up.

  The magazine, concluded Schulte-Hillen, had less than a month to produce the first eight-part series: it would need to be shown to potential foreign customers during syndication negotiations at the beginning of April.

  Early the next morning, the peripatetic Sorge was back at Hamburg airport to catch the first flight to London. He had already scheduled meetings with potential British customers before Stern changed its publication strategy. In view of the importance of the British market, it was decided to go ahead with the London sales trip as planned. At Heathrow, Sorge was met by Stern’s bureau chief in London, Peter Wickman, and the two men drove to their first appointment: with Sir David English of Lord Rothermere’s Associated Newspaper group.

  English, editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday, listened to Sorge’s presentation of the Hess story. His immediate worry was the possibility that the Hitler document might be a fake. He had been caught himself, when editor of the Daily Mail, by forged correspondence supposedly originating from Lord Ryder. Another worry was the reputation of the Mail on Sunday, to whom the Hess scoop would be given as ammunition in its circulation battle with the Sunday Express. The Mail on Sunday’s editor, Stewart Steven, was the man who had helped Ladislas Farago track down Martin Bormann for the Daily Express in 1972 only to discover, too late, that ‘Bormann’ was actually an innocent Argentine high school teacher. English told Sorge he was interested in Stern’s story, but he would require absolute guarantees of authenticity before going any further.

  In the afternoon, Sorge and Wickman went to see their other possible client, Times Newspapers. Colin Webb and Charles Wilson attended the meeting on behalf of The Times, Brian MacArthur for the Sunday Times. Before revealing what he had to offer, Sorge made the three men sign a pledge of secrecy. They were more interested in the story than David English, but before they could make any commitment, they would have to consult the editors of the two papers and their proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. The secrecy pledge was amended to allow these three gentlemen to be informed of Stern’s scoop.

  Sorge spent the night in the Savoy Hotel and the following morning returned to Hamburg.

  Heidemann dreaded the impending launch of the diaries. His comfortable existence of the last two years – the suitcases full of money, the flattery of his superiors – was bound to come to an end. He would cease to have a hold over the company. He would suffer the humiliation of watching while the diaries were passed to other writers for exploitation. Already, he had been forced to entertain Wolf Thieme in his gallery in Milchstrasse and tell him the story of the diaries’ discovery. This meeting had posed another problem for Heidemann. It was safe for him to talk about the evacuation of documents from Berlin and the loss of the plane. He could describe how he had located the crash site using Gundlfinger’s name. He could talk of the local peasants who had salvaged material from the wrecked aircraft. But then, of necessity, there was a gap of more than thirty years, until the books started accumulating in the management’s safe in Hamburg. Heidemann explained to Thieme that he could not say any more without jeopardizing the lives of his informants. Naturally, he did not tell Thieme the other reason for his reticence: that if Kujau’s identity were ever disclosed, and if the garrulous relics dealer ever spoke to anyone else from Stern, it would only be a matter of time before the company discovered he had been defrauding them for the past two years.

  To try to ward off publication, with all its attendant hazards, Heidemann used every argument, cajolement and threat at his disposal in a desperate attempt to make the company change its mind. On Thursday 17 March he went to see Schulte-Hillen and handed him a closely typed two-page memorandum ‘for his eyes only’. The managing director, said Heidemann, must destroy it as soon as he had read it. ‘Dear Herr Schulte-Hillen,’ it began,

  Before you reach any irrevocable decisions, I would like once again to put my reservations on paper. I cannot guarantee that the missing diaries will be in Hamburg by the beginning of May 1983. There is no way that they will be with us by the beginning of April. How are the sales negotiations to proceed if we cannot offer those who are interested a complete set of diaries? Are we to answer questions by admitting that we have not had the nerve to wait as long as it takes to have the last diary in our hands? Are we to say to those interested that we are worried there might be photocopies of the diaries on the market? What do we do when the main protagonists [in the negotiations – i.e. Sorge] are insisting that the diaries can only be sold as a complete package and we should wait until the autumn? Of course I am of the opinion that we should have the complete story of the find and several issues prepared and ready to go in order to be able to begin publishing immediately should any photocopies surface. But this danger is very slight: my business partner in East Germany is counting on the fact that the ‘Swiss collector’ will eventually buy other things from him….

  Heidemann went on to list fourteen separate sets of Hitler documents which his ‘business partner’ had told him were on offer:

  1. Six diary-like volumes which Hitler wrote alongside the diaries which are known to us.

  2. Adolf Hitler’s handwritten memoirs, My Life and Struggle for Germany, written in the years 1942–44.

  3. Hitler’s book about women, in which there are said to be descriptions of his experiences with women.

  4. Hitler’s plan for the solution of the Jewish question, written after the Wannsee Conference on 28 January 1942, in which he gives Himmler precise orders as to what is to happen to the Jews (eighteen handwritten pages).

  5. Hitler’s ha
ndwritten Documents about Himmler, Ley and Others, including notes about the Jewish origins of those concerned.

  6. Hitler’s notes from 18 April until his death on 30 April 1945.

  7. Goebbels’s notes following Hitler’s suicide.

  8. Hitler’s handwritten testament and marriage documents (twenty-one pages).

  9. Hitler’s documents about his supposed son in France.

  10. Hitler’s documents about his origins and relatives.

  11. Secret Thoughts about Different Military and Political Problems.

  12. Hitler’s book about Frederick the Great.

  13. Hitler’s book about King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

  14. Hitler’s opera, Wieland the Blacksmith.

  Heidemann added that there were ‘three hundred other drawings and watercolours by Hitler’ also available in East Germany.

  Heidemann was not necessarily lying when he outlined this fantastic catalogue to Schulte-Hillen. He appears to have genuinely believed what Kujau told him: that these documents could be rescued from behind the Iron Curtain and that premature disclosure might lose Stern the chance of obtaining them. Not all the items were new to Stern. For example, Kujau had first offered to sell Wieland the Blacksmith to Heidemann at the beginning of 1981. The forger had hit on the idea after reading the memoirs of August Kubizek. In The Young Hitler I Knew, published in 1955, Kubizek described how Hitler set about writing an opera, a sub-Wagnerian epic of rape and murder, set in the rugged wastes of Iceland, complete with flaming volcanoes, icy glaciers and winged Valkyries in shining helmets rising from the waters of ‘Wolf Lake’. In the end, Wieland the Blacksmith was too much even for Hitler, and he abandoned it, after a few weeks’ work, in 1907. The incident provided Kujau with a perfect cover story for another fake, and for more than two years he kept promising to supply the opera to Heidemann. The imagination recoils at the thought of what Bertelsmann’s marketing department might have done with a Hitler opera – especially as one of the company’s American subsidiaries was Arista Records. Mercifully, Wieland the Blacksmith was one piece of Hitleriana that Kujau never got round to forging. (He would have done it, he said later, but for the fact that he did not read music.)

  Another of the new documents – the biography of King Ludwig II of Bavaria – was also familiar to Heidemann. One of the first diaries the reporter delivered to Hamburg contained a description of a visit supposedly made by Hitler to the town of Hohenschwangau. ‘During my address,’ noted ‘Hitler’ on 12 August 1933, ‘I mention that in earlier years I once wrote a small book about Ludwig II. This must be in Munich.’ Thus Kujau, with characteristic cheek, used one forgery to prepare the way for another.

  In his memorandum, Heidemann warned Schulte-Hillen that it would be impossible to obtain all these treasures by 31 March – the managing director’s ‘target date’ for the completion of Stern’s archive. Therefore, said Heidemann, he proposed to deliver the material to ‘other interested parties’, and asked to be released from his contract with Gruner and Jahr.

  Schulte-Hillen was not impressed by Heidemann’s bluster. The reporter had threatened to resign so often over the past few years, the bluff no longer carried any conviction. It was not that Schulte-Hillen saw anything inherently implausible in such documents as Hitler’s ‘book about women’, it was simply that the time had passed when he was prepared to tolerate this sort of procrastination. Besides, the company already had enough Hitler material to fill Stern for the next eighteen months. He was a stubborn man, and he had made up his mind. They would begin publishing the diaries in May.

  Schulte-Hillen also ignored Heidemann’s request that he should burn the memo. When he had finished reading it, he locked it away in the same file as Heidemann’s various contracts. Afterwards he mentioned the episode during a conversation with Henri Nannen. To Nannen, Heidemann’s determination to try to postpone publication was further evidence of fraud. ‘Heidemann’, he thought, ‘was only really interested in providing further material in order to obtain further payments.’ But recalling Schulte-Hillen’s reaction the last time he had aired his suspicions, he said nothing.

  Three days later, Sorge announced to his clients that in addition to the Hess story, Stern was now offering to sell syndication rights in Adolf Hitler’s diaries. Interested organizations were invited to send representatives to inspect the material in Zurich at the end of the first week of April.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE FIRST INTIMATION that there might be something seriously wrong with Stern’s great scoop came a week and a half later. Walde had at last succeeded in persuading the West German Federal Police to carry out the long-awaited forensic tests. On Tuesday 22 March he telexed Dr Henke and Dr Oldenhage at the Bundesarchiv to tell them he had fixed an appointment to hear the results the following Monday morning. He hoped they could both make it: ‘Colleague Heidemann will attend for us.’

  At 10 a.m. on 28 March, Heidemann, Henke and Oldenhage duly assembled at the police headquarters at Wiesbaden. It was assumed that the meeting would be a formality. The material had, after all, been authenticated by three different handwriting analysts. The police expert, Dr Louis Werner, appeared. He had been given nine samples to examine: the Hess statement, the Horthy telegram, the Kleist document, the draft telegram to Franco, some speech notes, a letter to Goering and the three signed Hitler photographs. His conclusion: of the nine documents, he thought at least six were forgeries.

  To begin with, Heidemann could not believe what he was hearing. He asked Dr Werner to elaborate. Werner explained that under ultraviolet light, six of the samples, including all the signed photographs and the Horthy telegram, appeared to contain a substance called ‘blankophor’, a paper-whitening agent which as far as he was aware had not come into use until after the Second World War. In his opinion, it was therefore impossible that they could have been written at the time their dates indicated. He proposed to consult an expert from the Bayer chemical company for confirmation. In addition, the Kleist document contained glue of recent manufacture, and one of the letters had been typed on a machine built after 1956.

  Heidemann asked about the other three samples, which included the Hess statement, the only page to come from the actual diaries. They, at least, were definitely genuine? Not necessarily, replied Werner. He could not be sure until he had carried out further tests.

  How long would that take?

  A week.

  Heidemann asked if he could borrow the telephone. Werner told him to go ahead. In the scientist’s presence, he rang Walde and repeated what he had just heard. He handed the receiver to Werner.

  Walde asked the expert if he could absolutely guarantee that the Hess document was a fake. Werner said he couldn’t: he would have to carry out further tests. These would necessitate damaging the page by cutting away part of it which could then be broken down into its separate components.

  Greatly relieved, Walde thanked him and asked him to put Heidemann back on the line. Walde told Heidemann to retrieve the material and return with it to Hamburg immediately.

  The two men discussed this unexpected setback the next day. There was no question in their minds that the material was genuine. They had three handwriting reports to prove it. Clearly, there had been a misunderstanding somewhere. Perhaps the documents had become contaminated with whitener in the course of their travels around Europe and North America during the previous year. Perhaps Werner had made a mistake. Or perhaps somehow a few dubious papers had been mixed up with the genuine material.

  Heidemann rang Kujau and explained what had happened. ‘Oh, don’t worry about the BKA,’ Kujau assured him. ‘They’re all mad there.’ He told Heidemann that he had encountered this problem before. According to a police official he knew, paper whitener had been in use since 1915. Werner was talking nonsense.

  Heidemann relayed this conversation to Walde. They agreed, as a safety check, to arrange further forensic tests, this time specifically concentrating on material from the diaries. They did not bother to
tell Stern’s editors or management of Werner’s preliminary assessment.

  To launch Hitler’s diaries, Stern was planning the biggest publicity campaign in its history. There would be a press conference in Hamburg. There would be advertisements in all West Germany’s leading newspapers. There would also be a special television documentary, packaged and ready to sell to networks throughout the world.

  On Thursday, 31 March, Wilfried Sorge called in the head of Stern’s TV subsidiary, Herr Zeisberg, and briefed him on the story of the diaries’ discovery. Could he have a forty-minute film ready by 3 May, to coincide with the launch? Zeisberg said it was possible. They discussed who they might commission to make it. The obvious choice as producer was Klaus Harpprecht: he had made programmes on historical subjects, he had an excellent reputation, and he had worked extensively in America – an important qualification, as Sorge wanted to include an American element to help US sales. As presenter, they picked Barbara Dickmann, an experienced journalist, occasionally tipped as a potential German equivalent of ABC’s Barbara Walters.

  Peter Koch approved their choices. He called Dickmann at her office in Bonn that afternoon. Would she come to a confidential meeting at his home in Hamburg next Monday? She asked him what it was about. He refused to tell her over the telephone. Intrigued by Koch’s secretive manner, she agreed.

  In America, Maynard Parker of Newsweek telephoned Gordon Craig, Professor of History at Stanford University. Swearing him to secrecy, Parker told him about the Hitler diaries and asked if he would be willing to advise Newsweek on their authenticity. Craig, author of The Germans, was not an expert on Hitler: his speciality was the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He advised Parker to ask someone else. Parker asked him if he could recommend anyone. Craig suggested Gerhard Weinberg of the University of North Carolina. Parker said he would try him.