Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  Craig promptly rang his old friend Weinberg. He could not go into details, he said, but ‘off the record’ Newsweek would be getting in touch with him very shortly. Weinberg, fifty-five years old, quiet and punctilious, had managed to pursue his profession in peace for more than three decades and had only limited experience of journalists. ‘I don’t think that’s very likely, Gordon,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll see,’ insisted Craig. ‘They’ll be in touch.’

  In London, Peter Wickman spoke with Sir Edward Pickering, executive vice chairman of Times Newspapers. Pickering said the company wanted to send a historian out to Zurich to give them an opinion on the diaries: ‘We thought we’d ask Trevor-Roper.’ He was not only considered an authority on Hitler, he was also one of the company’s five Independent National Directors. Wickman said that Stern did not mind who Times Newspapers nominated as long as it was someone discreet. The next day – Friday, 1 April – Colin Webb, assistant editor of The Times, tried to contact Trevor-Roper.

  For the ‘Sleuth of Oxford’, the years since the publication of The Last Days of Hitler had been filled with honours and success. In 1957, his friendship with one Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had helped bring him the post of Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University; and in 1979 Margaret Thatcher granted him a peerage. He was an honorary fellow of two Oxford colleges, a member of three London clubs, and a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. In 1954 he had married Lady Alexandra Howard-Johnston, elder daughter of Field Marshal Earl Haig, and the couple had become renowned for grand dinner parties at which Trevor-Roper would occasionally appear in velvet smoking jacket and embroidered slippers. His friend, the philosopher A. J. Ayer, ‘admired his intellectual elegance’ and ‘appreciated his malice’.

  Intellectually, even in private, Trevor-Roper could be faintly menacing; in print, he was devastating. An attack on one historian’s work (on the Elizabethan aristocracy) was described as ‘a magnificent if terrifying work of destruction’ and brought him a rebuke from the venerable R. H. Tawney: ‘An erring colleague is not an Amalekite, to be smitten hip and thigh.’ In the course of one intellectual dogfight with Evelyn Waugh on the subject of the Catholic church, Waugh advised him to ‘change his name and seek a livelihood at Cambridge’. Trevor-Roper did so in 1980, taking the title Lord Dacre of Glanton and becoming Master of Peterhouse, the oldest and most conservative college in Cambridge. Since then, anecdotes of the running battle between the college’s High Church fellows and their anti-clerical Master had reached mythical proportions within the university. At his first dinner on High Table, Trevor-Roper was said to have objected to the consistency of the soup. ‘Gentlemen,’ he announced, ‘only have clear soup at dinner.’ The following evening’s menu began with Potage de Gentilhomme, a soup thick enough for the Master to stand his spoon in.

  Trevor-Roper was not at home in Peterhouse when Webb tried to reach him on the telephone. It was Good Friday, and he and Lady Alexandra had retired for Easter to Chiefswood, their country house in Scotland, once the property of the novelist, Sir Walter Scott. Here, Trevor-Roper was able to escape the in-fighting of Oxbridge and affect the habits and costume of a laird of the Scottish borders; and it was here, on 1 April, that Webb tracked him down, told him of Hitler’s diaries, and asked him to fly to Zurich the following week.

  On Easter Sunday, Peter Koch made several trips to Heidemann’s home on the Elbchaussee to pick up drawings and paintings from the reporter’s collection. The idea was to take them to Zurich and exhibit them alongside the diaries to create the right atmosphere for the negotiations. It was the first time Koch had seen Heidemann’s lifestyle at first hand, and he was shocked by its luxuriousness. As he was led from room to room he-tried to reckon up in his mind how much this would cost in rent. Ten thousand marks a month at least, he thought. Heidemann said he found it rather cramped. ‘He told me he was thinking of buying a house on the Elbchaussee,’ recalled Koch. ‘It was a place with a view of the Elbe.’ A house like that would cost over a million marks.

  Heidemann pointed out some of his treasures. ‘There was a whole pile of antiques,’ said Koch. ‘There were some old walking sticks, drawings by Rembrandt and Dürer, a memento of Napoleon…. He also told me he had about three hundred paintings by Hitler.’ Heidemann produced Hitler’s suicide weapon, with Bormann’s note attached to it. ‘There was also a ladies’ pistol, which was supposed to have been Eva Braun’s.’ Heidemann told him it had all come from the Boernersdorf crash. Koch asked him how he had paid for it. The reporter told him the company had compensated him for buying it with a payment of 1.5 million marks.

  Heidemann mentioned this quite casually, apparently assuming that Koch already knew of it. It was the first Koch had heard of any special payment and he confronted Schulte-Hillen with the story at one of the company’s routine financial meetings the following week. ‘He behaved as if he didn’t know anything,’ Koch remembered. ‘Then he asked his deputy, Hensmann, if he knew anything. They both looked very embarrassed, running their hands through their hair and behaving as if they had great difficulty in remembering. They hesitated and then they said they had made a special payment of 1.5 million marks to Heidemann.’

  Koch told Felix Schmidt what the management had done. They were both angry. Money had been paid out to a member of their staff behind their backs, and they had learned of it only by accident. But they were not surprised. The longer the affair went on, the more private deals they seemed to discover. What might they stumble on next?

  For all those involved in the Hitler diaries project, the pace of events now began to accelerate.

  On Monday, 4 April, Klaus Harpprecht and Barbara Dickmann, together with executives from Stern’s television company, arrived at Peter Koch’s apartment to meet Sorge, Walde, Pesch and Heidemann. The two television journalists were informed of the existence of the Hitler diaries. Koch said that Stern wanted a film ready to launch the scoop. It would almost certainly be bought by one of the West German networks, and probably by foreign stations as well. It would have a budget of 160,000 marks. Harpprecht and Dickmann were worried about their reputations as impartial reporters. To avoid being seen to be making a publicity puff for Stern, they asked for editorial freedom to make the film as they wished. Sorge and Koch readily agreed to their demands: all the information contained in the film would have to come from Stern, and most of the potential interviewees – old Nazis like Karl Wolff and Hans Baur – were acquaintances of Heidemann’s; in the time available, there was no chance of the television team carrying out independent investigations of their own.

  On Tuesday, Heidemann withdrew another 300,000 marks from the diaries account.

  On Wednesday, Walde telexed Dr Werner at the police headquarters in Wiesbaden: ‘I cannot yet give you our company’s decision regarding the material for authentication. We will ring you or your colleague on Monday 11 April to inform you what material can be given to you, and when.’

  On Thursday, Dr Klaus Oldenhage of the Bundesarchiv drove up from Koblenz to the Gruner and Jahr offices for a meeting with the company’s lawyers.

  In March, Gerd Schulte-Hillen had suddenly learned some shocking news. After more than two years of paying out money for the diaries, he was informed by the Gruner and Jahr legal department that the company did not actually own the diaries. The lawyers had revised their earlier opinion; the agreement with Werner Maser, they warned him, was probably worthless. It was impossible to say with certainty who held the copyright on the diaries: it could be the Federal Government; it could be the State of Bavaria; it might even be some distant relative of Hitler’s of whose existence no one was aware; at any rate, it was not Gruner and Jahr. Schulte-Hillen found himself preparing to hold syndication negotiations which technically involved the handling of stolen property. There was only one hope: an agreement with the Bundesarchiv.

  The Federal Archives had known of the existence of Stern’s hoard of Hitler’s writings for more than a year, ever since Walde h
ad sent them samples for handwriting analysis. Legally, they were aware that ownership of the material might well be theirs anyway, as the archive’s lawyers thought that the copyright was vested in the West German Government. On the other hand, it was undeniable that without Stern’s expertise and money, the documents would never have come to light. At his meeting with the lawyers in Hamburg on Thursday, Oldenhage therefore announced that the Bundesarchiv was prepared to do a deal with the magazine, allowing them exclusive rights to the material for a limited period – on condition that eventually the originals would all be deposited in the Bundesarchiv. A contract was drawn up. To avoid accusations that the authorities were giving special treatment to Stern, the agreement was in Heidemann’s name.

  ‘Herr Gerd Heidemann’, stated the contract, ‘has access to unpublished written and typed documents belonging to Adolf Hitler.’ The material came from ‘outside the Federal Republic of Germany’ and was ‘of political and historical significance’. (Oldenhage still had no idea that the documents in question were Hitler’s diaries.) The Bundesarchiv agreed to give Heidemann ‘unlimited newspaper, book, film, TV and audio-visual rights in the material for him to dispose of as he thinks fit’. The rights would remain his for ‘as long as the material has a marketable value’, a period which was not to exceed ten years. At that point, the documents would revert to the Bundesarchiv ‘in order to preserve them and allow them to be used in a proper historical context’.

  For Stern’s lawyers, the agreement was a triumph. It was, of course, still possible that when the diaries were launched, some unknown descendant of Adolf Hitler would step out of the shadows to claim his inheritance. But now the magazine would have the West German authorities on its side. The contract also gave the company’s salesmen a legal document to wave at potential purchasers in the syndication talks. Gruner and Jahr had secured ownership in its scoop a bare twenty-four hours before the sales negotiations began.

  That night, the principal figures in the first stage of those negotiations began moving into position. Sorge, Hensmann and Koch flew from Hamburg to Zurich, while Hugh Trevor-Roper travelled south from Scotland to London to be ready to catch a flight to Switzerland the next morning.

  Trevor-Roper had finished breakfast and was preparing to leave for Heathrow on Friday when the telephone rang. It was Charles Douglas-Home, the editor of The Times.

  The grandson of an earl, the nephew of a prime minister, educated at Eton, commissioned in the Royal Scots Greys, a dedicated hunter of the English fox – Douglas-Home’s qualifications to edit The Times were perfect to the point of caricature. Trevor-Roper knew him well, and liked him: as one of the five independent directors of the paper he had supported his candidature for the editorship on the grounds that he was ‘more academic’ than his rival, Harold Evans. Nevertheless, he was not pleased at being bothered by Douglas-Home that morning.

  In the course of the previous week, Trevor-Roper had had several conversations with The Times. He had told them that it would be impossible for him to reach an instant decision about the diaries’ authenticity. He had been assured that he would not be required to do so. He should get a feel of the diaries in Zurich, and on his return to London he would be given a typed transcript of the material up to 1941. Only after he had studied that would he be required to deliver a verdict. The purpose of Douglas-Home’s call ran contrary to that understanding. The editor of The Times told Trevor-Roper that Rupert Murdoch was taking a personal interest in the project, that he was determined to secure serial rights in the diaries, that there were rival news organizations equally determined, and that Murdoch wanted to be in a position to make his bid quickly. He could not afford to sit around while transcripts were studied; if he did, he would lose the deal. Douglas-Home therefore asked Trevor-Roper if he would ring London from Zurich that same afternoon with a preliminary assessment of the diaries’ authenticity.

  Trevor-Roper was ‘very irritated’ and ‘surprised’ by the request. It was ridiculous to expect him to reach a conclusion so quickly. But, ‘under the pressure of events’ and with assurances from Douglas-Home that this would only be an interim opinion, he agreed.

  The next four hours were a blur of taxis and airports. Shortly after 9.30 a.m. he was picked up by car and driven to Heathrow. At 10.30 a.m. he met Peter Wickman. At 11.15 a.m. he took off on a Swissair flight to Zurich. He read the outline of Plan 3 on the aircraft and thought it so phoney that his entire journey was wasted. At 1.50 p.m., Swiss time, he landed in Zurich. Wickman hurried him through immigration and customs. At 2.30 p.m. they dropped their luggage off at their hotel. At 3 p.m. he was led into the entrance hall of the Handelsbank, taken through a door immediately to his left, and found himself staring – ‘astonished’ – at fifty-eight volumes of Hitler’s diaries.

  This was the first occasion on which a trained historian had seen their treasure and the Stern men had prepared for it thoroughly. The diaries had been brought up from the vault and arranged in a neat pile on a table at the end of the room, embellished by other Hitler documents, paintings, drawings and memorabilia, including a First World War helmet, supposedly authenticated as Hitler’s by a note from Rudolf Hess. Seen in its entirety, the archive looked stunning in its scope and variety. As Trevor-Roper bent over the stack of books, Sorge, Koch and Hensmann swiftly surrounded the elderly gentleman.

  Trevor-Roper’s specialist field – The Last Days of Hitler notwithstanding – was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He was not a German scholar. He was not fluent in the language and had admitted as much in a review of Mein Kampf published a decade earlier: ‘I do not read German’, he confessed, ‘with great ease or pleasure.’ Written in an archaic script, impenetrable even to most Germans, the diaries might as well have been composed of Egyptian hieroglyphics for all the sense Trevor-Roper could make of them. He had to rely on the Stern men for translation. The conversation was entirely in English.

  Sorge, who had spent three months perfecting his sales patter, did most of the talking. He showed Trevor-Roper Heidemann’s dossier of how Hitler’s handwriting had changed over the years. He showed him the extract in Baur’s book in which the pilot referred to the Führer’s anguish at the loss of Gundlfinger’s plane. He showed him photographs of the graves in Boernersdorf. He talked of their ‘star reporter’, Heidemann. He gave him the reports of three independent handwriting experts who all confirmed that the writing they had seen was Hitler’s. He pointed out that the diaries were not the only cargo salvaged from the plane. He handed him a box full of drawings and paintings. As Trevor-Roper leafed through the books, listening to Sorge, his doubts ‘gradually dissolved’.

  Recollections of the meeting vary between the participants, but on at least two points it would seem that Trevor-Roper was deliberately misled. He was told that the age of the paper had been chemically tested and found to come from the right period. This was not true. He was also told by Peter Koch that Stern knew the identity of the ‘Wehrmacht officer’ who had originally kept the material in East Germany, and that this same individual was the supplier of the diaries. This, too, was false. Heidemann was the only man who had dealt with Kujau and knew the route by which the diaries had supposedly reached the West.

  Trevor-Roper has never been renowned as a trusting and simple soul. Nevertheless, it does not seem to have occurred to him that his hosts might lie to him. Stern stood to gain a fortune if the syndication negotiations proved successful: for that reason alone, their statements should have been treated with scepticism. But Trevor-Roper trusted them. He could see no reason why Stern should choose to sell forgeries. They might not be a particularly reputable organization, but he believed them to have high professional standards. As he put it afterwards in characteristic terms: ‘I took the bona fides of the editor as a datum.’

  ‘I was also impressed’, he said, ‘by the sheer bulk of the diaries. Who, I asked myself, would forge sixty volumes when six would have served his purpose?’

  He was struck by Stern’s ‘almo
st neurotic fear of leakage’. At one point, Koch produced a sheet of paper and wrote out in longhand a pledge of secrecy which he asked Trevor-Roper to sign. He was not to discuss what he had seen with anyone except those authorized to discuss the project on The Times. Trevor-Roper asked why he had to give such an undertaking. ‘In case The Times doesn’t buy the diaries,’ replied Koch. ‘It seemed a reasonable request,’ recalled Trevor-Roper, ‘so without thinking any more about it, I signed.’

  By the time Trevor-Roper left the bank, he was convinced that the diaries were genuine. He did not like the fact that Stern had refused to tell him the name of its supplier, but then, in his experience, an insistence on anonymity was not unusual: ‘Both the papers of Bormann and the diaries of Goebbels have come to publication through persons who have never been identified; and no one doubts that they are genuine.’ He went straight back to his hotel, the Baur au Lac, and from his bedroom telephoned Charles Douglas-Home. ‘I think they’re genuine,’ he told him. Douglas-Home, excited, thanked him for calling and said he would ring him back in an hour.

  Believing that he would have an opportunity to study a transcript of the diaries on his return to Britain, Trevor-Roper had done no preparation for his visit to Zurich. He had not brought out a sample of Hitler’s writing or any kind of chronology of the dictator’s life with which to carry out a random check of the diaries’ contents. The only thing he had brought, jotted on a scrap of paper, was the telephone number of a German historian he knew and respected – someone with whom he had planned to discuss the diaries. The historian whose name he had written down was Eberhard Jaeckel.