Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  In Hamburg on Thursday, Sorge and Hensmann tied up the loose ends with Stern’s smaller, European syndication partners. Paris Match bought the diaries for $400,000. The Spanish company Grupo Zeta paid $150,000. Geillustreerde Pers of the Netherlands handed over $125,000 for serial rights in Belgium and Holland. Norshe Presse of Norway bought the diaries for $50,000. The Italian rights went to Mondadori, publishers of the magazine Panorama, although as a precaution they decided at this stage to buy only the first four instalments for $50,000. Added together with the $1.2 million paid by News International for the English language serialization, this meant that the Hitler diaries had so far realized $1.975 million – less than Stern had originally hoped for, but still one of the largest syndication deals in history. And, of course, there were still the world book rights to come.

  The Peterhouse Master’s Lodge is a large and stately Queen Anne house on the eastern side of Trumpington Street, opposite the college. This spacious and well-proportioned home was regarded by Trevor-Roper as one of the more attractive aspects of being Master of Peterhouse. (‘The only drawback’, he remarked, ‘is that the college comes with it.’)

  Throughout Thursday, 21 April, Trevor-Roper sat in his first-floor study, trying to write his article for The Times. Although justifiably renowned for his literary style (A. J. P. Taylor called him ‘an incomparable essayist’), he had always found writing ‘terribly painful’. Deadlines especially were a torture to him. He never used a typewriter, always a fountain pen, and liked to ‘write, sleep on it, and then rewrite’. Today he had no time for such luxuries. At length, having sorted through his notes and cleared his mind, he set to work.

  ‘A new document’ – he began – ‘or rather, a whole new archive of documents – has recently come to light in Germany. It is an archive of great historical significance. When it is available to historians, it will occupy them for some time. It may also disconcert them. It is Hitler’s private diary, kept by him, in his own hand, throughout almost the whole of his reign….’

  On Thursday night in his laboratory in the small town of Bad Ems outside Koblenz, Dr Arnold Rentz completed his analysis of the three sheets of paper Stern had sent to the Bundesarchiv the previous week.

  When he had commissioned him, Dr Josef Henke had told Rentz that the tests were a matter of the utmost urgency. The chemist therefore worked late in order to be able to give Henke the results the following day. He had some good news, and some bad.

  Part Four

  ‘After all, we are in the entertainment business.’

  Rupert Murdoch on the Hitler diaries

  TWENTY-FIVE

  FRIDAY 22 APRIL.

  At 9 a.m. a motorcycle dispatch-rider from The Times arrived at the Peterhouse Master’s Lodge.

  Trevor-Roper was entitled to feel a certain professional pride as he handed over his article. It was long – over 3000 words – and had been difficult to write, but he had finished it in a day and submitted it on time. It was an impressive piece of journalism, if not of scholarship.

  His career had always been marked by a curious dichotomy. There was Hugh Trevor-Roper, patient historian, author of learned works on such esoterica as the sixteenth-century European witch craze, the ancient Scottish constitution and the life of the fraudulent Sinologist, Edmund Backhouse, ‘the Hermit of Peking’. And then there was Lord Dacre, man of public affairs, newspaper director, pundit, MI5 officer and Hitler expert. His article for The Times represented the triumph of the intelligence officer over the scholar. His authentication of the Hitler diaries was not based on a careful analysis of their content – it could not be, he had scarcely bothered to read a single entry. It was based almost entirely on circumstantial evidence.

  He confessed that to start with he had been sceptical (‘the very idea of Hitler as a methodical diarist is new’). But then he had ‘entered the back room in the Swiss bank, and turned the pages of those volumes, and learned the extraordinary story of their discovery’ and his doubts had ‘gradually dissolved’. What most impressed him, he wrote, were the other parts of the Hitler archive shown to him by Stern in Zurich and by Heidemann in Hamburg:

  …it is these other documents – letters, notes, notices of meetings, mementoes, and, above all, signed paintings and drawings by Hitler, all covering several decades – which convinced me of the authenticity of the diaries. For all belong to the same archive, and whereas signatures, single documents, or even groups of documents can be skilfully forged, a whole coherent archive covering 35 years is far less easily manufactured.

  Such a disproportionate and indeed extravagant effort offers too large and vulnerable a flank to the critics who will undoubtedly assail it…. The archive, in fact, is not only a collection of documents which can be individually tested: it coheres as a whole and the diaries are an integral part of it.

  That is the internal evidence of authenticity….

  Trevor-Roper’s entire misjudgement was founded upon the non sequitur contained in that last, fatally confident sentence. The fact that the archive spanned thirty-five years and included paintings and other documents did not, except in the most superficial sense, provide ‘internal evidence of authenticity’. If such internal evidence existed, it was to be found in the detailed content of the diaries themselves. But no German scholar had even been allowed to see them, let alone check every entry; at least twenty volumes had not yet been transcribed into typescript; and Walde and Pesch, the only journalists apart from Heidemann who had access to the diaries, had thoroughly examined only one volume: that devoted to the flight of Rudolf Hess. (Ironically, the authenticity of the Hess book was the one feature of the diaries which still worried Trevor-Roper. ‘We must not jump to premature conclusions,’ he wrote. ‘There are many mysteries in the case of Hess.’)

  The ‘external fact’ which impressed Trevor-Roper was the plane crash and Hitler’s reaction to it: ‘a clue which connects him, by a thin but direct line, with this archive’. The outburst in the bunker, together with the extent of the material accompanying the diaries, ‘seems to me to constitute clear proof of their authenticity’.

  The world, he concluded, would have to revise its opinion of Hitler to take account of the fact that he was ‘a compulsive diarist’.

  In fact, we must envisage him, every night, after he had apparently gone to bed… sitting down to write his daily record: and perhaps more too, for the archive contains not only the diaries but whole books by Hitler – books on Jesus Christ, on Frederick the Great, on himself (the three subjects which seem equally to fascinate megalomaniac Germans) – and a third volume of Mein Kampf. If Hitler (as he said in 1942) had long ago found writing by hand a great effort, that may be not so much because he was out of practice as because he already suffered from writer’s cramp.

  * * *

  As this hasty compilation of donnish jokes and misunderstanding sped down the M11 to London, Felix Schmidt opened the regular Stern editorial conference in Hamburg. It was 11 a.m., German time.

  He had a brief announcement to make, he said. His statement was simple and to the point. Over the past few days, colleagues had probably heard rumours of an impending scoop of great importance. He was now pleased to be able to let them in on a secret which had been kept by the magazine for the past two years. Stern had acquired the diaries of Adolf Hitler and would begin publishing them on Monday.

  The news was met with gasps and whistles of astonishment.

  Simultaneously, the magazine was issuing a public statement announcing its discovery to the world. ‘Following evaluation of the diaries,’ it claimed, ‘the biography of the dictator, and with it the history of the Nazi state, will have to be written in large part anew.’

  At 11.15 a.m., Stern’s news department began sending out the telexed message – to the German press agency, DPA, to Associated Press, to Reuters, to United Press International, to West German radio and television….

  It was at this point, with the juggernaut already beginning to roll, that Thomas Walde rec
eived a telephone call from Dr Josef Henke at the Bundesarchiv. Henke had received the results of Rentz’s forensic analysis. The two blank pages which had been cut from the diaries did not contain paper whitener and therefore could have been manufactured either before or during the Second World War. The Mussolini telegram, however, did contain whitener and Rentz was convinced the paper was made after 1945. Rentz’s findings supported those of the West German police in March: while the diaries might be genuine, much of the accompanying archive (whose existence had done so much to convince Trevor-Roper) was faked.

  Walde thanked Rentz for his help and asked him to rush Rentz’s written report to Hamburg as quickly as possible.

  At first sight, this news was not too disturbing for Stern: the diaries, after all, were what mattered, and Heidemann had already told Walde that, according to ‘Fischer’, the other material did not necessarily come from the Boernersdorf crash. But considered more carefully, the implications of the Rentz report were frightening. Three handwriting experts had concluded that the draft telegrams to Admiral Horthy and General Franco (similar to, and from the same source as, the Mussolini telegram) were written by the same person as the author of the page from the Hess special volume. If they were fakes, how much reliance could be placed on the handwriting authentication? And Rentz had been able to establish, by the apparent absence of whitener, only that the two diary pages might be from the right period: they could still be made of paper manufactured after 1945 by an old-fashioned process (as indeed eventually proved to be the case). Thus, at the very moment that news of Stern’s scoop was being flashed around the world, the magazine received indications about its authenticity which were, at best, ambiguous.

  As soon as Walde had finished speaking to Henke, he went off to find Peter Koch to tell him the news. Koch, newly returned from America, was understandably alarmed. Walde tried to reassure him: according to Heidemann, he said, whitener was in use before the war; and even if the Mussolini telegram was a fake, it did not originate from the same source as the diaries.

  Koch was still not happy. He told Walde that they must inform the management at once. They collected Felix Schmidt on the way, briefed him on what had happened, and together all three went up to the ninth floor to see Schulte-Hillen.

  Koch explained the situation and made a short speech. At any moment, he declared, a wave of scepticism was going to descend upon them. They were going to be attacked by academics and newspapers all over the world. They had to be absolutely confident that the story was watertight. There was only one way they could be sure. Heidemann must be made to divulge the name of his source. Koch was worried. ‘I told Schulte-Hillen,’ he recalled, ‘“Heidemann has greater trust in you than in me. Please ask him to write down the exact course of events. You can then read the piece of paper and lock it away in a safe. You don’t even need to give it to me to read. Just tell me that the source is OK.”’

  Schulte-Hillen agreed. He asked his secretary to get Gerd Heidemann on the telephone.

  The reporter was not in Hamburg. He was eventually traced to the Bayerischer Hof, an expensive hotel in the centre of Munich.

  Schulte-Hillen explained the problem and asked him to write down, in confidence, the complete story of how he had obtained the diaries. Heidemann refused. ‘I asked him again,’ recalled Schulte-Hillen, ‘emphatically.’ It was no use. According to the managing director:

  He told me that as an experienced journalist he knew that anything that was written down could also be copied and anything that was said could be passed on to other people. He was not so unscrupulous that he would endanger the life of his informant. He could not live with his conscience if he put someone else’s life in danger.

  When I tried to pressurize him further, he became quite irritated and said: ‘What is it that you want of me? I won’t tell you. I swear to you on the lives of my children that everything is in order. It has all been properly researched. The books are genuine. What more can you ask of me?’

  Schulte-Hillen was once more struck by what seemed to him Heidemann’s obvious sincerity. ‘I too have children,’ he said afterwards. ‘Heidemann’s oath impressed me.’ He let the matter drop. In any case, under the terms of his contract, Heidemann had the right to keep the identity of his supplier secret. The managing director told the editors that there was nothing he could do. They would all have to trust Heidemann.

  In London, Frank Giles, editor of the Sunday Times, summoned two of his senior colleagues, Hugo Young and Magnus Linklater, to his office. He was, recalled Linklater, ‘obviously very flustered’.

  Giles was not a member of Murdoch’s inner circle. He had been only on the fringes of the group which negotiated to buy the diaries – vaguely aware of what was going on, unenthusiastic, yet comforted by his belief that they would be running in The Times. His sang froid had been shattered the previous day by a brisk, transatlantic announcement from Murdoch that the Hitler diaries were going to be serialized in the Sunday Times after all: now that Stern would be appearing on Monday, Sunday had become the perfect day to print the extracts. It would enable the paper to avoid the risk of rivals getting hold of advance copies of the German magazine and printing pirated extracts from the diaries twenty-four hours ahead of them.

  Murdoch was not a proprietor who encouraged dissent. Even strong editors found it hard to stand up to him. Giles was not a strong editor. He was sixty-four years old, sleek and aristocratic, a lover of Glyndebourne, fine French wines and classical music which he listened to on his Sony Walkman. His relationship with Murdoch was akin to that between a rabbit and a stoat. The proprietor made no secret of his habit of ripping into Giles’s editorial decisions. He once announced jauntily to Harold Evans that he was ‘just going over to terrorize Frank’. Murdoch’s office on the sixth floor of The Times building looked directly across into Giles’s at the Sunday Times. Evans recalled how the Australian tycoon ‘would stand up with a big grin and with his fingers pointed like a pistol fire bang! bang!’ at Giles working with his back to the window. The subject of this imaginary target practice was in no position to stop Murdoch from doing what he wanted with his newspaper.

  Giles told Young and Linklater that the Sunday Times would be serializing the Hitler diaries. They would prepare the ground on Sunday with extensive coverage of their discovery. The two men were ‘aghast’. How could Giles countenance something as irresponsible as running the diaries without allowing the paper’s own journalists to make independent checks? Had he not seen Knightley’s memorandum? Had he forgotten the Mussolini diaries?

  Giles, according to Linklater, raised his hands to his ears.

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want to hear about all that. The deal’s been signed and we’re going to have to do it.’

  Minutes later, Arthur Brittenden, Times Newspapers’ Director of Corporate Relations (their press officer), announced that the Hitler diaries would be running in the Sunday Times. ‘It’s not been decided how many Sundays,’ he told the New York Times, ‘because the complete translation is not yet finished. But I think we’ll run it for two or three weeks, then there will be a gap and we’ll pick it up again.’

  By coincidence, many of the leading characters in the British subplot of the affair came together for lunch on Friday at the Dorchester Hotel. The Dorchester was hosting the UK Press Awards, an annual ceremony at which Britain’s journalists present prizes to one another in recognition of their professional skill. Charles Douglas-Home was holding forth to a woman sitting next to him. ‘It’s just been announced,’ he told her. ‘It’s the greatest historical find of the century.’

  Sitting at the table, Gitta Sereny of the Sunday Times asked what he was talking about.

  ‘The Hitler diaries,’ said Douglas-Home.

  ‘Are you running them?’ she asked.

  ‘No. You are.’

  Sereny relayed the gist of this conversation to Phillip Knightley, sitting a few yards away. Knightley hurried back to the office and sought out Magn
us Linklater. Linklater gloomily confirmed that the news was true. ‘The Times is running an article by Trevor-Roper tomorrow saying they’re genuine. Why don’t you talk to him?’

  It was 3 p.m. In the Master’s Lodge, Trevor-Roper was preparing for a visit to the opera when Knightley called him. The historian’s tone was confident and reassuring.

  ‘The one thing that impressed me most’, he told Knightley, ‘was the volume of the material. I asked myself whether it all could have been constructed out of the imagination and incidental sources. I decided that it could not.’

  Knightley reminded him that there had been thirty volumes of the purported Mussolini diaries. Trevor-Roper was unperturbed: ‘I know Hitler’s handwriting. I know his signature. I know the changes in it between 1908 and his death. It seemed to me that an operation of forgery on that scale was heroic and unnecessary.’ He pointed out that they were not dealing with some shady characters operating on the fringes of the law, but with one of the wealthiest and most widely read magazines in Europe: ‘The directors of Stern, one must assume, do not engage in forgery.’

  By the time he hung up, Knightley – who recorded the call – felt much happier. Trevor-Roper’s reputation was impeccable. It was inconceivable that he could be so emphatic about the diaries’ authenticity without good cause. ‘I must say,’ Knightley recalled, ‘he went a long way to convincing me.’