Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  It is a tradition on the Sunday Times that, as the presses begin to turn, the senior members of the staff gather in the editor’s office for a drink. Shortly after 7 p.m., Linklater, Eddy, MacArthur, Knightley and their colleagues trooped in to see Giles. There was a mood of self-congratulation. The paper looked so good, it almost convinced the people who had written it. Over a glass of wine, the conversation turned to the following week’s paper: who would attend the Stern press conference, who would handle the serialization…. Giles suggested they should invite Trevor-Roper to write an article demolishing ‘all these carping criticisms’ about the diaries’ authenticity. This was considered a good idea. Giles picked up the telephone. What followed has entered the mythology of Fleet Street, a scene etched in the memory of the witnesses, ‘told and retold over the milk-bars of Fleet Street’, as Evelyn Waugh once wrote of a similar moment in Scoop, ‘perennially fresh in the jaded memories of a hundred editors….’

  ‘Hugh?… Frank Giles…. Very well, thank you….’

  There had been a murmur of conversation in the room, but this gradually died away as more of the Sunday Times men began listening to one side of the telephone conversation.

  ‘…I think we’d like just a quiet, scholarly, detailed piece, rebutting….’

  There was a pause. ‘Frank didn’t go white exactly,’ recalled Knightley, ‘but his tone suddenly changed.’

  ‘Well, naturally, Hugh, one has doubts. There are no certainties in this life. But these doubts aren’t strong enough to make you do a complete 180-degree turn on that?… Oh. I see. You are doing a 180-degree turn….’

  The editorial conference froze into a tableau of despair: MacArthur who had slumped against the wall, now slid gently to the floor; Linklater sat with his head between his knees; Knightley silently pounded the table; nobody spoke.

  After Giles had hung up there was, according to one participant, ‘a tense fifteen-minute conversation’. Should the presses be stopped? That would require Murdoch’s agreement. He was in New York. Someone went off to try to reach him. It was decided that Giles should ring Trevor-Roper back and insist that if he had doubts, he should not air them in public at Stern’s press conference but should reveal them exclusively in the following week’s Sunday Times. Everyone left to enable the editor to make the call in peace; as they did so, his ebullient wife, Lady Katherine Giles, burst through the door carrying her husband’s supper in a hamper. She stayed with him while he made the call and emerged a few minutes later to reassure everyone: ‘Frank was marvellous.’ Meanwhile, Brian MacArthur was speaking to Rupert Murdoch who had been tracked down in the United States. MacArthur outlined the problem caused by Lord Dacre’s change of heart. Should they stop the print run and remake the paper?

  ‘Fuck Dacre,’ replied Murdoch. ‘Publish.’

  Sunday 24 April.

  As 1.4 million copies of the Sunday Times were distributed across Great Britain, the assault on the diaries’ authenticity intensified. Lord Bullock, author of Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, made the same point as a number of critics of the scoop: how could Hitler have written about the attempt on his life in July 1944, when his right arm was known to have been damaged in the blast? Bullock called for an international commission of French, British, American and Jewish historians to be appointed to examine the diaries. The Sunday Times’s rivals, using the information bought from Irving, were having a field day. ‘Serious doubts cast on Hitler’s “secret diaries”,’ claimed the Observer. ‘THE DAMNING FLAWS IN THE HITLER DIARY,’ alleged the Mail on Sunday. ‘All too splendid, too neat, too pat to be anything but a gigantic hoax.’ In Germany, a succession of Hitler’s former aides, few of them under seventy, was wheeled out for comment. ‘We often used to eat at about three or four o’ clock in the morning,’ said Nicolaus von Below, the Führer’s air force adjutant, ‘and only after that did Hitler go to bed. He had no time to write anything. It’s all a complete lie.’ Richard Schulze-Kossens echoed von Below: Hitler ‘never had time’ to keep a diary. ‘The Führer never made notes by hand,’ insisted Christa Schroeder.

  At 8.30 a.m., David Irving was picked up by a Mail on Sunday car and driven to the airport to catch the 10.35 a.m. flight to Hamburg. He was met at the other end by Jochen Kummer, a senior reporter on the mass-circulation Bild Zeitung. Irving was to be their ‘torpedo’ at the Stern press conference the following day. ‘We agreed a fee of £1000 plus expenses,’ noted Irving in his diary.

  A couple of hours later, Trevor-Roper also arrived at Heathrow, accompanied by two minders from the Sunday Times, Paul Eddy and Brian MacArthur. At the airport he found himself ‘pursued by massed cameras’. ‘The whole story had been blown up into a sensation,’ recalled Trevor-Roper. Microphones were thrust at his face. ‘I do believe the diaries are genuine,’ he said, ‘but there are complications. I will not put a percentage figure on my belief. I admit there are problems….’

  In Hamburg the three men met Anthony Terry, and Trevor-Roper once again checked into the Atlantic Hotel to await the arrival of Gerd Heidemann.

  It was late afternoon by the time Heidemann arrived. He apologized for having kept Trevor-Roper waiting. He had just flown in from Munich, he said, where he had been talking to Frau Ilse Hess. Trevor-Roper told him there were certain points he wanted clarified before he was prepared to endorse the diaries at the press conference. Would Heidemann tell him, once again, how the diaries came into Stern’s possession?

  This posed a problem for Heidemann. Since he had last spoken with Trevor-Roper, Stern had received the results of the Rentz forensic investigation. Heidemann was now aware that although the diaries might still be genuine, the accompanying archive was probably forged. Kujau had assured him that the two sets of material came from different sources. But how could Heidemann square that with his original assertion that there was one plane crash, one salvaged cargo, and one supplier? His solution was to add a new twist to his story. Heidemann now told Trevor-Roper that the diaries had been brought out of the East by a former Wehrmacht officer currently living in West Germany. The reporter said he had collected the first diaries from Switzerland. Other material had been delivered to him in Hamburg by the Boernersdorf peasants.

  Trevor-Roper was immediately suspicious. This was the third version of the story he had heard, he said. Originally, in Zurich, he had been told by Peter Koch that the diaries’ supplier lived in East Germany: that was why his name could not be disclosed. Then, in Hamburg last week, Heidemann had told him that the so-called ‘Wehrmacht officer’ lived in Switzerland and could not be identified for tax reasons. Now he was supposed to live in West Germany and only to have supplied the diaries, not the additional material. Which version was correct?

  Heidemann blustered. He was not responsible for anything Koch said. Koch knew nothing. Koch knew only as much as he, Heidemann, chose to tell him.

  The historian was insistent. He would not authenticate the diaries unless Heidemann gave him the full story of their discovery. They should start again from the beginning. How had the diaries come into Stern’s possession?

  ‘In interrogation,’ Trevor-Roper once observed, ‘pressure must be uninterrupted.’ That afternoon in the Atlantic Hotel he drew on the skills he had learned in the prisoner of war cages of Germany in the autumn of 1945. Remorselessly, he battered away at Heidemann’s story in a way that no one had done since the diaries had first begun to emerge in Hamburg. Heidemann pulled out document after document from his briefcase. ‘I’ll produce anything if you just won’t put me through the mincing machine.’

  Trevor-Roper read through the Hess special volume. It was ludicrously superficial. He had no doubts now. It was a forgery.

  ‘Can you give me’, he demanded, ‘any reason why I should believe in this Wehrmacht officer?’

  ‘No,’ said Heidemann. ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Well, then, why should I believe?’ retorted Trevor-Roper.

  There was real anger in the exchanges; old resentments flared. ‘You are behaving exac
tly like an officer of the British secret service,’ shouted Heidemann. ‘We are no longer in 1945.’ After putting up a stubborn resistance for more than an hour, the reporter declared that he had had enough and stalked out of the room, refusing to attend a dinner that Stern was supposed to be giving in Trevor-Roper’s honour that evening.

  Trevor-Roper, too, considered boycotting the meal. In the end he agreed to attend only in the hope of extracting the name of the diaries’ supplier from Peter Koch. But to the historian’s astonishment, Koch, when confronted with his earlier assertion that Stern knew the identity of the ‘Wehrmacht officer’, calmly denied ever having made such a claim. Trevor-Roper threatened to stay away from the following morning’s press conference. The Stern men were unmoved. The dinner ended, according to the subsequent Stern Report, with ‘an icy atmosphere around the table’.

  After the meal, Trevor-Roper discussed his dilemma with Paul Eddy, Brian MacArthur and Anthony Terry. They urged him not to recant in public at the press conference. He should at least wait until he had returned to Britain. The three Sunday Times men were persuasive, and by the time they left him at midnight, the historian was half convinced. He was crossing the lobby of the hotel on his way up to bed when he unexpectedly ran into an old friend – Sir Nicholas Henderson, Britain’s former ambassador in Washington and Bonn. The two men retreated to the bar and drank beer until 2 a.m. Henderson’s advice was unequivocal. Trevor-Roper should state his reservations as quickly and publicly as possible. He would not have a better opportunity than the Stern press conference in a few hours’ time. Trevor-Roper decided ‘to sleep on the matter’.

  Monday, 25 April.

  ‘The big day,’ wrote Irving in his diary.

  The special issue of Stern was already piled up on the news-stands to greet the early morning commuters. More than two and a quarter million copies had been printed over the weekend. ‘Hitler’s Diary Discovered,’ proclaimed the cover, displaying a stack of black-bound volumes, topped by one bearing the Gothic initials ‘FH’ (the ‘F’ still assumed by Stern to be an ‘A’). Coverage of the diaries sprawled across more than forty pages, with extracts blown up to three or four times their original size. There was Hitler on Ernst Roehm:

  I gave him the chance to draw the consequences, but he was too cowardly to do so. On my orders he was later shot.

  Hitler on the Kristallnacht, the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ in 1938, when Jewish shops and synagogues were smashed and thousands of Jews sent to concentration camps:

  Report brought to me of some ugly attacks by people in uniform in various places, also of Jews beaten to death and Jewish suicides. What will they say abroad? The necessary orders will be given immediately.

  Hitler on the Russian attack on Berlin in April 1945:

  The long-awaited offensive has begun. May the Lord God stand by us.

  There were pictures of Hitler in the Reichschancellery in 1945, Hitler with Mussolini, Hitler writing at his desk, Hitler holding a bunch of flowers, Hitler with Hess; the only other person shown as often was Gerd Heidemann: Heidemann on Carin II, Heidemann with the diaries, Heidemann in Boernersdorf, Heidemann with Wolff, Heidemann with Guensche and Mohnke – the entire issue was a monument to one man’s obsession, a tasteless and hysterical trampling over thirty-eight years of post-war German sensitivity about the Nazis. Stern was already under attack for its handling of the diaries; this tactless treatment was to earn the magazine the odium of almost the entire West German press.

  In the Four Seasons Hotel, Irving was up early. He prepared for the morning’s combat with a haircut in the hotel barber’s followed by a heavy German breakfast. The restaurant, he found, was ‘packed with journalists and television teams, poring over this morning’s Stern’.

  Trevor-Roper woke at 8 a.m. to a telephone call from Charles Douglas-Home. How was he feeling? Trevor-Roper said that he had talked to Heidemann, that his doubts had not been assuaged, that they had, in fact, increased. Douglas-Home urged him not to ‘burn his boats’ at the press conference.

  By 10.30 a.m., the Stern canteen was packed with journalists. More than two hundied had converged on Hamburg from all over the world. There were twenty-seven television crews. All the seats were taken and reporters and photographers squeezed into every corner, squatting, and in some cases lying full-length, beneath the platform at the far end of the room. Incongruous yet unnoticed, in the centre of it all, sat General Wilhelm Mohnke, attending by special invitation of Gerd Heidemann. Each of the journalists was issued with a press kit: twenty pages of information about the diaries and a set of seven photographs. Also included were copies of the Rentz forensic reports on the two diary pages; the Rentz finding on the Mussolini telegram was omitted, giving the impression that his tests had been a hundred per cent in favour of the authenticity of the Stern material.

  At 11 a.m., the stars of the conference filed in to a battery of flashes from the photographers: Peter Koch, Felix Schmidt, Thomas Walde, Gerd Heidemann and Hugh Trevor-Roper. The professor was startled by the size of the audience, the hot and noisy atmosphere, the brilliance of the television lights. It looked, wrote one journalist afterwards, like ‘a Sadler’s Wells set for hell’.

  Peter Koch’s introduction was aggressive. He denounced the attacks on the diaries’ authenticity. Eberhard Jaeckel was making assertions about material he had not even seen. ‘If we as journalists behaved in such a manner,’ said Koch, ‘we would be accused of superficiality.’ David Irving – sitting half-way down the room – he dismissed as an historian ‘with no reputation to lose’. ‘I am a hundred per cent convinced that Hitler wrote every single word in those books,’ insisted Koch. ‘We paid a lot of money for the diaries, but when it comes to informing the reader, nothing is too expensive.’

  The press was then shown the Stern documentary film, The Find. Trevor-Roper watched his own endorsement of the diaries, recorded the previous week, with his head in his hand. When the programme finished, a young woman pushed her way through the cameras to the tables at the end of the canteen and tipped out the contents of two parcels: a dozen volumes of the Hitler diaries. It was a coup de théâtre – ‘as if,’ said Brian James of the Daily Mail, ‘Hitler had suddenly thrust an arm out of the grave’. The photographers scrambled for close-ups. The Stern men tried to shield the contents to prevent any premature disclosure. Koch thrust a handful of diaries at Gerd Heidemann who was persuaded to stand up, with great reluctance, and pose with them for the cameras. Koch invited questions. Almost all of them were directed at Trevor-Roper.

  In his own mind, the historian had already concluded that the diaries could well be false. ‘Having once admitted it to myself,’ he said later, ‘I felt I must attend the press conference and admit it to others.’ With head tilted back, eyes focused on some indeterminate point in the middle distance, he began to recant. ‘The question of the authenticity of the diaries is inseparable from the history of the diaries. The question is: are these documents linked necessarily to that aeroplane? When I saw the documents in Zurich, I understood – or, er, misunderstood – that that link was absolutely established….’ The diaries ‘might’ be genuine, he said, but ‘the thing looks more shaky’ – there was, after all, ‘such a thing as a perfect forgery’. He ended with a swipe at Stern and Times Newspapers:

  As a historian, I regret that the, er, normal method of historical verification, er, has, perhaps necessarily, been to some extent sacrificed to the requirements of a journalistic scoop.

  One of Trevor-Roper’s Oxford pupils, Timothy Garton Ash, covering the press conference for the New Republic, described the performance as ‘rather like watching a Victorian gentleman trying to back peddle on a penny farthing’.

  Someone asked the historian about the damage the affair had done to his reputation. Trevor-Roper took a meditative sip from a glass of water. ‘I suppose my personal reputation is linked to anything I say. I am prepared to express my opinion, and if I am wrong I am wrong, and if I am right I am right. I don’t worry about th
ese things.’

  Until Trevor-Roper’s contribution, the press conference had been going well for the Stern men. Now they sat, stony-faced, with arms folded, as the proceedings began to disintegrate around them. David Irving leapt to the microphone in the centre of the hall, incensed at Koch’s description of him as a man without any reputation. ‘I decided to play hardball,’ he wrote in his diary afterwards. ‘I am the British historian David Irving,’ he declared. ‘1 May not have a doctorate, or a professorship, or even the title “Lord”, but I believe I have a reputation in Germany nevertheless.’ He demanded to know how Hitler could have written of the July bomb plot in his diary, when Stern’s own film had just shown the dictator meeting Mussolini a few hours after the explosion, and having to shake hands with him with his left hand. He brandished his photocopies. ‘I know the collection from which these diaries come. It is an old collection, full of forgeries. I have some here.’ The television cameras swung away from the Stern dignatories and on to the gesticulating figure in the middle of the room. ‘Reporters stormed towards me,’ recalled Irving, ‘lights blazing, and microphones were thrust at me.’ A Japanese film crew was trampled in the rush and a fist fight broke out. Chairs and lights were scattered as chaos rippled across the crowded floor. From the platform, Koch shouted that Irving should ask questions, not make speeches. Irving’s microphone was switched off. But it was too late. Irving challenged Stern to say whether the diaries’ ink had been tested for its age. There was no answer. ‘Ink! ink!’ shouted some of the reporters. ‘Torpedo running,’ whispered Irving to one of the journalists sitting next to him as he sat down. The local NBC correspondent approached and asked if he would leave immediately to take part in a live link-up with the Today show, now on the air in America. Irving agreed. ‘All most exhilarating,’ he noted, ‘and I left a trail of chaos behind me.’