As Irving was going out of the Stern building, Gerhard Weinberg was coming in. The American academic had been unpacking in Bonn on Saturday, finishing off his interview with Steven Strasser of Newsweek, when Peter Koch telephoned him. Koch had pleaded with him to attend the press conference. Weinberg had told him that it was impossible – he had his first class in Bonn at 10 a.m. on Monday; he wouldn’t cancel it. (‘It took him some time to realize I wasn’t being difficult,’ said Weinberg. ‘I was just being me.’) But Koch was persistent: he would fix the travel arrangements to ensure that the professor did not miss his class. Accordingly, the instant his lecture finished, at 11 a.m. on Monday, a Stern driver rushed Weinberg from the university campus to the airport. From Bonn he was flown in the company’s private plane to Hamburg, then driven straight to the Stern office. At 12.30 p.m. he took his place on the platform.
Weinberg repaid Stern for its trouble and expense by raising fresh doubts about its scoop. ‘All the handwriting authentication I have seen’, he told the world’s press, ‘pertains to documents other than the diaries, except one page said to have been cut out of one diary. In other words, the memorandum from the American handwriting expert and the German police handwriting expert refer to Hitler’s handwriting, but not to Hitler’s handwriting in the diaries. In fact, they probably didn’t know the diaries existed when shown this evidence.’ It was ‘inappropriate’ to cite the analysis of one set of documents and apply it to another.
Koch stared at Weinberg in horror, but the professor had not finished yet. In his careful, pedantic manner, he continued: ‘One question has troubled me from the outset – that no knowledgeable expert on the Third Reich has been allowed to study the whole text to see if there are any textual absurdities. I mean, we’re not living on a South Sea island here, they wouldn’t have had to have gone outside the Hamburg city limits to find experts who would know. It is vital now that a group-of experts from all over the world should be given the chance to test these manuscripts.’ Koch cut in to say that, of course, experts would be given the opportunity to study the diaries. There were shouts of ‘When?’ and ‘Set a date.’ ‘When the journalistic evaluation has been completed,’ replied Koch.
The news conference, which had begun so well for Stern, broke up after more than two hours in complete disarray. It was not merely a public relations disaster; the failure to produce convincing evidence for the diaries’ authenticity also had legal implications. One of Stern’s lawyers, Herr Hagen, had warned Schulte-Hillen on Friday in a confidential memorandum that the magazine’s coverage was such that the company risked prosecution for disseminating Nazi propaganda. Stern’s defence, obviously, would be that it was furthering historical research. But that argument could collapse if historians regarded the diaries as being of dubious value. The State of Bavaria could use the uncertainty as a pretext to withdraw the publishing rights it had conceded through the agreement with the Bundesarchiv. Watching as the press conference disintegrated, Hagen decided that ‘only a quick and definitive judgement on the diaries’ authenticity could save the situation’. With the consent of the Stern management, he arranged for three of the diaries – the Hess special volume and books from 1934 and 1943 – to be handed over immediately to Dr Henke of the Bundesarchiv, who had attended the conference. Henke promised to deliver a judgement to Hagen swiftly and privately. The lawyer was relieved. The prospect of a court battle to try to establish that Stern was not sympathetic to the Nazis, with Gerd Heidemann possibly called as a witness, did not bear contemplating.
Trevor-Roper felt a sense of relief as he left the Stern building. His action might have come as ‘a painful surprise’ to his hosts, but he had done as his conscience dictated. After a light lunch with the three Sunday Times journalists, he caught an afternoon flight back to London.
Trevor-Roper hoped he might now begin putting the whole affair behind him. He was over-optimistic. One of the first things he saw on his arrival at Heathrow was a placard advertising the London Standard. Its front-page banner headline was ‘HITLER DIARIES: DACRE DOUBTS’. ‘My heart sank,’ he recalled.
At home in Cambridge the telephone had scarcely stopped ringing since his departure for Germany on Sunday. He found his wife deeply upset. Reporters were camped on his doorstep. His first act was to instruct the Porter’s Lodge not to put through any more calls. It was impossible to stroll across the road to Peterhouse without running the gauntlet of journalists in the street outside. Instead, he had to leave through his garden, shin a back wall, cut through a car park and sneak into the college a few yards further up the street. He had to keep up this performance for the rest of the week.
Pictures of the Stern press conference were carried on all the evening news bulletins and dominated the following morning’s papers. The stories all focused on Trevor-Roper: ‘I’M NOT SURE NOW CONFESSES HITLER DIARY PROFESSOR’, ‘HITLER: THE GREAT RETREAT’, ‘BOFFINS’ BATTLE ON NAZI “DIARIES”’, ‘FISTS FLY IN HITLER UPROAR’, ‘I’M NOT QUITE SO SURE, SAYS DACRE’. The Guardian wanted to know why he had decided to ‘risk his reputation by pronouncing the diaries genuine after only the most cursory examination?’ His former colleague at Oxford, A. L. Rowse, wrote an article headed ‘The trial of Lord Dacre’ describing him, at the age of nearly seventy, as ‘a young man in a hurry’. ‘I have always had reservations about him,’ said Rowse, ‘since he started writing at Oxford as my protégé.’ A limerick did the rounds of Cambridge senior common rooms:
There once was a fellow named Dacre,
Who was God in his own little acre,
But in the matter of diaries,
He was quite ultra vires,
And unable to spot an old faker.
The final insult came in a solicitor’s letter sent on behalf of Rachel, Lady Dacre. She was a distant cousin who had arranged for the ancient Barony of Dacre to be called out of abeyance in her favour in 1970; she had strongly objected to Trevor-Roper’s decision to use the same name when he was awarded a life peerage in 1979. Now she had her lawyers warn him always to use his full title – Lord Dacre of Glanton – so as not to embarrass her side of the family in the light of his action over the Hitler diaries.
‘Life’, said Trevor-Roper, subsequently reflecting on the period, ‘was torture.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
BUT WHAT WAS torture to one historian was food and drink to another. After his triumph at the press conference, David Irving spent the rest of Monday writing articles and giving interviews. ‘Adolf Hitler is still big box office, from Hamburg to Harlem,’ he wrote in the Daily Mail. He described Heidemann as ‘a typical nice guy. He does not believe that villains exist in this world; he is the kind of man who believes the claims of tyre advertisements.’ For the readers of Bild Zeitung he outlined seven reasons why the diaries had to be forgeries. He was inexhaustible. At 3.30a.m. on Tuesday morning, he was roused in his hotel room in Hamburg and rushed to a local television studio for a live link-up with the ABC programme Nightline. ‘Twenty million viewers again,’ recorded Irving gleefully in his diary. ‘Paid 700 marks in cash as requested.’ From the studio he was taken back to his hotel. He grabbed another two hours’ sleep and after breakfast heard from Der Spiegel that they were willing to pay him 20,000 marks for his photocopies and his story. ‘Very satisfactory,’ he noted. ‘That brings the total up to about £15,000 in three days.’ In the afternoon, he flew to Frankfurt to take part in a West German television debate on the diaries’ authenticity.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the full extent of Newsweek’s alleged perfidy was at last apparent. Monday had seen the airing of the magazine’s television commercials, none of which made any mention of doubts about whether the diaries might be genuine. Casual readers of the accompanying newspaper advertisements would also have had the impression that Newsweek had bought the diaries and that there was no question surrounding their authenticity:
These controversial papers could rewrite the history of the Third Reich from Hitler’s rise to power to his sui
cide in the ruins of Berlin.
They shed new light on his character, his plans for war, Munich, the miracle of Dunkirk, the flight of Rudolf Hess, his military campaigns, his relations to his lover, Eva Braun.
The patient reader had to wade through to the fifth paragraph before coming to the throwaway question ‘Are they real?’ Maynard Parker, responsible for putting together the Newsweek treatment, was subsequently unrepentant about this aggressive salesmanship: ‘The advertising department had earlier deadlines than ours, but I do not feel that the ads misrepresent what is in the magazine.’
This was true. Although Newsweek gave some space to the views of the sceptics, the overwhelming impression left by its extensive coverage was that the diaries were genuine. The magazine actually ran more extracts than Stern – seventeen individual quotations, culled during the course of the syndication negotiations. Here was an ‘awestruck’ Hitler on Josef Stalin (‘How on earth does Stalin manage it?’); Hitler on Mussolini (‘He does not have the courtesy to face me’); on the Wehrmacht High Command (‘These old officers let themselves be hung with titles, decorations and property, but they don’t obey my orders’); and a ‘tender and sentimental’ Hitler on Eva Braun (‘Eva had to endure much suffering’). The Germans were predictably outraged. ‘That was a nice dirty trick,’ Peter Koch complained in an interview with Time. ‘We would like to sue. We were cheated and I guarantee Newsweek will regret what they did.’ There was a separate article on the forensic and handwriting examinations commissioned by Stern, there was ‘A Scholar’s Appraisal’ by Gerhard Weinberg and a piece on ‘Hitler and the Holocaust’. The magazine concluded with a prediction that the discovery of the diaries would force the world ‘to deal, once again, with the fact of Hitler himself’.
Germans will have to wonder anew about their collective, inherited guilt. Jews will have to face their fears again. All of us will have to ask once more whether Hitler’s evil was unique, or whether it lurks somewhere in everyone. Those speculations have been trivialized for years in gaudy paperback thrillers and made-for-television movies. Now the appearance of Hitler’s diaries – genuine or not, it almost doesn’t matter in the end – reminds us of the horrible reality on which our doubts about ourselves, and each other, are based.
Newsweek’s behaviour over the Hitler diaries was widely criticized in the United States. An editorial in the New York Times entitled ‘Heil History’ poured particular scorn on the magazine’s assertion that the question of whether or not the diaries were genuine ‘almost doesn’t matter’:
Almost doesn’t matter? Almost doesn’t matter what really drove the century’s most diabolic tyranny? Almost doesn’t matter whether Hitler is reincarnated, perhaps redefined, by fact or forgery?
Journalism should take no solace from the customary excuse that it must deal with history in a hurry. And scholars in such a hurry, their second thoughts notwithstanding, can hardly be called historians.
Newsweek gave enormous play to the diaries, but the magazine was not alone in seeing it as the most important story of the moment: the New York Times itself ran it on its front page on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday; the mass-circulation tabloids gave it even greater space. By the fifth day the Hitler diaries affair had turned into a kind of giant soap opera – an international entertainment playing on almost every radio and television network and newspaper front page in the world. And what a story it was – Hitler’s bunker, old Nazis, a wartime plane crash, a trail across the Iron Curtain, millions of dollars, Swiss bank vaults, secret documents, a punch-up in front of the cameras, dramatic changes of heart, the Rewriting of History, Lord Dacre, David Irving, Rupert Murdoch, Gerd Heidemann….
It seemed that every academic who had ever written about Hitler was at some stage called upon to comment. Professor Donald Watt, the editor of the most recent English language edition of Mein Kampf, thought the diaries ‘odd’. John Kenneth Galbraith called them ‘impossible’. William L. Shirer said they were ‘outlandish… a hoax’. ‘I don’t think serious historians will touch these things for a long time,’ said J. P. Stern, the author of The Führer and the People. Professor Gordon A. Craig called it ‘one of the most sensational finds of the century’. ‘The question is of little importance,’ was A. J. P. Taylor’s characteristic comment. ‘Who cares about Hitler nowadays?’
There was a section of opinion which held that the material, even if genuine, should not be published. What had caught the popular imagination was the fact that these were Hitler’s diaries. A diary was something intimate and human. How could a figure who had caused so much suffering be allowed to speak in ordinary language, to justify what he did? It directly touched the point George Steiner had made: ‘You will think him a man and no longer believe what he did.’ The Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Immanuel Jakobovits, put this argument in a letter to The Times which was extensively quoted around the world, especially in West Germany:
As a human being – victim and survivor of history’s most monstrous tyranny – I protest vehemently against the publication of the so-called Hitler diaries. Whether they are authentic or not is quite immaterial to the outrage of resurrecting the incarnation of evil and his propaganda, rehabilitating him for a generation which knew not this master gangster…. Hailing this find as ‘the biggest literary discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls’ is a sacrilege which only compounds the insult to the millions who perished and suffered under this tyranny.
Nineteen eighty-three marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazis’ rise to power. But although more than a generation had passed since the end of the war, the reaction aroused by the diaries showed how potent a symbol Hitler remained. It was not simply fresh proof of the accuracy of the old cliché about the fascination of evil; the comments also revealed how little attitudes towards Hitler had changed. In the communist world, the Hitler portrayed in the diaries was denounced as an agent of capitalism. Similarly, some conservatives in the West, in their comments on Stern’s Hitler, were blinded to any other consideration by their overwhelming mistrust of the Soviet Union. Both responses were a curious echo of those of the 1930s.
On the day of the Stern press conference, Professor Karl-Dietrich Bracher of Bonn University dismissed the diaries as forgeries and speculated as to who might be responsible. He noted that this was a Hitler who was supposed to have expressed admiration for the shrewdness of the arch-appeaser, Neville Chamberlain; who had allowed the British Army to escape at Dunkirk; who had sanctioned Hess’s peace mission in 1941. Perversely, it was Hitler’s enemies in the West, Churchill and Roosevelt, who were portrayed as the warmongers. Bracher suggested that the diaries were ‘an attempt to manipulate German history at a politically sensitive moment’. Perhaps the diaries were the work of a foreign power? The 1980s, after all, were ‘a time of intense debate about the deployment of new NATO missiles in West Germany’ – at such a moment ‘there was a growing audience for history unfavourable to the United States and Britain’. Werner Maser alleged the diaries were the work of an official ‘forgery factory’ in Potsdam in East Germany ‘where Hitler letters and Hitler notes are produced to earn hard currency for the East Germans’. This theme was developed in Britain in a radio interview by George Young, a former deputy director of MI6 and a noted cold warrior. Without any evidence – without even having seen the diaries – he alleged the affair might be part of ‘an East German official disinformation effort’:
The East German security and intelligence service has a document-faking or disinformation section. No doubt they would be capable of doing this…. It would suit the Russians’ book to sow mistrust in any shape or form, particularly among the West Germans. NATO croaks and groans quite a bit these days and anything that sows doubts about the past may create mistrust about the present.
At a press luncheon in New York on Tuesday, the American Ambassador to the United Nations, Mrs Jeanne Kirkpatrick, also detected in the diaries the hand of an Eastern intelligence agency. ‘I have no doubt’, she claimed, ‘that there are
those in central Europe today who would, and indeed do, attempt to sow distrust between the United States and its German friends.’
The communists nurtured suspicions of their own. The Soviet Union lost 20 million dead in Hitler’s war; the memory was still a decisive influence on Russia’s foreign policy. Moscow had not officially confirmed Hitler’s death until 1968 and remained acutely sensitive to what it saw as any attempt to rehabilitate the Nazis. On Monday, Professor Sergei Tikhvinski, a leading Russian historian and a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, denounced the Hitler diaries as ‘a most obvious act of political sabotage’. At 6.30 on Wednesday evening, Soviet television described the diaries’ publication as ‘an attempt to whitewash the chief fascist criminal’. Ninety minutes later, Radio Moscow International broadcast a similar opinion to its listeners in France, where Paris Match had just begun its serialization:
The phantom of the human Führer… is an attempt to make allowances in advance in the eyes of public opinion for those in the USA and in NATO headquarters who are working out new versions of limited warfare, or other wars for Europe, using the pretext of the old myth of the threat from the East – the one that allowed Hitler to unleash the Second World War.
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