Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

‘These “diaries”’, claimed the official news agency Tass, ‘are intended to propagandize Nazism among the young generation, to distract them from the fight for peace and put them on the path of right-wing nationalist forces in the Federal Republic.’

  In Berlin, the East German Foreign Ministry issued an official statement: ‘The German Democratic Republic regards the publication of the Hitler diaries in Stern as a belated attempt to rehabilitate Hitler.’ Western journalists who applied for permission to visit the site of the crashed plane in Boernersdorf found that visas were granted with unusual speed. The East Germans were eager to allow foreigners to speak to the local farmers who, virtually without exception, derided the idea that documents could have been salvaged from the burning wreck. Suddenly, after centuries of calm, the peaceful village was invaded by the western media. Ignorant of the furore about the diaries, a rumour went round Boernersdorf that the reason for the influx of cameramen and reporters was that two of the graves in the churchyard, marked ‘Unknown man’ and ‘Unknown woman’, contained the remains of Hitler and Eva Braun.

  On the night of Tuesday 26 April the leading western protagonists in the controversy were brought together on West German television. ZDF, one of the country’s two national networks, cleared its evening schedules to mount a debate on the diaries’ authenticity. Peter Koch and Gerd Heidemann flew down from Hamburg to the television studios in Wiesbaden. At Frankfurt Airport they ran into another participant on his way to ZDF, David Irving. The three men shook hands – ‘Koch unwillingly,’ wrote Irving in his diary.

  The programme began with the screening of The Find, which ZDF had bought off Stern for 175,000 marks. The film was followed by an interminable and crowded discussion of the sort beloved by West German television. Four historians – Walther Hofer, Andreas Hillgruber, Eberhard Jaeckel and David Irving – faced Peter Koch in Wiesbaden. Gerhard Weinberg took part down the line from Bonn. Trevor-Roper was persuaded to sit in a studio in London – an isolated figure who spoke throughout in English (evidence of his unease with the German language which did not go unnoticed in the West German newspapers the following day). Gerd Heidemann was prevented from taking part by Peter Koch: his belief that the diaries had been authenticated by Martin Bormann would not have enhanced Stern’s credibility.

  Trevor-Roper went further than he had done at the press conference. The burden of proof once again rested with Stern, he said. ‘I also believe that some of the other documents which I have seen in Mr Heidemann’s house and which come from the same source are forgeries.’

  Koch, undeterred, put up a spirited defence of the diaries. There was no question but that they were genuine, he insisted. They had been tested by handwriting and forensic experts and most of Stern’s critics were motivated by commercial jealousy. Even Irving, a master at hijacking the medium for his own purposes, was impressed by his ‘manful’ performance. ‘At the end he put his Hitler diary on the table and challenged me: “Now, Herr Irving, put your ‘diary page’ next to it and let’s see which is genuine.” Fortunately, the cameras were off or it would have been difficult: the pages were clearly different….’

  The debate was a victory for Stern. Afterwards, at about midnight, as Koch and Heidemann were driving back to the airport, they passed Irving and Jaeckel walking down the hill from the studio to their hotel. They pulled alongside and asked the two historians if they wanted a drink. Irving and Jaeckel agreed.

  In this private conversation Koch gave vent to his bitterness about Newsweek. It was only because of the Americans, he complained, that Stern had been forced to rush into print so precipitately. But for Newsweek, they would have had more time to check the documents and could have prevented the damaging publicity which now surrounded the diaries. Irving said Stern had been foolish to trust The Times and Newsweek while refusing to take a West German historian into its confidence. ‘I suggested he should show [the diaries] to a sceptical historian like Jaeckel. Jaeckel nodded, puffed his pipe sagely, and was staggered when Koch then turned to him and asked if he would, in principle, agree to assess all sixty diaries, after signing an undertaking incorporating a savage financial penalty if he revealed the contents.’ The idea was discussed for a while, but by the time the drinking session broke up at 2 a.m., it was obvious there was no room for agreement: Jaeckel was ‘too fixed in his hostility’ to the diaries.

  When Peter Koch walked into the Stern editorial meeting in Hamburg a few hours later, he was greeted by a round of applause from his colleagues for his ‘valiant defence’ of the diaries on television the previous night. Emboldened by this success, Stern now planned a counter-attack on its critics. They would take the fight into the heart of the enemy camp with a lightning campaign on American television. Koch would fly over to New York the next day with one of the diaries and offer himself for interview on every available US television and radio network.

  That same afternoon, Stern recruited a valuable new ally to its cause. Wolf Hess emerged from a two-hour meeting with Koch and the other editors to announce to reporters that he had no doubts that the magazine’s scoop was genuine. ‘I will ask the Allied authorities to allow my father to comment on the diaries.’

  Rudolf Hess had celebrated his eighty-ninth birthday in Spandau prison on Tuesday. The family had been trying to secure his release for years. The appearance of the diaries now offered them a fresh chance to focus attention on his plight. Wolf Hess agreed to accompany Koch, at Stern’s expense, on his American tour. He also sent a telegram to the American, British, French and Soviet Ambassadors appealing to them to let his father examine and authenticate the diaries ‘as the sole living and direct eyewitness’.

  David Irving arrived back in London on Wednesday afternoon and rushed straight round to see his bank manager, arriving late and perspiring for his appointment. To his surprise, he found him ‘very friendly’: he had followed his client’s progress over the past few days with great interest. That did not, however, lessen his distress at the fact that Irving’s overdraft stood at £26,700, unchanged since January; it must come down. Irving, as he noted in his diary, was at last able to give him some good news. ‘I said I have earned about £15,000 since Friday in various ways (TV, newspaper articles and contracts, etc.) and this money is due now; I guarantee to let him have £6000 in two weeks. He is very happy. God knows what I would have had to offer at the interview without the happy events since Friday.’

  Despite the scepticism being heaped upon the diaries by experts from West Germany and abroad, Gerd Heidemann betrayed no trace of anxiety. He was undoubtedly aware by now that there were some problems with his material: both the police and Arnold Rentz had found that part of the archive he had obtained from Kujau was false; he also knew that the faked diary pages which Irving was hawking around Europe came from the original Fritz Stiefel diary, a volume which had finally come into his possession at the end of March. But self-deception was one of the strongest traits of Heidemann’s character. He had no difficulty in accepting Kujau’s excuses – that the dubious telegrams came from a different source, that paper whitener was in existence before the Nazis came to power, that the Stiefel diary was a ‘party yearbook’ and not part of the main diary archive. Nor was his delusion that the diaries were genuine entirely without foundation. He could point to the three handwriting analyses which had found that the page cut from the Hess special volume was in Hitler’s hand. He could also call in support the two forensic tests, neither of which had established that the diary’s paper was of the wrong date. He exuded confidence. When the Austrian magazine Profil asked him whether he was alarmed by David Irving’s claim that he had a sample of the diaries, Heidemann’s answer was that Irving was bluffing – he ‘has no original and has never seen an original’. Was he, at least, concerned by Trevor-Roper’s change of heart? ‘Of course not,’ he replied. ‘I know where the diaries come from…. My informant is neither an old Nazi nor a wanted war criminal, but he won’t go public because he doesn’t want huge press attention and I won’t name
him because I promised not to.’

  Heidemann’s unshakeable conviction that the diaries were authentic soothed the worries of his colleagues. Throughout the week which followed the press conference, Stern presented a united front to the world. Brian MacArthur, the head of the Sunday Times team staying at the Four Seasons Hotel, shared the doubts of his British colleagues. ‘But when you see their absolute confidence,’ he said to Gitta Sereny after one meeting with the Stern men, ‘their total calm in the face of this almost universal disbelief, then all one can think is that they know something they are not telling; that they have something up their sleeves, some sort of absolutely reliable confirmation of authenticity.’

  On Thursday 28 April Heidemann announced that the missing diaries had at last arrived in a consignment of pianos delivered to Saarbruecken. He visited Peter Kuehsel in his office and arranged to pick up the final instalment of 300,000 marks at 9.30 a.m. the next morning.

  On Friday, he met Konrad Kujau in Hamburg and took delivery of the last four volumes.

  Kujau had been watching events unfold from Stuttgart with some interest. On Friday, when the evening news had announced the diaries’ discovery, he had telephoned Maria Modritsch and told her to switch on her television. He had viewed the coverage of Monday’s press conference and found it ‘unbelievable’. Could he get away with it? He was confident enough to believe that he could: he had, after all, been forging Nazi documents for the best part of a decade and had so far managed to avoid detection. Surely Stern would not be publishing the material unless it had already succeeded in fooling enough experts to put him in the clear? When Ulli Blaschke, his friend in the police force, saw him in the Beer Bar in Stuttgart at the height of the controversy, he brought up the subject of the diaries and asked Conny whether he thought they were genuine. Kujau solemnly assured him that in his opinion they were.

  The forger has provided a colourful account of his final transaction with Heidemann that Friday. According to him, they met in the archive in Milchstrasse. Outside, the public debate about the diaries was still raging; inside, the telephone scarcely stopped ringing. Heidemann received the diaries and handed him in return 12,000 marks and an IOU for a further 100,000, He then told Kujau that he had a plan showing the location of a hoard of Nazi treasure in East Berlin, buried ‘two spades deep’. Heidemann suggested that Conny and Edith should go over together and dig it up. He would pay them 20,000 marks as a reward. ‘Oh yes?’ replied Kujau. ‘You’ll be coming to hold the lamp, will you?’ The reporter said he couldn’t: it was impossible for him to cross the border at the moment. Kujau immediately suspected that Heidemann planned to tip off the East German police and arrange for him to disappear into a communist jail. He declined the offer and returned to Stuttgart.

  A few hours after saying goodbye to Kujau, Heidemann rang David Irving in London.

  Since his return to Duke Street, Irving had been pondering the events of the past few days. He was forced to admit that as far as attacking the authenticity of Stern’s diaries went, he had ‘squeezed the lemon dry’. He asked himself what he could do to recapture the initiative, and he came up with one answer: he could announce that he had changed his mind and declare the diaries genuine.

  There were a number of factors which made this an attractive idea, apart from the obvious injection of fresh publicity it would provide. One was temperamental. Irving had always relished his role as an enfant terrible. He liked being outrageous, making liberal flesh creep. Now, for the first time in his career, his stand on the diaries had put him on the side of conventional opinion. It was not his style and he found it disconcerting.

  He had also begun to have genuine doubts about the wisdom of the uncompromising line he had adopted. He had been shaken by the sheer quantity of Stern’s archive when he had seen it in the ZDF studio on Tuesday night. Perhaps there was a genuine set of Hitler diaries somewhere, which had served as a model for the forgery in his possession? One of his objections to the Stern material had been that Hitler had suffered from Parkinson’s Disease in the final weeks of his life. Now he had to admit, having seen them, that the final entries did slant sharply to the right, as if oblivious to the lines on the page – a classic symptom of Parkinsonism. And finally, there was the fact that the diaries did not contain any evidence to suggest that Hitler was aware of the Holocaust – Stern might help substantiate the thesis of Hitler’s War.

  Irving told Heidemann that he was on the point of changing his mind. He had given an interview to the BBC that morning announcing his reservations. Heidemann asked him when it would be broadcast. Next Wednesday, replied Irving. ‘Heidemann’, he wrote in his diary, ‘urged me to say it now as Peter Koch is going on television in New York on Monday with his counter-attack.’ Irving promised to think it over.

  Meanwhile, that afternoon, Radio Moscow had resumed its attack on the diaries with a heavy-handed ‘satirical broadcast’ to West Germany. Its target was a new one: not Stern, but the rest of the republic’s press, at that moment filling its pages with reports of the affair. The broadcast took the form of a story set in the office of the editor of Die Welt. The editor wants to know what he should put in the paper over the next few weeks. The home editor suggests unemployment, which is about to reach three million. The foreign editor suggests the deployment of American missiles. The editor-in-chief ‘explodes’:

  ‘You are quitters. The hit of the coming months is the diaries of our Führer. Granted, the copyright is in the hands of our business rivals. To hell with them. Nobody can stop us discussing the authenticity of the diaries. We shall quote from the diaries in every edition and in every column. You [he says to one reporter] will have to take care of statements by historians from abroad. You [to another] provide interviews on the subject with comrades-in-arms of the Führer. What is important is to make the Führer appear as respectable as possible. And you, well you go to Berchtesgaden, to the former residence of the Führer. He says in his diary that his favourite alsatian, Blondi, always stopped at the gate during walks. You take samples of the soil there and give them to the laboratory. If these soil tests are compatible, then…?’

  ‘The diaries are authentic,’ the reporter bursts out.

  ‘That’s right,’ the boss says, grinning. ‘Let’s get to work now. And don’t say a word about missiles or unemployment.’

  * * *

  For once, Hugh Trevor-Roper had other things on his mind apart from the Hitler diaries. Friday 29 April was an important occasion in the life of Peterhouse – the day of the annual college Feast, an ancient ritual of good food and fine wine. The guest of honour was the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, who arrived in mid-afternoon to take tea with Trevor-Roper and his wife in the Master’s Lodge.

  It was now four days since the historian had given orders to have all telephone calls to the Lodge stopped at the porter’s switchboard. It was inconvenient, particularly with a member of the Cabinet in the house. In some trepidation, Trevor-Roper decided to rescind the instruction. The telephone rang almost immediately. ‘I’ll answer it,’ said Hailsham.

  It was the Observer.

  ‘I’m afraid Lord Dacre is not at home at present,’ said the seventy-five-year-old Lord Chancellor. ‘May I take a message? I’m his butler.’

  It was an amusing end to what was otherwise one of the more unpleasant weeks of Trevor-Roper’s career.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  AS THE CRISIS over the Hitler diaries worsened, Rupert Murdoch flew back from New York to London. The Sunday Times’s reputation was clearly in jeopardy, but Magnus Linklater was struck by Murdoch’s apparent lack of concern. He seemed almost bored by the diaries: they were yesterday’s deal; his restless mind had already moved on to other matters. In commercial terms, the question of whether or not the diaries were genuine was of only minor importance. In the past week, sales of the Sunday Times had increased by 60,000 copies. As long as the controversy continued, circulation was likely to remain buoyant. Besides, under the terms of News International’s agree
ment with Gruner and Jahr, his money would be refunded if the diaries proved to be fakes. Whatever the final verdict on authenticity, Murdoch would not suffer. At a meeting with the journalists involved in the project he readily agreed that if the situation worsened, he would suspend publication. They wanted to know how much worse things had to get. Murdoch said he would pull out of the deal only if there was a 55 per cent chance that the diaries were forged – in other words, the onus was on the sceptics to substantiate their doubts, not on Stern to justify its faith. This irresponsible formula was, none the less, regarded at the time as a major concession on Murdoch’s part.

  The psychology which was leading Stern to disaster now began to operate on the Sunday Times. The reporters involved on the story had no desire to see their paper humiliated; they wanted to believe that the diaries were genuine and set out to find evidence to keep their hopes alive. Brian Moynahan was dispatched to Boernersdorf where he managed to find a fifty-one-year-old quarryman named Helmut Schmidt who had been thirteen when the Junkers 352 had crashed. Schmidt told Moynahan that he had seen one of the survivors sitting dazed on the ground clutching a wooden case more than two feet long and eighteen inches wide. ‘He hung on to it like this,’ he claimed, at which point, according to Moynahan, ‘Schmidt, working on his allotment, gripped his hoe until his veins rose.’

  While Moynahan tramped round Boernersdorf, in London, Elaine Potter ploughed through some of the US Counter-Intelligence Corps files. She extracted the story of how the CIC picked up rumours of a ‘Hitler diary’ during its investigations in the Berchtesgaden area in 1945.

  In Hamburg, Gitta Sereny interviewed Heidemann. The reporter gave her the variation on his original story which he had given to Trevor-Roper on Sunday: the diaries had stayed in the hayloft in Boernersdorf for only a few days; they had been brought to the West by an officer in 1945; this officer was now over seventy and had given Heidemann the documents on condition his name should never be divulged; Heidemann claimed to have talked to him only ‘two days ago’. ‘Here,’ wrote Sereny, ‘is one of the indispensable links demanded by critics who have questioned the authenticity of the diaries.’