Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  ‘I decided’, said Kujau afterwards, ‘to tell him Grimms’ fairy stories.’

  Kujau’s tale – which he stuck to throughout the next week – was that he was simply a middleman: the idea that he was the forger of the diaries he dismissed as ‘absurd’. He claimed to have met a man known only as ‘Mirdorf’ in East Germany in 1978 who had offered to supply him with Hitler material. In this way, Kujau said he had obtained a diary and given it to Fritz Stiefel. Later, when Heidemann had heard about the story, he had pressured him to provide more diaries. Kujau told the prosecutor that as a result he had renewed his contact with Mirdorf who had promised to obtain them. The books had then emerged from East Germany over the next two years through another man called Lauser. Above all, Kujau denied emphatically the allegation that he had been given 9 million marks for the books. He had passed on no more than 2.5 million, of which he had taken 300,000 in commission.

  Kujau’s story sounded wildly improbable, and Klein had no difficulty in demolishing large sections of it almost at once. For example, when Maria Modritsch was interrogated, two days after her lover’s arrest, she identified the shadowy ‘Mr Lauser’ not as a Swiss businessman but as ‘a man who used to come to the Sissy Bar to fix the juke box’. And if Kujau had not been aware that the diaries were forged, demanded Klein, why did he have in his house more than six hundred carefully marked books and newspaper articles detailing Adolf Hitler’s daily movements? And why had the police also found several empty notebooks identical to the so-called diaries?

  The questions were unanswerable. But what eventually proved most effective in breaking Kujau’s resistance was the image the police could conjure up of Heidemann. Whilst he languished in prison, the reporter was still enjoying his freedom in Hamburg, telling everyone he had handed over all the money to Kujau. The idea of it was intolerable. On Thursday 26 May, his thirteenth day in custody, Kujau confessed in writing to having forged more than sixty volumes of Hitler’s diaries. To prove his guilt, he wrote out part of his confession in the same gothic script he had used in the diaries. As a final, malicious embellishment, he added that Heidemann had known about the forgery all along.

  It had been clear to Heidemann for some time that he had become the subject of a criminal investigation. Within hours of Kujau’s arrest, on Saturday 14 May the Hamburg police had raided the family’s home on the Elbchausee along with his archive in Milchstrasse; Carin II had also been searched and impounded. Heidemann’s collection of Nazi memorabilia and many of his private papers were seized. Four days later, the police carried out a second raid. It turned up ‘nothing new’ according to the prosecutor’s office, but it made it obvious to Heidemann that his days of freedom were drawing to a close.

  He read of Kujau’s arrest in the newspapers and reacted to the growing rumours that ‘Conny’ was the forger with incredulity. ‘I don’t believe it at all,’ he told Reuters: Kujau would have had to have been a ‘wonder boy’ to have forged so much. ‘If these diaries are not genuine,’ Heidemann confided to his friend Randolph Braumann, ‘then there must – somewhere – be some genuine ones. Kujau cannot have made it all up alone – all those complicated historical situations. Maybe Kujau copied them up from genuine diaries which still exist somewhere.’

  Heidemann told Braumann that he was feeling ‘completely kaputt, flat out’ and Gina warned him that her husband was ‘terribly depressed’. The company Mercedes had been taken away; their credit cards had been cancelled; they were social lepers. Braumann felt very sorry for them. On Monday 23 May he rang and invited the couple round for a drink that evening. Gina doubted whether Heidemann would leave the flat. ‘He’s depressed again,’ she said.

  The Heidemanns eventually turned up at 10.30 p.m., and stayed drinking with Braumann and his wife until three o’clock the next morning. Heidemann was listless and full of self-pity. The other three tried to make him pull himself together, but he simply sat slumped in his chair, shaking his head. ‘Everything seems to have collapsed at the same time,’ he complained. ‘Everything has crumbled. If only a scientist would appear and prove that the diaries, or at least some of them, were genuine.’

  Braumann said that what was so astonishing was that the diaries were such primitive forgeries. Heidemann said that it was easy to say that now: ‘But I never doubted. It all seemed to fit together so well. One thing followed another: first the Hitler pictures, then the things that he’d painted in his youth, then the writing from his time in Vienna, then his applicatior to the school of art and his rejection by the professors – everything genuine, everything proven; then the positive results on the diaries. No one ever dreamed it could all have beer forged.’

  Braumann asked about the two police raids.

  ‘They’ve taken everything away,’ said Heidemann. ‘Documents, photographs, all the paperwork – everything, without a receipt.’

  ‘He was really apathetic,’ recalled Braumann, ‘like a man who had seen all his hopes and dreams destroyed. He didn’t drink very much. His thoughts seemed to be stuck in a groove, going round and round on the subject of where the diaries came from, whether they were genuine or whether they were false.’

  ‘I don’t want to be remembered’, said Heidemann, ‘as the man responsible for the greatest flop in newspaper history.’

  Braumann promised to do all he could to help Heidemann, but time had run out. Three days later, Kujau implicated him in the forgery and at 10 p.m. on the night of Thursday 26 May the reporter was arrested at his home and taken into custody.

  Epilogue

  A VARIETY OF theories have been advanced to explain the origin of the Hitler diaries. Radio Moscow alleged that the whole affair was a CIA plot ‘intended to exonerate and glorify the Third Reich’. The CIA, claimed the Russians, had provided the information contained in the diaries and trained the forger. Its aim was ‘to divert the attention of the West German public from the vital problems of the country prior to the deployment of new US missiles’ and to discredit the normally left-wing Stern. In this version of events, Kujau was an American stooge:

  Half a century ago the Nazis set fire to the Reichstag building and accused the insignificant provocateur Marinus van der Lubbe of arson. Van der Lubbe was supposed to provide proof against the communists, and he did. Now, another van der Lubbe has been found, a small-time dealer, possessed by the mad idea of going down in history, psychologically as unstable as van der Lubbe. Even now the West German bourgeois press predicts that this new van der Lubbe will testify against East Germany. This is not just the normal style of the CIA: one clearly also detects the hand of the [West German] intelligence service and the Munich provocateurs from the circle around Franz Josef Strauss.

  (The fact that the writer Fritz Tobias had established more than twenty years previously that the Nazis did not set fire to the Reichstag, and that the blaze was the work of van der Lubbe, is apparently still not officially accepted by the Soviet Union.) The Hitler diaries, wrote Izvestia, ‘parted the curtains a little to reveal the morals of the Western “free press” and the political morality of bourgeois society’.

  Henri Nannen, on the other hand, told the New York Times that in his view the affair could have resulted from ‘an interest in East Germany to spread disinformation and destabilize the Federal Republic’. According to Stern’s rival, Quick, East German intelligence concocted the diaries and transported them to the West ‘to provide a spur for neo-Nazis and to resurrect the Nazi past as a means of damaging the reputation of the Federal Republic’. The West German authorities took the allegations seriously enough to ask the central police forensic laboratory to examine the diaries to see if their paper and ink could have originated in the East. The anti-communist hysteria surrounding the fraud was sufficiently widespread to be cited as a reason by the East Germans for cancelling the planned visit to Bonn of their leader, Erich Hoenecker.

  Another conspiracy theory was put forward by the Sunday Times in December 1983 after a lengthy investigation into the hoax. According to th
is account, the Hitler diaries were organized as a fund-raising operation by the SS ‘mutual aid society’ HIAG, which pays out funds to old SS men who lost their pensions at the end of the war. Despite the paucity of evidence put forward to support its thesis, the paper stated flatly that ‘most or all of the money’ paid out by Stern ‘went to HIAG’. The idea was dismissed in West Germany and since appears to have been quietly dropped by the Sunday Times itself: not one word has appeared in the paper about the subject since 1983.

  Most of these theories about the diaries reveal more about their authors than they do about the fraud. Because the figure of Adolf Hitler overshadows the forgery, people have tended to read into it whatever they want to see. To a communist the affair is a capitalist plot; to a capitalist, a communist conspiracy; to a writer on the Third Reich, fresh evidence of the continuing hold of the Nazis on West German society. This is not surprising. Hitler has always had the capacity to reflect whatever phobia afflicts the person who stares at him – as the columnist George F. Will wrote at the height of the diaries controversy, Hitler ‘is a dark mirror held up to mankind’. Equally, it flattered the victims of the fraud to believe that they were not gulled by their own paranoia and greed for sensation, but were actually the targets of a massive ‘disinformation’ operation or giant criminal conspiracy, trapped by something too complex, powerful and cunning to resist. How else could a successful and worldly publication like Stern have fallen for such obvious fakes? How else could they have paid out so much money? How else could the story have been bought by someone as shrewd as Rupert Murdoch and launched, unchecked, in such a distinguished publication as the Sunday Times? Anyone who took the magnitude of the fiasco as their starting point was bound to look for an appropriately sophisticated plot as the only possible explanation. When Konrad Kujau crawled out from beneath the wreckage of Stern’s million-dollar syndication deals, people refused to believe that such an odd individual could be responsible.

  There are many unanswered questions relating to Kujau, of which the most important are how and why did he learn to forge Nazi documents with such skill; his craftsmanship certainly suggests that at some stage he may have learned his trade by working for someone else. But, although it is possible that Kujau may have had an accomplice to help him write the diaries, it would appear, on present evidence, that there was no extensive conspiracy to rob Stern. The fraud swelled to the proportions it did only because of the incompetence displayed within Gruner and Jahr. How could anyone possibly have guessed in advance that the magazine would have behaved so foolishly? The editors, presented with a fait accompli, relied upon the management; the management relied upon Heidemann and Walde; Heidemann and Walde relied upon Kujau; and between them all, they managed to bungle the process of authentication. A competent forensic scientist would have established in less than a day that the diaries were forgeries: any conspirators would have been aware of that. Only the uncovenanted stupidity of Stern, along with a series of flukes, prevented the fraud from being exposed long before publication. The Hitler diaries affair is a monument to the cock-up theory of history. If HIAG or some similar group had really been so desperate for 9 million marks as to contemplate crime, they would have been far better served to have staged an old-fashioned bank raid.

  But money need not have been the only motive behind the appearance of the diaries. It has also been suggested that they were concocted in an attempt to rehabilitate Hitler. Gitta Sereny, responsible for the Sunday Times investigation, has claimed that the diaries’ content is ‘totally beyond’ Kujau’s abilities, that a ‘coherent psycho-political line’ emerges, presenting Hitler as ‘a reasonable and lonely man’. The suggestion is that Kujau was told what to write by someone else: the candidate put forward by the Sunday Times was Medard Klapper, ‘the central organizer of the conspiracy’. Again, this now seems highly improbable. In the first place, it greatly exaggerates the sophistication of the diaries. They read like the handiwork of a fairly uneducated man, obsessively interested in Hitler, who has cobbled together whatever he can lay his hands on from the published sources – they read, in other words, like the handiwork of Konrad Kujau. Secondly, the idea that Medard Klapper of all people might be the political brain behind the whitewashing of Hitler seems somewhat unlikely. Is the man who promised to introduce Heidemann to Martin Bormann once he had undergone a ‘Sippung’ any more credible as an author of the diaries than Kujau? HIAG would have had to be desperate.

  But above all, it is the crudity of the forgery which belies the idea that it might be the product of a Nazi conspiracy. If this was a serious attempt to present an untarnished Hitler, one would at least have expected the conspirators to have taken some elementary precautions. They would not have used paper containing chemical whitener; they would have avoided such Kujau touches as plastic initials and red cord made of polyester and viscose; they would not have relied so completely on the work of Max Domarus as to have copied out his errors.

  What is sobering is to speculate on what might have happened if these precautions had been taken. After all, Stern and News International stopped publication only because of the conclusiveness of the forensic tests carried out in the first week of May. If those tests had found nothing substantially wrong, the diaries would have been printed and would now stand as an historical source. No doubt they would have been dismissed by most serious scholars, but nevertheless they would have been bought and read by millions. Thomas Walde and Leo Pesch would have produced their book on Rudolf Hess and become rich men; Gerd Heidemann would have retired with his Nazi memorabilia to southern Spain; and Konrad Kujau, ex-forger of luncheon vouchers, having thrown students of the Third Reich into turmoil, would no doubt have continued flooding the market with faked Hitler memorabilia.

  Instead of which, on Tuesday 21 August 1984, after more than a year in custody, Heidemann and Kujau were led out of their cells and into a courtroom incandescent with television lights and photographers’ flash bulbs to stand trial for fraud. Heidemann was accused of having stolen at least 1.7 million of the 9.3 million marks handed over by Stern to pay for the diaries. Kujau was charged with having received at least 1.5 million marks. Edith Lieblang, although not being held in prison, was also required to attend court with her lawyer, accused of helping to spend Kujau’s illegal earnings.

  The two men had both been transformed by the events of the past sixteen months. Heidemann looked worn out and seedy. He had grown a beard in captivity which only gave further emphasis to the unhealthy prison pallor of his skin. His first act on arriving in the courtroom was to head for the corner. When anyone spoke to him, he would look away. It was common knowledge that he had suffered some kind of nervous collapse in jail.

  Kujau, in contrast, had developed into something of a star. He had sold his life story to Bild Zeitung for 100,000 marks. He gave regular television interviews from his prison cell. He slapped backs, exchanged jokes with his warders, kissed female reporters, and happily signed autographs ‘Adolf Hitler’. And he lied: expertly, exuberantly and constantly. Every reporter who interviewed him came away with a forged diary entry as a souvenir and a different version of his career. He drove Heidemann mad with frustration. While the reporter sat alone in his cell, poring over a meticulous card-index of the events of the past three years, trying to work out what had happened, he could hear Kujau regaling a reporter with some new account of his adventures; occasionally, like a tormented beast, Heidemann would let out a howl of rage. He would not speak to Kujau; he would not look at him. It was a far cry from the days when Gerd and Gina and Conny and Edith would meet and toast with champagne their good fortune at having met one another.

  On its opening day, the Hitler diaries trial drew an audience of 100 reporters, 150 photographers and television crewmen and around sixty members of the public. It was front page news for the first couple of days; thereafter interest dwindled until eventually the audience numbered only a half dozen regular court reporters and a handful of curious day trippers. The proceedings beca
me so monotonous that in the middle of September one of the magistrates had to be replaced because of a chronic inability to stay awake.

  Heidemann denied stealing any of Stern’s money. However, from his private papers and known bank accounts, the prosecution had no difficulty in establishing that he had spent almost 2 million marks more than he had earned since 1981, even allowing for the 1.5 million marks paid to him as ‘compensation’ for obtaining the diaries. The prosecutor also told the court that, although he would only be attempting to prove the smaller figure, he believed Heidemann could have stolen as much as 4.6 million marks. Heidemann’s defence was that the money had been paid to him by four anonymous investors as payment for a stake in one of the reporter’s Nazi treasure hunts. As Heidemann refused to name these gentlemen, his story lacked credibility. His defence lawyers managed to persuade the court to accept as evidence a series of tape recordings made by Heidemann of his telephone conversations with Kujau. These had been edited together by the reporter and effectively proved his contention that he had not known the diaries were forged. Unfortunately, whenever the discussions turned to the matter of payments, the tapes abruptly ended, strengthening the prosecution’s case that Heidemann had not handed over all of the money.

  Kujau’s defence was handled by a lawyer of feline skill and left-wing opinions named Kurt Groenewold. At first sight Croenewold was an unlikely choice to defend a Nazi-obsessed forger: he was one of West Germany’s leadihg radical lawyers, a friend of the Baader–Meinhof group, a solicitor who numbered among his clients the CIA ‘whistleblower’ Philip Agee. But it turned out to be an inspired partnership. Groenewold’s defence of Kujau was based on the argument that he was a small-time con man who had been lured into forging the Hitler diaries only by the enormous sums offered by the capitalists from Bertelsmann. Whilst Groenewold dragged Stern into the centre of the proceedings, exposing the negligence which had allowed the fraud to reach the proportions it did, Kujau was abie to play the role of a likeable rogue whose cheerfully amateurish work had been exploited by the salesmen from Hamburg.