Selling Hitler

Prologue

ON APRIL FOOL’S Day 1983 the distinguished British historian Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, first Baron Dacre of Glanton, was telephoned at his country home in Scotland by the Assistant Editor of The Times, Mr Colin Webb.

Among his many honours, Trevor-Roper had, in 1974, accepted an invitation to become an Independent National Director of Times Newspapers. For nine years his telephone had rung periodically with news of strikes, sackings and closures. But this call had nothing to do with routine Times business. It concerned a discovery of great historical significance. It was strictly confidential. The German magazine Stern, said Mr Webb, had discovered the private diaries of Adolf Hitler.

Trevor-Roper, a former Regius Professor of History at Oxford, was startled and immediately sceptical. ‘I said to myself, there are so many forgeries circulating in the “grey market”: forged documents about Bormann, forged diaries of Eva Braun, falsified accounts of interviews with Hitler…’ Besides, it was well known that Hitler disliked putting pen to paper and had virtually given up writing in his own hand altogether after 1933. As far as he was aware there was no evidence, either in the German archives or in the recollections of Hitler’s subordinates, to suggest that the German dictator had kept a diary. If he had, and if it had now been discovered, it would certainly rank as one of the greatest historical finds of modern times: Hitler, as Trevor-Roper himself had written, was the twentieth century’s Genghis Khan, the ‘political genius’ whose murderous influence upon mankind was still being felt four decades after his death. If this diabolical figure, contrary to all accepted beliefs, turned out to have kept a diary, it would provoke a sensation.

Webb explained that Stern was offering to sell the foreign serial rights in the diaries. Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Times Newspapers, was considering bidding not merely for the British and Commonwealth, but possibly for the American rights as well. The syndication negotiations were about to begin. In the meantime the diaries themselves were being kept in a bank vault in Switzerland. Webb said that Murdoch wanted an expert’s opinion before making an offer for the diaries. Would Trevor-Roper, as an authority on the period and a director of the company, be willing to act as an adviser? Would he fly out to Zurich and examine the material?

Trevor-Roper said he would.

In that case, said Webb, Stern would expect him in Switzerland at the end of the following week.

By the time Adolf Hitler had passed his fifty-second birthday, there was no longer a human being left in history who could provide a precedent for his impact on the earth. In January 1942, whilst he picked at his customary vegetarian supper at his headquarters in East Prussia, his soldiers were guarding U-boat pens on the Atlantic coast, shivering in dugouts on the approach roads to Moscow, sweating in tanks in the Libyan desert. In less than twenty years, he had passed from brawling provincial politician to imperial conqueror. He was remaking the world. ‘Mark my words, Bormann,’ he announced one evening over dinner, ‘I’m going to become very religious.’

‘You’ve always been very religious,’ replied Bormann.

But Hitler was not thinking of himself as a mere participant in some future act of worship: he was to be the object of it.

‘I’m going to become a religious figure,’ he insisted. ‘Soon I’ll be the great chief of the Tartars. Already Arabs and Moroccans are mingling my name with their prayers. Amongst the Tartars I shall become Khan…’

When the warm weather returned he would finish off the Red Army. Then he would ‘put things in order for a thousand years’. Giant roads would be built into Russia and the first of twenty million Germans, ‘soldier-peasants’, would start making their homes in a colony whose frontier would extend 250 miles east of the Urals. The Russians, denied churches and schools, educated only to a point at which they could read road signs, would be confined to vast, disease-ridden cities, patrolled from the air by the Luftwaffe. The Crimea would be exclusively German. Moscow would be razed to the ground and turned into an artificial lake. The Channel Islands would be handed over to the Strength Through Joy organization ‘for, with their wonderful climate, they constitute a marvellous health resort’. Every nation would have its part to play in Hitler’s New Order. The Norwegians would supply Europe’s electricity. The Swiss would be hotel keepers. ‘I haven’t studied the problem as regards Sweden,’ joked Hitler. ‘In Finland, unfortunately, there is nothing to be done.’ Opponents would be confined behind barbed wire in the lengthening chain of concentration camps now opening up in the Eastern territories. At the first sign of trouble, all inmates would be ‘liquidated’. As for the Jews, they would simply be ‘got rid of’. The future was a vista of endless conflict. A man’s first encounter with war, stated Hitler, was like a woman’s first experience with a man: ‘For the good of the German people, we must wish for a war every fifteen or twenty years.’ And in Berlin, renamed Germania, at the centre of this ceaselessly warring empire, would sit the Führer himself, in a granite Chancellery of such proportions that ‘one should have the feeling that one is visiting the master of the world’. The Berghof, his private home on the Obersalzberg, would, in due course, become a museum. Here, propped up in bed, while the rest of the household slept, Hitler had found the inspiration for his dreams, gazing out ‘for hours’ at ‘the mountains lit up by the moon’. When his dreams were reality, it would become a place of pilgrimage for a grateful race. ‘I can already see the guide from Berchtesgaden showing visitors over the rooms of my house: “This is where he had breakfast…” I can also imagine a Saxon giving his avaricious instructions: “Don’t touch the articles, don’t wear out the parquet, stay between the ropes…”’

Almost half a century has now passed since Adolf Hitler and his vision were buried in the rubble of Berlin. All that remains today of the Berghof are a few piles of stone, overgrown with moss and trees. But the repercussions of his career persist. ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice,’ concludes Alan Bullock’s study of Hitler: ‘If you seek his monument, look around.’ The division of Germany, the exhaustion of British power, the entrenchment and paranoia of Soviet Russia, the denials of freedom in the Eastern half of Europe, the entanglement of America in the Western half, the creation of the State of Israel and the consequent instability of the Middle East – all, in a sense, have been bequeathed to us by Adolf Hitler. His name has become a synonym for evil. Even the physical act of uttering the word ‘Hitler’ necessitates a grimace. In 1979, the British historian J. H. Plumb described him as a ‘curse’, the ‘black blight’ that overshadowed his youth:

In an attempt to come to terms with this phenomenon there were, by 1980, according to one estimate, over seventy biographies of Adolf Hitler in existence. There are twice as many biographies of Hitler as there are of Winston Churchill; three times as many as there are of Roosevelt and Stalin. Only Jesus Christ has had more words devoted to him than Hitler. The public appetite for these books is enormous. In 1974, Joachim Fest’s biography sold over 250,000 hardback copies in Germany alone. Two years later, John Toland’s Adolf Hitler sold 75,000 copies in the United States (at $15 each) and went into four printings within weeks of its publication. When David Irving began work on his study he wrote that ‘it was possible to speculate that “books on Hitler” outnumbered page for page the total original documentation available. This proved a sad underestimate.’ By 1979 the British Library and the Library of Congress listed over 55,000 items relating solely to Hitler and the Second World War. There are specialist books about Hitler’s childhood, his years in Vienna and his service in the army; at least half a dozen works are devoted specifically to his last days and death. There have been investigations into his mind, his body, his personal security, his art. We have first-hand accounts from his valet, his secretary, his pilot, his photographer, his interpreter, his chauffeur and a host of adjutants, ministers and generals. From one doctor (Morell) we know all we ever want to know – and considerably more – about the movement of Hitler’s bowels; from another (Giesing), the appearance of the Führer’s genitalia. We know that he liked cream cakes, dumb blondes, fast cars, mountain scenery; that he disliked lipstick, modern art, opinionated women and the screech of an owl.

The detail is immense and yet, somehow, the portrait it adds up to remains oddly unconvincing. Despite the millions of words which have been poured into explaining the gulf between Hitler, the private individual, and Hitler, the political prodigy, the two remain unreconciled. ‘We seem to be left with a phantom,’ wrote J. P. Stern, ‘a centre of Nothing.’ This inner emptiness helped enable Hitler to use himself like a tool, changing his personality with shocking abruptness to suit the task in hand. The charm of an Austrian gentleman, the brutality of a gangster, the ranting of a demagogue, the assurance of a diplomat succeeded one another in a kaleidoscope of performances which left his innermost thoughts a mystery. In the 1930s, an astonished official watched him carefully work himself into an artificial rage for the sole purpose of frightening an English diplomat; the performance over, he returned to his advisers chuckling, ‘Gentlemen, I need tea. He thinks I’m furious.’ Hitler remained an enigma, even to his most intimate advisers. ‘I got to know Adolf Hitler more closely in 1933,’ wrote Joachim von Ribbentrop at the end of the war.

‘When a decision has to be taken,’ Hermann Goering told one diplomat before the war, ‘none of us count more than the stones on which we are standing. It is the Führer alone who decides.’ And General Jodl, at Hitler’s side throughout six years of war, was equally baffled. ‘To this very day,’ he wrote in 1946, ‘I do not know what he thought or knew or really wanted.’ He was utterly self-contained, mysterious, unpredictable, secretive, awesome. He was, as Hugh Trevor-Roper put it, ‘the Rousseau, the Mirabeau, the Robespierre and the Napoleon of his revolution; he was its Marx, its Lenin, its Trotsky and its Stalin.’ What a sensation it would cause if it were now discovered that such a man had left behind a diary….

On Friday, 8 April 1983, exactly one week after his initial conversation with The Times, Hugh Trevor-Roper presented himself at Terminal 2 of London’s Heathrow Airport. There he was met by Stern’s London representative, Peter Wickman, and at 11.15 a.m. they took off for Zurich.

Wickman, plump and garrulous, proved an amiable companion and the sixty-nine-year-old historian was soon launched into one of his favourite topics of conversation: the inordinate superiority of Oxford over Cambridge. (He once said that leaving an Oxford professorship for a Cambridge mastership was rather like becoming a colonial governor.) It was not until the stewardess had served lunch that the two men settled down to business.

Wickman gave Trevor-Roper a twenty-page, typewritten document, bound in a clear plastic cover and entitled Plan 3. Based on the so-called diaries, it told the story of how Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, had undertaken his abortive peace mission to Britain in May 1941. The accepted view among historians was that Hess had made his dramatic flight on his own initiative. But according to the diary entries quoted in Plan 3, Hitler knew of Hess’s intention in advance.

On 25 June 1939, Hitler was alleged to have written in his diary:

Other entries followed:

Finally, Hitler was supposed to have outlined three contingency plans:

1. Should the mission go well and Hess be successful, he acted in agreement with me.

2. If Hess is arrested in England as a spy, then he informed me some time ago of his plan, but I rejected it.

3. Should his mission fail completely, I declare Hess acted in a fit of delusion.

When it became clear that Hess’s mission had failed, ‘Plan 3’ had duly been adopted. This, according to Stern, was the solution to one of the great mysteries of the Second World War, proof that six weeks before the invasion of Russia, Hitler had made a genuine attempt to negotiate peace with Britain.

Even as he took detailed notes from the document, suspicions began to accumulate in Trevor-Roper’s mind. Stern’s version of the Hess story was in conflict with all the available evidence. Albert Speer, for example, had been outside Hitler’s study door at the precise moment that the Führer had learned of Hess’s flight to Britain. ‘I suddenly heard’, Speer recalled, ‘an inarticulate, almost animal outcry.’ Trevor-Roper had been told the story by Speer in person. He had subsequently described in his own book, The Last Days of Hitler, how the Nazi leadership had been hastily summoned to the Berghof to discuss the damage Hess had done: hardly the behaviour one would have expected if Hitler had known of Hess’s intention in advance. He told Wickman immediately that he thought the Stern story was rubbish and Wickman, who had long nursed his own private doubts, agreed.

By the time the plane landed in Zurich, Trevor-Roper was finding it difficult to keep an open mind about the diaries. He was almost certain it was a wasted journey, but having come so far he thought he might as well at least see them. The two men took a taxi into town, dropped off their luggage at the Hotel Baur au Lac, and while Trevor-Roper waited, Wickman telephoned ahead to the bank where the diaries were being kept. The Stern people were already waiting. Wickman told them that he and the historian were on their way over.

Shortly after 3 p.m., Trevor-Roper was ushered into a ground floor room of Zurich’s Handelsbank. At the end of a long table, three men rose to meet him. One was Wilfried Sorge, the salesman who had flown round the world alerting newspapers in America, Japan, Italy, Spain and Britain to the existence of the diaries. Another was Dr Jan Hensmann, the financial director of Stern’s parent company, Gruner and Jahr. The third German was Stern’s bullet-headed editor-in-chief, Peter Koch.

When the introductions had been completed, Koch gestured towards a side table. On it were fifty-eight volumes of diaries, carefully piled up in a stack more than two feet high. Another set of documents was in a metal safety deposit box. There was a bound volume of original drawings and paintings. There was even a First World War helmet, allegedly Hitler’s. This was no mere handful of notes. It was, as Trevor-Roper later described it, ‘a whole coherent archive covering 35 years’. He was staggered by its scale.

He picked up a couple of the books. They were A4-sized, with stiff black covers. Some bore red wax seals in the form of a German eagle. Others were decorated with initials in gothic script. Most carried typewritten labels declaring them to be the property of the Führer and signed by Martin Bormann. The pages inside were lined, some densely filled with old Germanic script, some bearing only a couple of sentences, some completely blank. At the foot of each page was Hitler’s signature – a jagged oscillation in black ink, like a seismographic record of some distant earthquake.

The Stern men met Trevor-Roper’s queries point by point. They produced three separate reports from handwriting experts authenticating the documents. They described how the diaries had come into their hands. They confirmed that the magazine knew the identity of the supplier. It was enough.

Twenty-four hours later Rupert Murdoch was sitting in the same bank vault leafing through the diaries with the former head of Reuters at his side translating their contents. By mid-afternoon on 9 April he had offered the delighted Germans $3 million for the world rights.

What happened next is described in detail later in this book: how Murdoch and the Newsweek company fell into an ill-tempered auction which at one stage pushed the price of the diaries up to $3.75 million, until Stern’s greed and Newsweek’s alleged unscrupulousness punctured the whole deal; how Stern nevertheless managed to sell subsidiary rights in the diaries to newspapers and magazines in America, Britain, Australia, France, Italy, Spain, Norway, Holland and Belgium – a contract carefully calculated to squeeze the last marketable drop out of Adolf Hitler, dividing the diaries into twenty-eight separate extracts whose publication would have spanned more than eighteen months; how news of the diaries’ discovery was rushed into print despite growing evidence that some of the material was of post-war origin; and finally how this elaborate but increasingly shaky pyramid of subsidiary deals and serial rights was sent crashing two weeks later by a short laboratory report from the Federal police.

The diaries, announced the West German state archives on 6 May, were not merely fakes: they were ‘eine plumpe Fdlschung’, a crude forgery, the grotesquely superficial (‘grotesk oberflächlich’) concoction of a copyist endowed with a ‘limited intellectual capacity’. The paper, the binding, the glue, the thread were all found to be of post-war manufacture. By the time this was disclosed, the management of Stern, in the course of more than two years, had handed over twenty-seven suitcases full of money to enable their star reporter, Gerd Heidemann, to obtain the diaries. $4 million had disappeared, making the Hitler diaries the most expensive and far-reaching fraud in publishing history, easily dwarfing the $650,000 handed over by McGraw-Hill for the faked autobiography of Howard Hughes. Scores of reputations apart from Trevor-Roper’s were damaged by the diaries fiasco. At least four editors in three different countries lost their jobs as a result.

The affair was a reminder of Adolf Hitler’s continuing hold on the world’s imagination. News of the discovery of the diaries made headlines in every nation; it ran on the front page of the New York Times for five consecutive days. Shrewd businessmen showed themselves willing to pay enormous sums for material of which they had read only a fraction. It did not matter that the diaries’ content was perfunctory and tedious: it was sufficient that it had been written by him. The diaries briefly put Hitler back in the arena of international diplomacy, a weapon in the Cold War which his career had done so much to create. Radio Moscow alleged that ‘the affair of the Hitler diaries clearly reveals the CIA style’. America’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, suspected the communists of producing the diaries ‘to sow distrust between the United States and its German friends’. In the middle of the furore, the East German leader, Erich Hoenecker, cancelled his planned trip to Bonn complaining of a hostile Western press campaign: repeated allegations that the diaries originated in an East German ‘forgery factory’ were bitterly resented in Berlin. When the real forger, Konrad Kujau, confessed to the police on 26 May, it was difficult to believe that so much international confusion could have resulted from the work of this jaunty and farcical figure.

How did it happen? How did a hard-headed German publishing company come to spend so much money on such palpable fakes, and persuade almost a dozen foreign partners to invest in the project? To answer that question, we have to go back more than forty years: back through the expanding market in Hitler memorabilia, back through the activities of the surviving members of the Führer’s inner circle, right back to the figure of Hitler himself, malevolent to the last, but no longer confident of his destiny, preparing for death in his bunker in the spring of 1945.