Selling Hitler

FOUR

THE BOAT WAS lying low against the harbour jetty when he first saw her, ageing and dilapidated, with the freezing waters of the River Rhine seeping into her hold. She had been built in 1937 and presented as a gift by the German motor industry to Hermann Goering, architect of Hitler’s rearmament programme and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe. The sumptuously finished motor yacht took its place amongst the other trappings of the Reichsmarschall’s grandiose lifestyle: his luxurious private train, his 100,000 acre hunting estate, his enormous hoard of looted art treasures. In honour of his first wife, who had died prematurely in 1931, Goering named her Carin II. The yacht survived the wartime air raids guarded by three soldiers in a private anchorage in Berlin. She also survived the death of her owner in Nuremberg in 1946. During the Allied occupation she was impounded by Field Marshal Montgomery and presented to the British Royal Family who rechristened her the Royal Albert. Following the birth of the Prince of Wales, she was renamed the Prince Charles. In 1960, after more than a decade in the service of the British Rhine Flotilla, the Queen returned the yacht to Goering’s widow, his second wife, Emmy.

It was on a bleak day in January 1973, thirteen years later, that Gerd Heidemann found her moored on the waterfront in the West German capital, Bonn. She now belonged to the owner of a local printing works. More than eighty feet long, expensive to maintain and in need of extensive repairs, the yacht had become a financial liability. The owner told Heidemann he wanted to sell her.

Heidemann subsequently maintained that at that time he had no particular interest in the Nazis. He was a photographer and reporter on Stern and had simply been commissioned to take pictures of the boat for a feature article. He was forty-one years old, his third marriage had recently collapsed, and he was looking for an opportunity to make some money. He concluded that the yacht, once renovated, could be sold for a large profit. A few weeks later, in March, he bought her for 160,000 marks. It was a huge sum of money for an ordinary journalist to find. He had to mortgage his house, a bungalow in the Hamburg suburb of Flottbeck, to raise it.

Heidemann knew little about sailing. For help he turned to an acquaintance, a twenty-five-year-old seaman named Axel Thomsen who was studying for his captain’s qualifications at the naval school in Hamburg. ‘I went down to Bonn and saw the ship,’ recalled Thomsen. it was in a miserable condition. Of the three engines, only one diesel was working. She was also taking in water and had constantly to be emptied.’ She was too badly damaged to withstand the open sea, and late that summer the two men sailed her back to Hamburg along the inland waterways of northern Germany. She had to be put in dry dock for a year to be made watertight.

Heidemann soon had cause to regret his impulsive investment. He had hopelessly underestimated the amount of work which Carin II’s restoration would involve. By 1974 he was in a financial trap: he could hope to sell the boat only if he completed the repairs; he could pay for the repairs only by selling the boat. Meanwhile, interest rates on the money he had already borrowed and the cost of keeping the yacht in dock bit deep into his salary. ‘He permanently seemed short of money,’ said Thomsen ten years later. ‘He was always trying to pump loans out of other people. He was worried that things were going to be taken off him because he hadn’t paid his debts.’ In desperation, Heidemann even asked Thomsen to lend him 15,000 marks. Word went round the Hamburg shipyards that the naive and over-confident new owner of ‘Fat Hermann’s boat’ was financially shaky. Neither for the first time in his life nor the last, Heidemann was in danger of making a fool of himself.

Gerd Heidemann was born on 4 December 1931 in the Altona district of Hamburg, the illegitimate son of Martha Eiternick. When his mother married a former sailor turned policeman called Rolf Heidemann, Gerd took his stepfather’s surname. His parents were apolitical. Gerd, like most boys his age, was a member of the Hitler Youth. When, at the end of the war, the Allies produced evidence of the scale of the Nazis’ atrocities, he went through the same sequence of emotions as millions of his fellow countrymen: disbelief, anger, guilt and a desire to reject the past.

A quiet and unassuming adolescent, Heidemann left school at the age of seventeen to become an apprentice electrician. The passion of his life was photography and eventually he found work as an assistant in a photographic laboratory. He went on to become a freelance photographer for the German newsagency DPA, for Keystone and for various Hamburg newspapers. In 1951 he won his first commission from Stern. On 1 September 1955 he became a permanent member of the magazine’s staff.

Twenty-eight years later, when his bewildered and humiliated employers were pressed into holding an internal inquiry into his activities at Stern, they found there was almost nothing to say about his early days on the magazine. ‘His colleagues do not have any particular memories of him, except that he used to enjoy playing chess,’ reported the inquiry. His shyness effaced him to the point of anonymity.

Stern had been founded in 1948 by a charismatic journalist and businessman named Henri Nannen. The magazine prospered on a diet of scandal, consumerism, crime and human interest, skilfully designed to appeal to a war-weary population. The picture stories Heidemann worked on give an idea of the quality of the magazine at that time. One was ‘Germany’s Starlets’; another, ‘Hospitals of Germany’. He investigated organized crime in Sardinia and smuggling on the border between Holland and West Germany. On one occasion he was dispatched to Goettingen to locate the son whom Chou En Lai was rumoured to have fathered during the 1920s when he was studying in Germany. Heidemann found a woman who had once had an affair with a Chinese student called Chou; their son was killed in the war. Unfortunately, as Heidemann reported to Nannen, her lover turned out to be Chou Ling Gui – a different Chou entirely. Nannen’s reply, according to Heidemann, was ‘Chou is Chou’ and the story appeared beneath the dramatic headline, ‘Chou En Lai’s Son Fell For Germany’. Looking back on his work during this period, Heidemann described it as ‘mediocre’.

In the mid-1950s Nannen was astute enough to recognize that the shock and humiliation of the immediate post-war era was gradually being replaced by a growing public interest in the Nazis. Heidemann became involved in features about the Third Reich: Auschwitz, fugitive war criminals and the reminiscences of the widow of Reinhard Heydrich. ‘Heidemann’s routine activities were generally speaking outside my daily concern,’ Nannen told police in 1983. ‘I had the impression that he was a competent researcher. I didn’t know of any mistakes in his work.’ There was something about this intensely serious young man, with his pale complexion and earnest expression, which reminded Nannen of a priest fresh from a seminary.

From 1961 Heidemann worked abroad as a war photographer. He saw action in the Congo, in Biafra, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Uganda, Beirut and Oman. In 1965 he won an international press award at the Hague for the year’s best photo-report: a feature about white mercenaries in the Congo. He frequently worked in a partnership with Randolph Braumann, a Stern reporter of the macho school, known to his colleagues in Hamburg as ‘Congo Randy’. ‘We both enjoyed war reporting and enjoying life and experiencing danger away from Europe,’ recalled Braumann. In 1970 they covered the Black September civil war in Jordan and were almost killed trying to run from a Jordanian tank to a German embassy car Heidemann had parked nearby. Even Braumann was impressed by his photographer’s exuberance under fire:

Braumann was awed by his composure. ‘The man had absolutely no fear.’

Back in Hamburg, Heidemann attempted to recapture the excitement of his foreign adventures. According to Braumann:

Visitors to the Heidemann household would be taken down to the cellar by their host to be shown the toy battlefield. Later, upstairs, if they were particularly unlucky, Heidemann would bring out mementoes from his trips abroad.

Heidemann’s obsessional nature inevitably had its effect upon his personal relationships. He had first married in 1954, at the age of twenty-three, and had a son. A year later he and his wife were divorced. In 1960 they remarried and had a daughter. But in 1965 the marriage finally foundered. Divorced once more, in 1966 Heidemann married his second wife, Barbara. This relationship lasted for five years, until Barbara too tired of his collections, his stories and his frequent absences abroad. The couple separated in 1971.

As a journalist, Heidemann was a curious amalgam of strengths and weaknesses. In research he was indefatigable, hunting down documents and interviewees with a dogged persistence which earned him the title ‘der Spürhund’ – the Bloodhound. His approach was uncritical and indirect. He flattered and insinuated and was often rewarded with the sort of confidences that a more aggressive approach would have failed to solicit. But this tendency to submerge himself in the opinions of others was Heidemann’s principal failing. He was such a compulsive collector of information that he never knew when to stop, and although he strove to be more than a photographer and researcher, he failed to become one of Stern’s major writers. He lacked any sense of perspective. Invariably the editor would end up asking him to hand over his boxes of files and transcripts. Someone else would have to boil down the mountain of information into a story. According to Stern’s 1983 inquiry: ‘He never actually wrote any of his reports himself.’

In 1967 Heidemann became involved in an exhaustive investigation to try to uncover the real identity of the German thriller writer, B. Traven. Long after the essentials of the story had been published in Stern, Heidemann continued his researches, to the exasperation of the magazine’s editors who wanted him to work on other projects. He went to Chicago, San Francisco, Mexico and Norway. He toured German antique shops collecting Traven memorabilia. ‘I acquired everything I could,’ said Heidemann. Even the patience of Congo Randy became strained. ‘Heidemann would talk about nothing else but Traven,’ he later complained. In 1972, Heidemann asked Braumann to help him turn his information into a book.

Undeterred, Heidemann spent almost a decade immersed in the Traven story. By the time he had finished he had seventy files of information. He became convinced that the writer was the illegitimate son of Kaiser Wilhelm II. As proof, he showed Braumann two photographs: one of a man he believed to be Traven, and another of the Kaiser’s eldest son. ‘Don’t they look similar?’ he asked. Braumann was not impressed. ‘I thought the story was far too improbable. It was typical of Gerd Heidemann that he should believe in something so crazy and unlikely.’

Braumann thought it was equally ‘crazy’ that Heidemann, short of money and ignorant of ships, should have plunged himself into debt to buy Hermann Goering’s yacht. But knowing this restless, diffident, obsessive man as well as he did he was not in the least surprised by what happened next. ‘I knew that after the mercenary phase and the Traven phase there would be a new phase for Heidemann: the Nazi phase.’

By 1974, Carin II had at least been rendered watertight. She was taken out of dry dock and moored in a Hamburg marina. ‘Only the most urgent repairs had been done,’ recalled Axel Thomsen, ‘because Herr Heidemann was deterred by the high cost involved. He said that further work was too expensive.’

With the yacht’s renovation temporarily halted for lack of money, Heidemann set about researching her history. In Munich he made contact with Goering’s daughter, Edda. She was in her mid-thirties, attractive, unmarried and devoted to the memory of her father. According to his colleagues, Heidemann had always been remarkably successful with women. Apparently Edda too saw something in this tall, slightly pudgy, quietly spoken journalist who listened so attentively to her stories of her father. Shortly after their first meeting, when Heidemann visited her to show her photographs of Carin II, the couple began having an affair.

Slowly, imperceptibly, through his ownership of the yacht and his relationship with Edda, Heidemann began to be drawn into a circle of former Nazis. A Stern reporter, Jochen von Lang, introduced him to former SS General Wilhelm Mohnke, the last commander of the German garrison defending the Reich Chancellery. The sixty-three-year-old General had lived quietly since his release from Soviet captivity in 1955. He even declined to attend the reunions of the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, the Führer’s bodyguard, of which he was a founder member. One reason for Mohnke’s low profile was that the British still had an outstanding war crimes charge against him, alleging he had been responsible for shooting prisoners at Dunkirk. Mohnke, silver-haired and craggy-featured, still lithe and powerful, looked as if he had stepped out of a Hollywood war film. ‘Herr von Lang took me to the yacht,’ stated Mohnke, ‘where, among others, I met Edda Goering.’ He and Heidemann established what he called ‘a very friendly rapport’ and were soon addressing each other with the familiar ‘du’.

Another SS general introduced by Jochen von Lang became friendly with Heidemann around this time: Karl Wolff, one of the most senior of the surviving Nazis. Wolff had been Himmler’s liaison officer with Hitler. He was sufficiently close to the SS Reichsführer for Himmler to call him by a pet name, ‘Wolffchen’, an endearment which Heidemann later adopted. In Minsk in 1941, on the one occasion Himmler steeled himself to stand at the edge of a mass grave and watch his SS troops massacre a hundred naked men and women, it was Wolff who caught hold of him when he seemed to faint and forced him to carry on watching. Wolff was heavily implicated in the Final Solution. As the Nazis’ military governor in Italy, he was alleged to have sent at least 300,000 Jews to the Treblinka death camp. He was also accused of arranging the liquidation of partisans and Jews in the Soviet Union. Wolff saved his neck by secretly negotiating with Allen Dulles the surrender of the German forces in Italy to the Americans. In 1946 he was sentenced to four years’ hard labour but spent only a week in prison. In the 1950s Wolff became a successful advertising agent in Cologne. But in 1962 he was rearrested. Fresh evidence was produced, including a letter written in 1941 in which he professed to be ‘particularly gratified with the news that each day for the last fortnight a trainload of 5000 members of the “Chosen People” has been sent to Treblinka’. He was found guilty of complicity in mass murder and sent to prison, but in 1971, in view of his ‘otherwise blameless life’, he was released. He was seventy-four when Heidemann met him: charming, energetic and unrepentant.

Heidemann began to hold regular Third Reich soirées on Carin II. About a dozen friends and former Nazis would be invited, with Wolff and Mohnke as the guests of honour. ‘We started to have long drinking evenings on board,’ recalled Heidemann, ‘with different people of quite different opinions talking to each other. I had always been a passionate reader of thrillers. Suddenly I was living a thriller.’ He started to devour books on the Third Reich. ‘I wanted to be part of the conversation, not just to sit and drink whisky.’

Heidemann’s only problem was the continuing cost of the yacht. Merely servicing the debts he had incurred in buying it was proving ‘a bottomless pit’. In the hope of a solution, he decided, in 1976, to seek help from Henri Nannen.

The Stern of 1976 was very different from the Stern which Heidemann had joined in the 1950s. With the advent of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, it had begun sprinkling its pages with glossy pictures of nudes. Following the growth of protest politics, its editorial line had swung to the left, with strident articles on student unrest, the Vietnam war, and the perfidy of the NATO alliance. The magazine’s financial strength was a reflection of the power of the West German economy. It sucked in enormous advertising revenue and regularly produced issues running to 300 pages. Always abreast of the latest fashion, with a circulation of over 1.5 million, it easily outsold its major competitors. Its publisher, Henri Nannen, shaped the magazine in his own image: prosperous, bulging, glossy and bumptious.

In 1976 this ‘hybrid of money and journalism’, as one of his left-wing writers called him, was sixty-three. He had never been a member of the Nazi Party, but he had a past which sat uneasily with his present position as purveyor of radical chic. He had appeared as a sports announcer in Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He had written articles praising Hitler in Kunst dem Volk (Art for the People), a Nazi magazine. During the war he had worked for a military propaganda unit. Stern, under his guidance, gave extensive coverage to the Third Reich and there were some who detected an ambivalence in his fascination with the period. ‘It was subconscious,’ claimed Manfred Bissinger, Nannen’s left-wing deputy at the time. ‘For Nannen, the less bad the Nazi past turned out to have been, the less bad his role in it was.’ He had a powerful personality and Heidemann revered him: according to Braumann, ‘he obeyed his great master Nannen’s every word’.

Heidemann had been pestering Nannen to visit Carin II for months. In the summer of 1976, Nannen finally agreed. He was, in his own words, ‘surprised and fascinated’ by what he saw. Heidemann had turned the yacht into a kind of shrine to its first owner. Goering’s dinner service was on prominent display, as were Goering’s tea cups and Goering’s drinking goblets. On the table was Goering’s ashtray, in the cupboard, his uniform. The cushion covers were made out of Goering’s bathrobe. Working from old photographs, Heidemann had even tried to fill the bookshelves with the same books Goering had kept there. Most of these mementoes had been given to Heidemann by Edda Goering; the rest had been acquired from dealers in Nazi memorabilia. Heidemann showed Nannen an album filled with photographs and newspaper cuttings about the yacht which included a picture of Princess Margaret on a trip to Basle. ‘Simply everything was there,’ said Nannen later. ‘The photographs didn’t just come from one source. They couldn’t have been forged. He’d actually collected the whole lot. I found it an incredible journalistic performance.’

Having put his employer in this receptive mood, Heidemann outlined his plan. Nannen recalled:

Heidemann proposed that he should write a book for Stern based upon the conversations he was holding with Mohnke, Wolff and other old Nazis. He told Nannen that he had already begun tape recording some of these reminiscences and had some interesting material on the Odessa network, the supposed Nazi escape route to South America. ‘Because Heidemann had already reported on this subject for Stern,’ said Nannen, ‘I agreed.’

On 12 October 1976 Heidemann concluded an agreement with Stern’s parent company, the large Hamburg publishing house of Gruner and Jahr. He undertook to write a book provisionally entitled Bord Gespräche (Deck Conversations) with the subtitle ‘Personalities from History Meet on Goering’s Former Yacht Carin II’. The contract was unusually generous towards Heidemann. He was paid an immediate advance of 60,000 marks, but no date was stipulated for the delivery of the manuscript and he was not required to return the money should he fail to write the book. All he had to do was undertake to maintain Carin II in a satisfactory condition. The contract was signed, on behalf of Gruner and Jahr, by Henri Nannen and by the company’s managing director, Manfred Fischer.

With the official blessing and financial support of his employers, Heidemann’s descent into the world of the old Nazis now began in earnest.

FIVE

WHILE HEIDEMANN POURED whisky and adjusted his tape recorder aboard Carin II, another journalist was also busy tracking down survivors of the Third Reich. One hundred and fifty miles south-east of Hamburg, in his office in West Berlin, James P. O’Donnell, bureau chief of Newsweek magazine, was compiling a card index of more than 250 people who had been with Hitler during his last days in the bunker. His researches were to have important consequences for Heidemann.

O’Donnell’s first assignment in Berlin for Newsweek, in July 1945, had been to visit the Führerbunker. The memory of those forty-five minutes beneath the ground – the stench of blocked latrines whose effluent flooded the narrow corridor, the blackened walls, the tiny rooms littered with broken glass and bloodied bandages – had stayed with O’Donnell ever since. ‘Adolf Hitler’, he wrote, ‘exercises over my mind, and that of many others, I suspect, a curious kind of fascination.’ He decided to write a book, an expanded version of The Last Days of Hitler, describing what had happened in the bunker. Between 1972 and 1976, operating out of Berlin, he visited scores of eyewitnesses, ‘cruising Hitler’s old autobahns, clocking more than 60,000 miles’.

Like Heidemann, he found himself increasingly fascinated by the network of characters he uncovered. Thirty years after the end of the war many of the people close to Hitler still kept in regular contact. Gossiping amongst themselves, divided into cliques, their relationships still traced ancient patterns of loyalty and animosity forged in the heyday of the Third Reich. Once, while he was interviewing Albert Speer at his home in Heidelberg, the postman arrived and handed Speer a package which turned out to contain an autographed copy of his book, Inside the Third Reich. Speer had sent it to Christa Schroeder, his favourite among Hitler’s secretaries, whom he had not seen since his arrest and imprisonment in 1945. She had sent it back with a brief covering note saying that she was sorry, but she was returning the book because she had been ‘ordered to do so’. ‘Who has the power to issue such orders?’ asked O’Donnell. ‘The Keepers of the Flame,’ replied Speer: the adjutants, orderlies, chauffeurs and secretaries who had formed Hitler’s inner circle and who habitually referred to themselves as ‘die von dem Berg’, ‘the Mountain People’, in memory of their pre-war days at Berchtesgaden. Speer, once Hitler’s favourite, was generally detested for his ‘betrayal’ of the Führer at Nuremberg. For his part, Speer contemptuously dismissed them as the Chauffeureska.

It was this group that O’Donnell, and later Heidemann, succeeded in penetrating: the adjutants, Otto Guensche and Richard Schulze-Kossens; the pilot, Hans Baur; the valet, Heinz Linge; the chauffeur, Erich Kempka; and, above all, the secretaries, who maintained a fierce loyalty to their dead employer. To them he was still der Chef: the Boss. The oldest, Johanna Wolf, had been recruited to work for Hitler by Rudolf Hess in 1924 and had remained his principal private secretary for more than twenty years. Stern was reputed to have offered her $500,000 for her memoirs. She turned them down. ‘I was taught long ago’, she explained to O’Donnell, ‘that the very first and last duty of a confidential secretary is to remain confidential.’ None of Hitler’s four main secretaries had married after the war; none had much money. When O’Donnell finally persuaded Gerda Christian to meet him at the home of an intermediary in 1975 she was working as a secretary in a bank in Dortmund. Of all the Keepers of the Flame, she was the most fanatical. ‘Do nothing to let the Führer down,’ was Frau Christian’s repeated exhortation to her colleagues. She had divorced her husband, a Luftwaffe general, in 1946, and like the other secretaries, she chose to remain single. O’Donnell once asked her why. ‘How could any of us have remarried,’ she replied, ‘after having known a man like Adolf Hitler?’

It was in the autumn of 1972 that O’Donnell first heard the story of Sergeant Arndt’s ill-fated mission to fly the ten metal trunks out of Berlin. From Heinz Linge he had obtained the address of Rochus Misch, the bunker’s switchboard operator. Misch, by then in his fifties, turned out to be the proprietor of a paint and varnish shop less than a mile from O’Donnell’s Berlin office. Misch was happy to talk about his wartime experiences. The interview began in his shop and continued during a walk through the city. From a vantage point in Potsdamer Platz the two men stood for a while, looking out across the Eastern sector, to the grassy mound in the shadow of the Berlin Wall which is all that now remains of Hitler’s bunker. It was not until the early evening, when they were sitting in O’Donnell’s office, that Misch mentioned the loading of the chests on to the lorry and described Arndt’s departure from Berlin.

Using this as a rough guide, O’Donnell estimated that Arndt had been escorting almost half a ton of documents. He decided to pursue the story further and a few months later drove down to the Bavarian village of Herrsching, on the shores of Lake Ammersee, to see Hans Baur.

Baur had tried to break out from the Führerbunker two days after Hitler’s death but had been cut down by Russian machine-gun fire. He was hit in the leg and the wound had turned septic. ‘There was no surgeon available,’ Baur wrote later, ‘so the German surgeon amputated with a pocket knife.’ O’Donnell found a tough and irascible old man of seventy-seven, who used his wooden leg as if it were an elaborate stage prop, noisily tapping it with his signet ring or occasionally hobbling round the room on it to enact some dramatic scene. In November 1945 he had been taken by cattle truck to Moscow’s Lubianka prison where, night after night for weeks on end, he had been interrogated about Hitler’s final hours. He was made to put his account down on paper, only to have the pages snatched off him and torn up before his eyes. Sometimes he was grilled on his own; sometimes the Russians dragged in other bunker survivors: the commander of Hitler’s SS bodyguard, Hans Rattenhuber, his naval attaché, Admiral Voss, Otto Guensche and Heinz Lingé. The questioning went on for three and a half years. In 1950 he was asked if he had ever flown Hitler to meet Mussolini. Baur answered that he had, four times. He was promptly accused of ‘having taken part in war preparations, because during those discussions Hitler and Mussolini had hatched their criminal plot to attack the Soviet Union’. Despite Baur’s horrified protests that he ‘bore no more responsibility than a train driver’, he was sentenced to twenty-five years in a labour camp. In the end, he spent ten years in Soviet captivity. He was released in 1955 and shortly afterwards he decided to write his memoirs. They were not designed to be a work of scholarship or history, but – as he told Trevor-Roper soon after his return to the West – a book to be read ‘by the fire, in the evening, with pipe in mouth’. It was in this book, Hitler’s Pilot, buried amid the anecdotes of his adventures with the Boss, that Baur had first described Hitler’s reaction to the news that Arndt’s plane was missing.

The original manuscript had contained ten pages on Operation Seraglio, but his publishers had cut them – as they cut more than two-thirds of his rambling reminiscences. Baur told O’Donnell that he had been anxious to set matters straight because of accusations from the relatives of some of those killed that the operation had been poorly planned. He had contacted the Luftwaffe’s Graves Registration organization who told him – erroneously as it turned out – that the aircraft had crashed in a Bavarian forest (it had in fact crashed in what is now East Germany). That was all he knew. He had no idea what Hitler had meant by ‘valuable documents’ for ‘posterity’.

O’Donnell considered what could possibly have been of such value to Hitler that its apparent loss could cause such distress.

From the autumn of 1942 onwards, a team of stenographers had taken down every word uttered during the military conferences at the Führer’s headquarters. These verbatim transcripts were compiled at Hitler’s insistence as a means of establishing his strategic genius and his generals’ incompetence: ‘I want to pin down responsibility for events once and for all,’ he explained to one of the stenographers. If there was one set of records which Hitler intended as ‘a testament to posterity’ it was this. He stated at the time that his words were to be ‘taken down for later historical research’.

One of Hitler’s secretaries, Christa Schroeder, told O’Donnell that in her view it was these transcripts that were on board the crashed plane. Else Krueger, Martin Bormann’s former secretary, agreed with her. She rejected O’Donnell’s initial theory that the papers might have been the missing notes of Hitler’s ‘Table Talk’ from 1943 to 1944: these were Bormann’s responsibility and would have been among his files, not Hitler’s.

At this point, in 1975, with the deadline for the completion of his book looming, O’Donnell decided he had taken the story as far as he could. He was content to have obtained a minor historical scoop: establishing for the first time a link between Baur’s account of Hitler’s reaction to the loss of Arndt’s plane, and Misch’s description of the evacuation of the ten heavy chests. To round off the story, and to cover all possible eventualities, he ended his account of the episode with what he hoped was an appropriately teasing last paragraph:

O’Donnell’s book was published in Germany under the title Die Katacombe in 1976. Not long afterwards, General Mohnke, one of the book’s main characters, presented a copy to Gerd Heidemann.

SIX

O’DONNELL WAS AWARE of Stern’s increasing interest in the survivors of Hitler’s court. ‘During the years when I was on the road talking to the “Mountain People”, and above all from 1975 on, Stern approached at least a dozen of the old Hitler retainers and encouraged them, in the words of Heinz Linge, “to get something, anything on paper”.’ Linge, who lived in Hamburg, recalled one occasion when he joined Wolff, Mohnke, Hanna Reitsch (the famous Nazi test pilot) and ‘several others’ aboard Carin II for a day trip to the North Sea island of Sylt. Linge described the yacht as ‘a kind of sentimental bait for all of us old Hitler people’. In the course of the two-hundred-mile voyage, Heidemann ‘between bouts of champagne and caviar’ tried to entice his guests to dictate their memories into his tape recorder. The results were disappointing: hardly surprising, observed Linge, ‘with so much champagne flowing’.

The Sylt excursion was, unfortunately for Heidemann, fairly typical. The rambling and tipsy old Nazis enjoyed his hospitality but produced little of practical value. By 1978 it was becoming apparent that Henri Nannen’s 60,000 mark investment in Heidemann and his ‘deck conversations’ was not paying off. Around this time, Erich Kuby, an experienced Stern writer, joined forces with Heidemann to investigate the Nazis’ relations with Mussolini. Carin II was supposed to be the key which would unlock the participants’ memories. SS Major Eugen Dollmann, formerly a senior officer in the German security service in Rome, was among those lured aboard. In the visitors’ book aboard the yacht Kuby wrote that ‘on this calm and quiet sea – if one can ever describe the Elbe as such – in the company of General Wolff, we allowed the Third Reich to come alive again’. But despite Kuby’s melodramatic description, these sessions also proved to be largely worthless.

‘Until this time,’ said Kuby, ‘I had no particular reason to think that Heidemann was pro-Nazi in any way. But as we worked on the project, my conviction about this began to waver.’ His colleague, he realized, no longer had any ‘critical perspective’ in his dealings with the former Nazis: he was beginning to identify with them. Piecing together Heidemann’s activities from now onwards is to witness a man slowly sinking into a mire of obsession and fantasy about the Third Reich.

Heidemann married his third wife at his fourth wedding ceremony in May 1979. His new bride was not Edda Goering, from whom he had parted a few years previously, but one of Edda’s friends. Gina Heidemann had been introduced to her future husband in the early 1970s. She was a former au pair girl and airline stewardess, tall and elegant with long blonde hair. At the time her affair with Heidemann began she was still married to her first husband and had two children, daughters, aged nineteen and sixteen. She shared Heidemann’s interest in the Nazis and had spent many happy hours on board Carin II. The two witnesses at the wedding were not Joseph and Heike Friedmann – Gina’s closest friends and the couple who had first introduced her to Gerd – but SS Generals Wolff and Mohnke. ‘We asked the Friedmanns whether they’d mind,’ Gina explained to the Sunday Times in 1983. ‘They are Jews you see. Joschi said that, no, he thought it would be interesting. And it was. They were all very interested in talking to each other.’ Not all the Heidemanns’ guests were as phlegmatic. ‘My wife and I went to the wedding ceremony,’ recalled Randolph Braumann, ‘and I said to him, “Aren’t you going a bit far? The SS as wedding witnesses?” “That’s just a tactic,” said Heidemann. “I need these people in order to get to the old Nazis in South America.”’

Heidemann wasted no time in exploiting his contacts. On 24 June 1979, he and Gina set off on their honeymoon – accompanied by General Wolff. Their destination was South America, where the trio spent the next nine weeks looking for fugitives from the Third Reich. The lustre of Wolff’s name ensured that the Heidemanns had access to some of the most notorious of the Nazi refugees. They visited Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. They saw several high-ranking SS officers who had served in Italy. In Chile they met Walter Rauff, Wolff’s former subordinate, who had been in charge of the mobile ‘gassing vans’, precursors of the gas chambers. He was wanted in West Germany for the murder of 97,000 Jews, mostly women and children. In La Paz in Bolivia, Wolff arranged a meeting with Klaus Barbie, the ‘Butcher of Lyons’, wanted by the French for torture, murder, and complicity in the Final Solution. Barbie gave Heidemann a long interview, and the reporter afterwards referred to his ‘friendship’ with the war criminal.

‘The point of the trip was to find Mengele and Bormann,’ Wolff told the police in 1983, ‘or at least to find traces of them.’ Josef Mengele, the notorious chief doctor at Auschwitz, had, it has since turned out, drowned in the sea at São Paulo only four months before Heidemann came looking for him: his trail, said Heidemann, was ‘cold’. But the search for Martin Bormann was a different matter. From the summer of 1979 onwards, Heidemann was convinced that Bormann was alive.

Such a belief was not without precedent. By 1972, sixteen different ‘Martin Bormanns’ had been arrested in South America: there was Rohl Sonnenburg, for example, the forty-three-year-old priest picked up in 1966 by the Brazilian police in a monastery near Recife; there was Juan Falero, the itinerant Mexican carpenter who had never even heard of Bormann, who was arrested in Guatemala in 1967; five years later there was the case of the septuagenarian jute and banana planter, Johann Hartmann, who was plucked from his shack in a remote Indian village in Colombia, photographed and fingerprinted, and reported all over the world as being Hitler’s former secretary. All of the alleged Bormanns were later found to be innocent and released, but the speculation that Bormann had survived persisted. ‘I believe that Martin Bormann is alive and well,’ wrote Stewart Steven, Foreign Editor of the Daily Express in March 1972. ‘His story would be certainly the most fascinating of all.’ Eight months later, Steven collaborated with the American writer Ladislas Farago on a five-part ‘World Exclusive’ serialized in the Daily News in New York and the Express in London. According to the two newspapers, Bormann was living as a prosperous businessman in Argentina. This ‘great manhunt saga’, as they called it, was accompanied by a ‘snatched’ photograph of an ‘Argentine intelligence officer’ face to face with his ‘quarry’ in the border town of Mendoza. Subsequent investigation established that the picture was actually taken outside a café in the heart of Buenos Aires and showed two friends talking. ‘Bormann’ proved to be a fifty-four-year-old Argentine high school teacher named Rudolfo Siri.

The journalist who did most to discredit the rumours that Bormann had survived was Jochen von Lang – the man who had first introduced Heidemann to Mohnke and Wolff. In 1965, von Lang had published an exhaustive investigation in Stern which concluded that Bormann had died during the break out from the Führerbunker on 2 May 1945. Stern was sufficiently confident of von Lang’s conclusion to hire a bulldozer and a team of labourers to dig for his body in Berlin’s Invalidenstrasse. They found nothing. But seven years later, on a snowy morning in December 1972, workmen excavating a site a few yards from the scene of the original Stern dig found two skeletons. Identified from dental records, one proved to be Hitler’s last doctor, Ludwig Stumpfegger, and the other, Martin Bormann.

This evidence satisfied most people. The West German public prosecutors, who had been searching for Bormann since 1945, shut down their inquiry. Hugh Trevor-Roper, who had regarded the question of Bormann’s survival as ‘open’ for twenty-five years, stated that it could now be ‘closed’.

Ladislas Farago, naturally, disagreed. In 1974 he produced a book – Aftermath – supposedly containing new evidence that Bormann was still alive. The book’s credibility was not enhanced by Farago’s highly coloured prose style. (‘Turning to Hugetti, he said, “I think this gentleman needs the picana.” Dieter winced. He knew what the picana was – the dreaded torture instrument…’) The climax of Farago’s imaginative tale was his personal confrontation with ‘Bormann’ in a convent hospital run by nuns of the Redemptorist Order ‘somewhere in southern Bolivia’:

For this, Farago was reported to have been paid an advance by his American publishers, Simon and Schuster, of more than $100,000.

Heidemann, like Farago, believed Bormann had survived. He subsequently claimed to have been given information to this effect by Klaus Barbie. When he returned to Germany from his honeymoon on 30 August he told Braumann ‘he was more convinced than ever that Bormann was alive: there was a whole series of indications’. He showed Erich Kuby a collection of twelve by ten inch photographs, which he had brought back from South America. ‘They included a set of pictures supposedly of Bormann,’ recalled Kuby. ‘Heidemann said he had not taken them himself but had been given them.’ As had been the case with the pictures of the Kaiser’s son six years earlier, the photographs fascinated Heidemann. He spent hours poring over them, tracing the subject’s profile and the shape of his ears. ‘He was convinced,’ said Kuby.

His employers on Stern, however, were less impressed. Before he left, Heidemann had persuaded them to help pay for the trip. His expenses – excluding air fares – amounted to 27,000 marks. But once again they found themselves with little to show for their money. ‘After his return from South America,’ noted the Stern Report, ‘although he had masses of tape recordings and transcripts, none of it produced very much which was usable for the magazine.’ This failure, combined with the high cost of the South American expedition, put Heidemann’s position on the magazine ‘in jeopardy’ for the first time in almost twenty-five years. Heidemann retaliated by spreading rumours that he was considering offers for his services from Stern’s rivals, Bunte and Quick.

The extent of Heidemann’s gullibility, of his almost pathetic eagerness to believe what he was told, was clearly demonstrated in 1979. There was the affair of the ‘Bormann’ photograph; there was also the affair of the Churchill–Mussolini correspondence.

While working with Kuby, Heidemann had become involved with a former SS officer named Franz Spoegler. Spoegler, who had been one of Mussolini’s German adjutants, claimed to have access to thousands of pages of transcripts of Mussolini’s telephone conversations with his mistress, Clara Petacci. He also said he could produce some sensational correspondence between the Duce and Winston Churchill. Heidemann was enormously excited. ‘Over a period of about eighteen months,’ recalled Kuby, ‘he was always chasing Spoegler to get hold of these documents.’

On 17 February 1979, Heidemann approached David Irving, who was in Hamburg to take part in a television programme. Irving had edited the diaries of Goering’s deputy, Field Marshal Milch, and Heidemann – with his mania for collecting anything to do with Carin II – asked Irving for a copy of an entry referring to a conference aboard the yacht. Then he told Irving about the Churchill–Mussolini correspondence. ‘He knew that I was writing a Churchill biography,’ said Irving. ‘He wanted to use me to get to English newspapers with these Mussolini letters.’ That night, in his diary, Irving made a note of his conversation with Heidemann:

Irving was intrigued and immediately on his return to London he wrote Heidemann a letter ‘in order to confirm in writing my interest in the Churchill letters to Mussolini which you mentioned’. Nine months later, at the end of November 1979, Heidemann rang the British historian and asked him to come to Hamburg as quickly as possible. On 2 December, Irving arrived at the Heidemanns’ flat.

From one of the folders, Heidemann produced photocopies of correspondence between Mussolini and Churchill covering almost six years. The first letter, dated 20 May 1939, was from Churchill, urging Mussolini not to sign the so-called ‘Pact of Steel’ with Hitler. The last letter, from Mussolini, written in April 1945, was a cryptic appeal to the British Prime Minister to remember their ‘earlier agreements’. In addition to the correspondence already in his hands, Heidemann, according to a memorandum Irving wrote shortly afterwards, had:

For a moment, Irving was electrified. Here was evidence of secret dealing between the leaders of two warring nations. If it were true, it would create a sensation.

Unfortunately for Heidemann, as Irving pointed out after a careful examination, the letters were obvious fakes. In what purported to be a handwritten Churchill letter to Mussolini dated 7 May 1940 there were four clues to suggest it was a forgery: the Chartwell letterhead was centrally placed rather than printed on the right; in the text, Churchill referred to his impending appointment as prime minister – something which did not occur for another three days and which at that stage he was unlikely to have anticipated; the letter contained a misspelling of ‘wich’ for ‘which’ – ‘a common spelling error made by foreigners’, commented Irving; and finally the handwriting itself, in his view, was ‘slightly too ragged’.

This was a bitter disappointment to Heidemann. Spoegler, according to Kuby, had demanded 65,000 marks for the correspondence, and Heidemann told Irving he had ‘mortgaged one-quarter of Carin II’ to pay for it. Having spent more than a year pursuing the documents he now saw their authenticity virtually demolished in the space of an afternoon. When Irving returned to London, he sent a copy of the letter dated 7 May 1940 to Churchill’s official biographer, Martin Gilbert, for his opinion. On 17 December, Irving wrote to Heidemann telling him that Martin Gilbert ‘clearly dismisses the possibility of authenticity…. Under no circumstances should you part with more money unless you are absolutely convinced.’ For Heidemann, the news that his investment had been wasted could not have come at a worse moment.

Despite the 60,000 marks he had been paid by Nannen in 1976, Heidemann’s financial position had steadily worsened. To ease the problem temporarily, on 9 May 1977, under a scheme open to Gruner and Jahr employees, he had taken out a two-year company loan of 10,000 marks. Exactly a year later, on 9 May 1978, he had borrowed a further 30,000 marks. Adding together this new loan, the balance still outstanding on the old one, and the money he had been paid for Bord Gespräche, Heidemann at this point owed his employers 94,960 marks: considerably more than a year’s salary.

In 1979, unable to extend his borrowing any further, Heidemann resorted to a new tactic to raise money. On 23 May, despite his failure to write the promised Bord Gespräche, he signed another agreement with Gruner and Jahr. In return for a further 30,000 marks he now undertook to deliver three books: a study of Mussolini, to be written in collaboration with Erich Kuby; a volume of autobiography, with the working title Gerd Heidemann: My African Wars; and a book about Nazi escape routes, SS Export.

The problem, as he confided to General Mohnke, was the cost of Carin II. He earned 9000 marks per month; the yacht alone took up 6000. In desperation, in June 1978, he finally decided he would have to sell her. He advertised her in the catalogue of the Munich auctioneers, Hermann, specialists in the sale of military memorabilia. His asking price was 1.1 million marks. The boat remained unsold. The consequences of this failure were to lead Heidemann directly to the Hitler diaries.

Mohnke suggested Heidemann try getting in touch with an acquaintance of his who might be able to help sell the yacht: a former junior member of the SS living in the town of Augsburg near Munich. His name was Jakob Tiefenthaeler.

Tiefenthaeler was fifty-three years old. He worked at the local US airbase where he was in charge of audio-visual instruction. He had an extensive network of old Nazi contacts, Mohnke, Wolff and Hans Baur among them. He was also deeply involved in the secretive world of Nazi memorabilia collectors, specializing himself in the acquisition of photographs from the Third Reich. At the beginning of 1979 Heidemann rang him. ‘He said he’d got my name and telephone number from General Mohnke,’ remembered Tiefenthaeler.

Heidemann complained sorrowfully to Tiefenthaeler that he couldn’t bear the thought of being parted from the yacht, that he’d turned it into a ‘perfect museum’ full of Goering treasures, but that the cost of berthing and insurance were such that he could no longer afford the luxury of keeping it.

Tiefenthaeler advertised the yacht in the United States for a price of 1.2 million marks. When this proved unsuccessful, he made contact with a millionaire Australian who ran a war museum in Sydney. Despite the fact that Heidemann twice dropped the price – first to 800,000 marks, then to 750,000 – the Australian pulled out. An Arab oil sheik from Abu Dhabi expressed an interest, but Heidemann was not keen: he told Tiefenthaeler he was worried that the yacht would be damaged in the hot sun. The Ugandan dictator Idi Amin sent a German mercenary, Rolf Steiner, to inspect the ship, but again the deal fell through. Amin would have loved to have cruised around Lake Victoria in Hermann Goering’s yacht, but the problems of transporting it to that landlocked country were felt to be insuperable.

While Tiefenthaeler was busy pursuing these potential foreign purchasers, he gave Heidemann the name of a wealthy south German collector of Nazi memorabilia who might be interested in buying some of the smaller Goering pieces. Accordingly, some time in 1979 – it is difficult to be sure of the precise date – Heidemann turned up in Stuttgart. Seven miles east of the city, in the quiet suburb of Waiblingen, he found a small engineering factory belonging to Fritz Stiefel; immediately next door to it was Stiefel’s house. He rang the bell and a thickset, taciturn man appeared.

According to Stiefel, Heidemann handed him a visiting card and introduced himself as a reporter from Stern. ‘He said that the reason for his visit was that he wanted to ask me if I was interested in buying the table silver from his yacht, the Carin II.’ Stiefel invited him in. Like some medieval pardoner peddling holy relics, Heidemann then laid out his wares. ‘There was a small silver sugar bowl, a silver water goblet and a gold coloured match-holder,’ recalled Stiefel. ‘The Goering family crest was engraved on all the objects.’ This trinketry appealed to Stiefel and he promptly bought it. ‘I can’t say exactly how much I paid for these objects,’ he claimed subsequently, with an unconvincing show of vagueness. ‘It was certainly over 1000 marks.’ Heidemann tried to tempt his customer into buying a couple of larger items. Stiefel was interested in the reporter’s expensive set of Goering table silver, but decided against taking it after consulting his wife. Nor did he want Goering’s ceremonial uniform which Heidemann also produced for his inspection.

Returning to Hamburg, impressed by Stiefel’s interest and by his obvious wealth, Heidemann telephoned Tiefenthaeler and suggested a new scheme: in return for an investment of 250,000 marks they should offer to make Stiefel a partner in the yacht. Tiefenthaeler promised to speak to Stiefel and shortly afterwards, towards the end of 1979, he rang Heidemann back. He was in a state of some excitement, having just been shown round Stiefel’s collection of Nazi mementoes; among them, he told the reporter, was a Hitler diary.

SEVEN

ON 6 JANUARY 1980, a few days after David Irving had passed on Martin Gilbert’s judgement that the Churchill–Mussolini correspondence was faked, Heidemann returned to Waiblingen to see Fritz Stiefel.

Heidemann opened the conversation by outlining his proposal that Stiefel should become part-owner of Carin II. In his quiet, urgent voice he conjured up a glowing vision of the future: the yacht, fully restored to her former splendour, would be permanently moored off the coast of ‘an island in the Atlantic’ (Heidemann’s suggestion was Jersey); it would be ‘a floating museum’ full of Nazi memorabilia, dedicated to the memory of Hermann Goering. Stiefel was unimpressed. ‘I turned him down flat,’ he said.

Disappointed in one fantasy, Heidemann grasped at another. Was there, he asked Stiefel, any truth in the rumour that he had a Hitler diary? The businessman, according to Heidemann, was ‘startled’ but after some hesitation agreed to show it to him.

Stiefel led Heidemann to an armoured steel door upon which was a large sign: ‘BEWARE. HIGH VOLTAGE. DANGER TO LIFE.’ Stiefel unlocked it, swung it open, and the two men stepped over the threshold.

Heidemann was later to tell colleagues of his astonishment at what he saw. The room was large and windowless. On display, in beautifully lit cabinets, was a staggering assortment of souvenirs from the Third Reich. There were Swastika flags, Nazi uniforms, photographs, paintings, drawings, books. In one corner was an exhibition of porcelain made by concentration camp inmates; in another, a collection of military decorations, including a Pour le Mérite. It had to rank as one of the largest private collections of its kind in Germany.

Stiefel handed Heidemann a slim, A4-sized book, with hard black covers and gothic initials in the bottom right-hand corner which Heidemann took to be ‘AH’. Stiefel allowed him to hold it briefly. He flicked through it. It covered the period from January to June 1935. There were a hundred or more lined pages; some were half full, some blank; some written in pencil, others in ink. Many of the pages bore Hitler’s signature. The writing itself was virtually indecipherable. After a few moments, Stiefel took it back and locked it up.

Heidemann began asking questions. Where did the book come from? Stiefel said it was salvaged by local peasants from a plane crash at the end of the war. Who gave it to him? A man in Stuttgart, replied Stiefel, who had relatives in senior positions in East Germany – no, he wouldn’t reveal his name. Were there more diaries? Stiefel said he understood there might be another twenty-six, each of them, like the one in his possession, covering a six-month period. That was all he could say.

Heidemann returned to Hamburg in a state of great excitement. In the Stern offices he described how he had actually held in his hands Hitler’s secret diary. He had managed to memorize a few sentences about Eva Braun and her two pet dogs which he recited endlessly.

Any journalist claiming to have stumbled upon such a scoop would have expected to face a certain amount of scepticism. Heidemann was greeted by an almost universal incredulity, bordering on derision. This was, after all, the man who had had two SS generals officiating at his wedding, who had spent his honeymoon looking for war criminals, who had claimed to have a recent photograph of Martin Bormann and who had thought he could prove the existence of secret dealing between Churchill and Mussolini. When Heidemann broke the news of the Hitler diary to Henri Nannen in the Stern canteen, the response was frankly insulting. According to Nannen: ‘My word-for-word answer was: “Spare me all that Nazi shit. I don’t want to hear about it and I don’t want to read about it.”’ Heidemann fared no better with Peter Koch, the magazine’s aggressive deputy editor, who treated him as if he were mentally deranged. ‘Keep away from me,’ he shouted, ‘with your damned Nazi tic.’ He warned Heidemann to stay off subjects connected with the Third Reich and added, ominously, that ‘he’d better produce something soon’. ‘The trouble with Stern’, complained Heidemann bitterly, ‘is they don’t want to hear about history any more.’

Only one man seemed to take Heidemann seriously. He was Thomas Walde, an earnest and sober character in his late thirties whose chief distinguishing feature was a large brown moustache. Walde had joined Stern in 1971 as an editorial assistant and had risen to become news editor. When, at the beginning of 1980, Stern had established a new department specifically to deal with historical stories, Walde had been put in charge of it. He had been in his office little more than a week when Heidemann turned up asking if he could come and work for him. Leo Pesch, Walde’s young assistant, recalled how Heidemann told them ‘he had seen a Hitler diary in the possession of a South German collector’. He would not stop talking about it. One evening in April, he threw a party for the history department on board Carin II. ‘The idea,’ said Walde, ‘was to meet outside the context of the normal office routine. We wanted to get to know the boat. And we wanted to discuss future projects.’ Among those ‘future projects’ was the Hitler diary.

Walde was interested in Heidemann’s tale. The problem was that almost nobody else was. ‘Heidemann and Koch didn’t get on,’ he recalled, ‘and Koch opposed Heidemann’s request to research Nazi topics.’ Walde therefore decided to embark on what was to prove a disastrous strategy. Without telling Koch and the other editors he went behind their backs and commissioned Heidemann to search for the Hitler diaries. ‘I didn’t believe in their existence,’ he claimed later. ‘I just hoped Heidemann would do enough research to kill the subject once and for all.’

The most obvious course was to try to discover the identity of the man who had supplied the diary to Stiefel; once he had his name, Heidemann reasoned, he could approach him directly. Stiefel, however, flatly refused to cooperate. Therefore, in the summer of 1980, Heidemann once again turned to the man from whom he had first learned of the diary’s existence, Jakob Tiefenthaeler. Tiefenthaeler, who had by now given up his attempts to sell Carin II, told Heidemann that he understood the supplier was an antique dealer in Stuttgart named Fischer. Armed with this information, Heidemann and Walde waited one night until everyone had gone home and then began combing through every Fischer in the Stuttgart telephone directory: a task – given the commonness of the name Fischer in Germany – not unlike searching an English phone book for a particular Smith. When this yielded nothing, Walde asked Stern’s correspondent in Stuttgart to make discreet inquiries around the city about this mysterious dealer; again, there was no trace.

With this line of inquiry temporarily at an end, Heidemann adopted a fresh tactic. He knew from Stiefel that the diary supposedly came from a plane crash. From O’Donnell’s book, Die Katacombe, and Baur’s, Hitler’s Pilot, he knew of the mysterious documents shipped out of the bunker whose loss had so distressed Hitler. He was convinced that this must be where Stiefel’s diary originated. If he could substantiate the story of the plane crash by pinpointing its location it would be a strong argument in favour of the diary’s authenticity. On Monday, 13 October 1980, he rang the Wehrmacht information bureau, the Wehrmachtsauskunftstelle, in Berlin to inquire if they had any information about the pilot of the missing plane, Major Friedrich Gundlfinger. He was not hopeful. Given the chaos in Germany in those closing days of the war it was asking a great deal to discover the fate of a single aircraft after an interval of thirty-five years. Heidemann was therefore surprised when, after a pause, a voice at the other end of the line replied that the bureau did indeed have records relating to Major Gundlfinger: he had died in a plane crash on 21 April, close to the little village of Boernersdorf near Dresden in East Germany on 21 April 1945; he was buried close to the crash site; his death certificate in the local register was 16/45.

From this moment, Heidemann and Walde were hooked and the tempo of their search quickened. Two days after Heidemann’s discovery of the location of the crash site, on Wednesday 15 October, Walde travelled to East Berlin. Through a contact in the East German security service he arranged a visit to the Dresden area to be undertaken in one month’s time. The cover story was that Heidemann was a relative of one of the victims of the plane crash. On Monday 27 October, Heidemann went to see Hans Baur in Herrsching, who once again confirmed the details of Gundlfinger’s last flight.

Heidemann’s unexpected success left Thomas Walde with a problem and in the last week of October, while Heidemann was talking with Hans Baur, he took the opportunity of a vacation to think things over.

For the past three years he and a close friend, Wilfried Sorge, had left their wives and families and gone on an annual walking holiday together. The two men, almost the same age (Sorge was three years younger than Walde), had known one another for the best part of twenty years. They had both attended the same school in the small town of Uelzen, not far from Hamburg. Now they both worked for the same company: Walde as a Stern journalist, Sorge as a junior executive with Stern’s owners, Gruner and Jahr. They kept few secrets from one another.

Accordingly, when they were safely alone in the middle of a Bavarian forest, Walde told Sorge of his involvement with the Hitler diaries and of the difficulties he was now in. The trouble, said Walde, was that Peter Koch, who was likely to take over from Henri Nannen in the New Year as editor-in-chief, had expressly ordered Heidemann ‘not to pursue any further researches into the Nazis’; Walde had disobeyed him. Meanwhile, Heidemann’s tale about Hitler’s diaries, far from being ‘killed’ by further investigation, was beginning to look as if it might be true. To compound his problems, Walde was about to undertake what he described as a ‘risky journey’ to East Germany, unable to tell his superiors about it because he had been deceiving them for the past six months. ‘Herr Sorge advised me to take the chance,’ recalled Walde.

Agreeing to keep the conversation confidential, they continued their walk.

But the sudden spectre of Hitler had clearly infected the holiday mood. Nursing their secret, the two men crossed over the border into Austria. They inspected Hitler’s birthplace in Braunau, and the town of Leonding, near Linz, where the Führer had spent part of his youth, before returning to Hamburg on 31 October.

On 15 November 1980, Heidemann and Walde drove through one of the checkpoints from West to East Berlin, picked up Walde’s contact who had arranged the trip, and travelled 120 miles south to Dresden. Another hour’s drive brought them to a tiny cluster of farmhouses and barns, nestling amid hilly fields and gentle woods three miles from the Czech border, in a region known as ‘Saxon Switzerland’. With its tiny kindergarten and scattered population of 550, it was difficult to imagine a sleepier village than Boernersdorf.

The Stern men parked their car on the side of the main road outside Boernersdorf’s small church. Behind it, in the cemetery overlooking the village, in the south-eastern corner, half hidden amongst the weeds and the long grass, they found eight weather-beaten wooden crosses. Attached to each one was a small white tile giving the name of the person buried there, the date of their birth and the day of their death: 21.4.45. They found Gundlfinger’s grave and Wilhelm Arndt’s; two graves were simply marked ‘unknown man’ and ‘unknown woman’. This physical evidence of the plane crash thirty-five years earlier made a profound impression on the two men. ‘The discovery of the graves’, said Walde, ‘was like another stone in the mosaic.’

Anxious to avoid drawing attention to themselves, Heidemann and Walde did not stay for long. They made notes of the names on the crosses and took some photographs. Half an hour later they returned to their car and drove back to Berlin.

Heidemann and Walde now sensed they were close to a breakthrough. On their return from East Germany, Walde informed Wilfried Sorge of the success of their visit.

The story as they had pieced it together seemed simple and credible. Papers of great value to Hitler undoubtedly had been loaded on to a plane in Berlin; that plane undoubtedly had crashed in East Germany; part of its cargo, a diary, had surfaced in the West. The remaining task was to find the link between the wrecked aircraft and Fritz Stiefel – and to find him before anyone else did.

A few days after their arrival back in Hamburg, Heidemann and Walde renewed their contact with Jakob Tiefenthaeler. They asked him to pass on to the mysterious ‘antiques dealer’ an offer generous enough to tempt him out of his seclusion. They were prepared, they told Tiefenthaeler, to guarantee a payment of 2 million marks in return for the complete set of Hitler’s diaries; this sum could be paid, according to his preference, in either cash or gold. If necessary, they would be prepared to accept photocopies of the diaries rather than the originals. The whole matter would be dealt with in the strictest confidence: even if the West German government tried to force Stern to disclose the identity of the supplier, they would stand by the traditional prerogative of a newspaper to protect the anonymity of its informants. It was a remarkable offer, all the more so considering it was made without the knowledge of the magazine’s editors. It showed the extent to which Heidemann and Walde had already convinced themselves that the diary held by Stiefel must be genuine.

While they waited for Tiefenthaeler to bring them the supplier’s response, Heidemann, using the notes he had made from the graves in Boernersdorf, set about tracing the victims’ relatives. On 1 December, in the Ruhr steel town of Sollingen, he found Frau Leni Fiebes, the widow of Max Fiebes, one of Hitler’s bodyguards who had been among the passengers. She had been notified of her husband’s death in 1948. She showed Heidemann the official report which had been forwarded to her, recording the discovery of:

This was of interest to Heidemann only in so far as it showed that oddments of paper could have survived the crash. But Frau Fiebes was at least able to give him the name of the plane’s rear gunner, Franz Westermeier, and on 10 December, the indefatigable reporter tracked down his family in Haag in Upper Bavaria. Westermeier, he learned to his surprise, had actually survived the crash, thrown clear of the burning wreck on impact, together with an SS guard, Gerhard Becker. Becker had died of his injuries two days later, but Westermeier had lived on into old age, dying in April 1980 of a kidney tumour: Heidemann had arrived just eight months too late.

Another trail seemed to have gone cold, leaving them no further forward. All Heidemann and Walde could do now was hope that the offer being relayed by Tiefenthaeler would flush out their prey.

EIGHT

THE NEW YEAR arrived, cold and bleak, with a symbolic reminder of Germany’s Nazi past and the conflicting emotions it aroused.

On 6 January 1981, a crowd of about 5000 German naval veterans and right wingers gathered in the snow at Aumuehle near Hamburg for the funeral of Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, Hitler’s successor as leader of the Third Reich. Doenitz, who had died on Christmas Eve at the age of 89, had been a devoted Nazi and the West German government announced that it would be boycotting the ceremony. ‘But in buses, cars and trains,’ reported The Times, ‘mourners came to his funeral, many of them old men with an upright military bearing, Iron Crosses glinting on their breasts and evident nostalgia for what Doenitz stood for.’ Rudolf Hess sent a wreath from his cell in Spandau. Serving naval officers – some in uniform, despite an official ban – formed an honour guard around the grave. As the coffin, draped in the red, black and gold flag of the Federal Republic and bearing Doenitz’s service dagger, was lowered into the frozen ground, the mourners broke into the militaristic first verse of ‘Deutschland über Alles’. At a rally afterwards, speakers from the extreme right were applauded as they denounced the craven behaviour of the republic’s politicians. It was an ugly start to the year and the ensuing political row lasted several weeks.

SS General Wilhelm Mohnke, who lived close to Aumuehle, marked Doenitz’s passing by arranging a small reception at his house on the day of the funeral. Otto Guensche and Richard Schulze-Kossens, two of Hitler’s SS adjutants, attended; so too did Gerd Heidemann. They all met at the graveside and then went back to Mohnke’s for his little party. ‘It was on this occasion,’ remembered Mohnke, ‘that Herr Heidemann told us for the first time that there were supposed to be Hitler diaries.’ Heidemann described the story of the plane crash and revealed that he had discovered its location in Boernersdorf. When he insisted that a set of Hitler’s diaries had survived, the three old SS men were sceptical. ‘That was thought by the people there to be impossible,’ declared Mohnke. Schulze-Kossens, who had helped found Hitler’s SS honour bodyguard in 1938 and who had often been in the Führer’s company, doubted if Hitler had had the time to write a diary. Heidemann was undeterred. Nothing could now shake his conviction that somewhere out there were Hitler’s diaries.

Nine days later, his confidence appeared to be vindicated. On Thursday 15 January, after an interval of more than seven weeks, Jakob Tiefenthaeler at last rang back. Herr Fischer, he reported, was interested in Heidemann and Walde’s offer and had authorized him to pass on his telephone number. It was 07152 41981. The reporter noted it down. He could hardly contain his impatience. ‘I remember that Herr Heidemann was in a real hurry to end the conversation,’ recalled Tiefenthaeler. ‘He thanked me and promised to keep in touch.’

Heidemann turned in triumph to Walde. ‘I have the number.’

A man’s voice, gruff and heavily accented, answered the number which Heidemann dialled. ‘I have been trying to reach you for more than a year,’ Heidemann told him. He talked about his ownership of Carin II, his friendship with the old Nazis and his collection of Third Reich memorabilia, before finally coming to the point. ‘We are very interested in the diaries.’

Fischer said that he was a dealer in militaria. He was originally from East Germany. His brother was still there – a general in the East German army. The general had been in touch with peasants in the area where Hitler’s transport plane had crashed at the end of the war. In return for money and consumer goods he had acquired from them a hoard of material which had been salvaged from the burning aircraft and hidden locally for more than thirty years. It was not simply a matter of diaries, said Fischer. There were other Hitler writings involved, including a handwritten third volume of Mein Kampf and an opera.

An opera? Heidemann was taken aback.

Yes, said Fischer, an opera entitled Wieland the Blacksmith which Hitler had written in his youth in collaboration with his friend August Kubizek. There were also letters and papers belonging to Hitler and original Hitler paintings. Heidemann asked about the material’s whereabouts. Some of it was in the West, said Fischer, but most of it was still in the East. He had already had offers for it from the United States.

Heidemann repeated the proposition he had made to Tiefenthaeler: 2 million marks for the diaries and a guarantee of absolute secrecy. Fischer sounded doubtful. His brother was prepared to deal only with discreet private collectors. He would never agree to the sale of the material to a publishing company: if his involvement ever became known, his career, possibly even his life, would be endangered. Again, Heidemann promised complete confidentiality. Fischer hesitated. He could, he supposed, keep Stern’s name out of it and pass Heidemann off to his brother as a wealthy Swiss collector. Certainly, he was adamant that if they were to do business, no one else could be brought into the arrangement. He would deal only with Heidemann. This suited the reporter perfectly and by the time the conversation ended, half an hour later, the foundations of a deal had been laid.

Heidemann and Walde now needed money and the following week was devoted to putting together a suitably tempting prospectus to obtain it. Heidemann assembled the information and photocopied the relevant extracts from Die Katacombe and Hitler’s Pilot but as usual he passed his material on to someone else to write up – on this occasion, Walde. The two men gave the project the cover name ‘The Green Vault’, after ‘Grünes Gewölbe’, the treasure chamber in Dresden Castle which housed a famous military museum. On Sunday, 24 January the document was completed. After outlining the story of the trunks full of documents, the plane crash and Hitler’s reaction to it, the prospectus went on:

The document was signed by Gerd Heidemann. It was put into a folder together with the extracts from the books of O’Donnell and Baur, and the photographs which Heidemann had taken in Boernersdorf.

Under normal circumstances, the next step would have been for Walde and Heidemann to have taken their story to Stern’s editors. But the deception which the pair had been practising for more than six months had boxed them in. Not only would they have been accused of lying, they had no guarantee that their story would have been accepted. Koch’s attitude towards Heidemann’s Nazi fixation had not changed. Only a few days earlier, according to the reporter, Koch had called him in and instructed him to research a series about the arms race. Heidemann had tried to avoid the assignment and had broached the subject of the Hitler diaries but Koch had brushed him aside angrily: ‘You! Always with your SS topics!’ And Walde had another fear: Stern was short of sensational stories at the moment. The magazine’s aggrieved editors, he claimed later, might have ‘wasted the tale of the diaries as a quick scoop’. It is also likely, although naturally neither man has ever admitted it, that they realized the discovery of the diaries could make them a great deal of money. Why should they simply give it away to their ungrateful editors?

Walde had already initiated Wilfried Sorge into the secret. At about noon on Tuesday, 27 January, the two journalists visited him in his office to show him their ‘Green Vault’ dossier. They told him that they needed 200,000 marks as a deposit to secure the first volumes. Sorge promised to see what he could do.

Four hours later Heidemann and Walde were summoned up to the offices of Gruner and Jahr on the ninth floor of the Stern building. Sorge had shown the folder to his immediate superior, Dr Jan Hensmann, the company’s deputy managing director. Hensmann was enthusiastic and at once telephoned the firm’s managing director, Manfred Fischer, to ask if he could spare a few minutes. ‘Heidemann has found something,’ said Hensmann. ‘We need to talk about it.’ Full of curiosity, Fischer made his way to Hensmann’s office.

Five men took their places in the room for the first of what would eventually prove to be dozens of conferences on the diaries, extending over a period of more than two years. Heidemann and Walde were the journalists present; Hensmann was the financial expert; Sorge, the salesman; Manfred Fischer, the dynamic executive whose love of instant decision making was to start the whole calamity.

The dossier was handed to Fischer. He read it, fascinated, and began asking questions. ‘Heidemann’, he recalled, ‘explained that many of the documents were in the hands of a highly placed officer in the East German army. The books had to be smuggled into the West by secret and illegal means. No names could be revealed in order not to jeopardize the informants.’ Fischer asked what Henri Nannen thought of it all. Heidemann described Nannen’s derogatory remarks in the Stern canteen; he talked of his ‘difficulties’ with Peter Koch; neither of them knew anything about it, nor should they be told. Walde pitched in to support Heidemann. Fischer was impressed by his manner of calm assurance; Walde, he said later, added a ‘seal of authority’ to the story.

Things might have gone very differently for Stern if at this point Fischer had insisted that the magazine’s editors be let in on the secret. But Fischer was a supremely self-assured character. He had reason to be. At forty-seven he was the favourite protégé of the mighty Reinhard Mohn. Mohn controlled 88.9 per cent of Bertelsmann AG, the West German printing and publishing conglomerate with an annual turnover of almost $2 billion. Bertelsmann in its turn owned 74.9 per cent of Gruner and Jahr. Fischer was expected to take over the running of the entire Bertelsmann empire in the next few months. If Heidemann and Walde wanted to keep the discovery of the diaries secret from their editors for a while, he was not the kind of man to shirk responsibility for that decision. He was flattered that two such experienced journalists should turn to him. Personally, he did not blame them for being reluctant to trust Koch – Fischer did not like the Stern editor either: he was too abrasive and much too left wing for his liking. Fischer was excited at the prospect of obtaining Hitler’s diaries. It would do him no harm to arrive at Bertelsmann with a reputation as the man who had engineered the biggest publishing coup of the decade. He postponed his next appointment and asked Walde and Heidemann how much they needed.

It was eventually agreed that Heidemann would offer, on Gruner and Jahr’s behalf, 85,000 marks for each of the 27 volumes. The company would also be willing to pay up to 200,000 marks for the third volume of Mein Kampf and 500,000 marks for the remainder of the archive, including the pictures. Heidemann said that he needed 200,000 marks as a deposit. Ideally, he would like to fly down to Stuttgart that night. Fine, replied Fischer, he should have the money at once. He summoned the company’s financial secretary, Peter Kuehsel.

Kuehsel, an accountant in his forties, had been with the firm for only three weeks. He wandered into the office and was suddenly ordered by Fischer to produce 200,000 marks in cash – immediately. It was after 6.30 p.m. and Kuehsel had been on the point of going home. He protested that all the banks were closed. ‘Get the money,’ said Fischer, and with a parting injunction to Heidemann to keep him fully informed, he departed for a reception being held by one of Gruner and Jahr’s consumer magazines.

‘I didn’t know what the money was for,’ Kuehsel said afterwards. ‘It wasn’t necessary for me to know. According to the company’s internal rules, Dr Fischer could authorize payment.’ The only bank he could think of which might still be open was the Deutsche Bank at Hamburg airport; he rang and checked; they were. Heidemann, Sorge, Kuehsel and a representative of the company’s legal department piled into a car and drove off into the night.

At the bank, a bemused cashier handed over 200,000 marks in 100-, 500- and 1000-mark notes. ‘Herr Heidemann gave me a receipt,’ said Kuehsel, ‘and put the money into his briefcase.’ Heidemann had booked himself on to the final flight out of Hamburg for Stuttgart. According to Kuehsel: ‘We took Herr Heidemann to the departure hall. I told him he was carrying a lot of money and he had to be careful.’ In addition to the cash, Heidemann had also taken the precaution of packing what he hoped would be his trump card in persuading Fischer to hand over the diaries – the pride of his collection, the full dress uniform of Hermann Goering.

Heidemann was now playing the part he relished most. Settled into his seat on flight LH949, a suitcase containing 200,000 marks at his side, he took off for Stuttgart on a secret mission to buy Adolf Hitler’s diaries.

At Stuttgart airport, Heidemann hired a car and drove into the city to the International Hotel. He rang Gina to let her know he would not be coming home that evening and went to bed.

The following morning, using the address given to him by Tiefenthaeler, Heidemann drove to Fischer’s shop at number 20 Aspergstrasse. The building was four storeys high, a solid, red brick affair, part of a terrace on a steep hill. Fischer’s shop had a pair of windows at the front, heavily shuttered. Heidemann rang the bell. There was no reply; the place was deserted. He tried to peer through the windows at the back, but they too had heavy metal bars and lace curtains.

Heidemann waited in his car in the bitter January cold all morning with only the money and Goering’s uniform for company. In the afternoon he decided to try to find Fischer’s home. From the area code prefixing Fischer’s telephone number, he worked out that his house must be in the Leonberg area, about ten miles west of the centre of Stuttgart. Heidemann drove through the darkening countryside, through neat fields and brightly lit villages, until, at about 7 p.m., he reached the tiny hamlet of Ditzingen. He drove past a row of small houses, parked by a phone box and rang Fischer’s number. ‘It’s Heidemann,’ he said, when Fischer answered, ‘from Stern.’ Fischer asked him what the weather was like in Hamburg. ‘I’m not in Hamburg,’ replied Heidemann. ‘I’m five minutes away from your house.’ Fischer gave him his address – it was literally only across the street – and moments later, Heidemann was ringing the doorbell of one of the small houses he had just passed.

The door opened to reveal a short, round-faced man with a bald head and drooping moustache.

NINE

IN KONRAD PAUL Kujau, alias Konrad Fischer, alias Peter Fischer, alias Heinz Fischer, alias Doctor Fischer, alias Doctor Kujau, alias ‘The Professor’, alias ‘The General’, known to his many friends as Conny, Gerd Heidemann had at last met his match: someone whose talent for inventing stories was equal to his own capacity for believing them.

Konrad Kujau, who began by forging luncheon vouchers and who ended up responsible for the biggest fraud in publishing history, was born on 27 June 1938 in the Saxon town of Loebau in what is now East Germany. He had three sisters and a brother; of the five children, he was the third eldest. His father, Richard Kujau, was a shoemaker. Unlike Heidemann, whose background was relatively apolitical, Conny was reared in a typically working-class, pro-Nazi household. Richard Kujau was an active supporter of the Nazis from 1933 onwards and his beliefs rubbed off on his son: seven years after the end of the war, at the age of fourteen, Conny was to be found painting an enormous swastika on his grandmother’s kitchen wall.

Kujau’s childhood was overshadowed by the poverty which descended on his family after his father was killed in 1944. His mother was unable to support the family and they had to be sent away to various children’s homes. Conny, the brightest in the family, did well at school but was too poor to stay on beyond his sixteenth birthday. In September 1954 he became an apprentice locksmith, a position he held for less than a year. Then came a succession of temporary jobs, none of them lasting more than a few weeks, as a textile worker, a building-site labourer, a painter, and finally as a waiter in the Loebau Youth Club. In 1957 a warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with the disappearance of the Youth Club’s microphone. Shortly before dawn on 7 June 1957, Kujau fled to the West.

He made his way first to the home of his uncle, Paul Bellmann, in West Berlin. But Bellmann had no room for his troublesome, nineteen-year-old nephew, and Kujau found himself in the first of a series of refugee camps. Rootless, alone, with no family to fall back on, the young Kujau was eventually resettled in Vaihingen, on the outskirts of Stuttgart. He lived in a succession of homes for single men and drifted into a world of casual labour and petty crime. His biography is written in his police record. In November 1959 he was arrested for stealing tobacco from a local cooperative and fined eighty marks. In 1960, together with an accomplice, he broke into a storeroom and stole four cases of cognac. He made so much noise he woke up two nightwatchmen who pursued and caught him. The police found he was carrying an air pistol, a small revolver and a knuckleduster. A court in Stuttgart found him guilty of serious theft and he went to prison for nine months. In August 1961, he was in trouble again, this time for stealing four crates of pears and a crate of apples whilst employed as a labourer for a fruit merchant; again, he spent a short period in prison. Six months later, working as a cook in a Stuttgart bar, he was arrested after a fight with his employer.

It was at this time that Kujau met and fell in love with a waitress at the same establishment, a homely girl named Edith Lieblang. Edith, like Conny, was plump, in her twenties, and a refugee from East Germany: she had worked as a salesgirl and was training to be a nurse when she decided to cross into the West in April 1961, a few months before the erection of the Berlin Wall. She came to seek her fortune and found Conny Kujau, upon whom, for a time, she seems to have been a steadying influence. In the summer of 1962 he rented premises in Plochingen, fifteen miles outside Stuttgart, and opened the Pelican Dance Bar. ‘For the first time,’ he claimed later, ‘I began to make money.’ He also began to rewrite his personal history.

To call Kujau a compulsive liar would be to underrate him. It would not do justice to the sheer exuberant scale of his deceptions. In 1962 he told people his surname was ‘Fischer’ and asked them to call him ‘Peter’. He made himself two years older, by changing his date of birth to March 1936. He altered his place of birth from Loebau to Goerlitz. He painted a touching but sadly fictitious picture of his childhood: separated from his parents during the bombing of Dresden, he had, he said, been brought up in an orphanage until his mother found him with the help of the Red Cross in 1951. He had not been a waiter in the Loebau Youth Club but an ‘organization manager’. He had attended the Dresden Academy of Art. He had been persecuted by the communists because his family was not working class. He had fled to the West to avoid conscription into the East German army. He had worked as a commercial artist in an advertising agency. There was no particular reason for most of these lies: Kujau simply liked telling stories.

By 1963 Kujau was once again in financial trouble. He gave up his dance bar and returned to Stuttgart to work as a waiter in a beer cellar. He soon resumed his old ways and for the first time his police record shows a conviction for forgery. He counterfeited twenty-seven marks’ worth of luncheon vouchers and was sentenced to five days in prison. According to the court records, Kujau – who was tried under the name Fischer – had added some new stories to his repertoire: he now claimed to have been born in June 1935, so adding yet another year to his age; he also pretended he was married.

In the year that saw his first conviction for forgery, Kujau persuaded the long-suffering Edith Lieblang to put up the money for his latest money-making scheme: window cleaning. He now had the distinction of having two criminal records, one under the name of Fischer, the other as Kujau. As Kujau he was actually supposed to be in jail, serving time under an old suspended sentence. The company therefore had to be registered in Edith’s name as the Lieblang Cleaning Company, with the slogan, ‘Guaranteed Clean as a Housewife’. Although the firm eventually picked up contracts from a large Stuttgart department store, a chain of fast-food restaurants and South German Television, Kujau and Lieblang initially did not make much money from the business. For seven years they could not afford to buy a flat together and continued to live apart, Edith working part time as a textile worker and as a waitress in a coffee shop.

In March 1968 the police carried out a routine check at the Pension Eisele, Kujau’s lodgings in Alfdorferstrasse. Kujau was registered as a cook and waiter named Peter Fischer from Guerlitz. He told the police that he was a resident of Berlin and gave them his uncle’s address. Unfortunately he was carrying papers which gave a different name (Konrad Fischer), a different address (Stuttgart) and a different date of birth. He was arrested. At the police station he gave a third version of events. His name, he said, was Peter Konrad Fischer, of no fixed address. He had given a false name because he was in fact a deserter from the East German army: he had escaped to the West in 1963 after training as a lieutenant in chemical warfare at the Rosa Luxemburg officer academy. A few hours later, he changed his story again: now he had come to West Germany immediately after leaving school in order to evade military service. He confused his interrogators in Stuttgart as he was subsequently to confuse journalists and the Hamburg police in 1983, by appearing to give precise details which only hours of investigation would later establish to be false – in this case that he had entered West Germany using a friend’s passport made out in the name of Harald Fuchs. Finally, his fingerprints proved that he was none of the people he said he was: he was the same old Konrad Kujau, conman and petty thief, who was wanted for evading a suspended jail sentence. Still protesting his innocence, he was taken away to Stuttgart’s Stanheim Prison.

In the late 1960s, following Kujau’s release from Stanheim Prison, the Lieblang Cleaning Company began to flourish. By 1971 it had half a dozen employees and was making an annual profit of 124,000 marks. Kujau and Edith bought a flat together in Schmieden, near Stuttgart, and Edith became Conny’s common law wife. In 1970, the couple returned to East Germany for a visit to Loebau. Kujau now had a new idea for making money, one which was far more in tune with his private interests than cleaning people’s windows. Since childhood he had been obsessed with militaria – guns, medals, uniforms – especially from the Nazi era. There was a flourishing demand for such objects in the West, and in the East, in the attics and junk shops of communist Germany, there was a ready supply. They were also cheap: on the black market, the western deutschmark was worth five of its eastern counterpart. Through his relatives in Loebau, Kujau let it be known that he was interested in buying military memorabilia for hard cash. Carefully worded advertisements were placed by his family on his behalf in East German newspapers: ‘Wanted, for purposes of research – old toys, helmets, jugs, pipes, dolls, etc.’ Kujau claimed to have been ‘swamped’ with relics as a result. It was an illegal trade. The East German government had introduced legislation to protect the state’s ‘cultural heritage’, forbidding the unlicensed export of objects made before 1945. Kujau and Lieblang had to smuggle their merchandise over the frontier. Normally, the border guards did not bother to search them. It was not until 1979 that Kujau was stopped trying to carry out a sabre; Lieblang was also caught on one run and had her consignment confiscated.

Kujau at this time cut a curious figure, simultaneously comic and sinister. He was only in his thirties but his thinning hair, bulging waistline and old-fashioned clothes made him look much older. He loved weapons of all kinds. Guns and swords brought back from East Germany decorated the walls of his house. According to his employees, he frequently wore a pistol which, after an evening’s consumption of his favourite drink of vodka and orange, he would fire into the air at random. Mostly he would shoot off a few rounds in a field by the Schmieden railway station, but he had been known to take potshots at bottles in his favourite bar. On 13 February 1973 he lay in wait outside the Balzac night club in Stuttgart for a man who had allegedly been slashing the tyres of vans belonging to the cleaning company. At 4 a.m., roaring drunk, he leapt out brandishing a loaded machine-gun. The man ran off. In the darkness and confusion, Kujau blundered into a doorway where he came face to face with a prostitute. The woman screamed. The owner of the night club and a waiter heard the commotion, overpowered Kujau and summoned the police. He told them his name was Lieblang. When the police raided his flat they found a machine-gun, a double-barrelled shotgun, three air pistols, three rifles and two revolvers. He confessed to having given a false name, apologized for being drunk and was let off with a fine.

By 1974, Kujau’s militaria was taking up most of the couple’s home and Edith’s attitude became threatening. According to Kujau she told him: ‘Either that goes out of the window or we separate.’ Kujau then began renting the shop in Aspergstrasse, filling its fifty square metres of floor space with his collection. It became the venue for long drinking sessions at which Kujau would entertain some of his friends: collectors with strong heads and simple minds like the local policeman, Ulli Blaschke, who is occasionally supposed to have acted as Kujau’s bodyguard; the post office official, Siegmund Schaich, a collector of military drinking jugs; and Alfons Drittenthaler, a blacksmith from the nearby town of Burlafingen. ‘The President of Police came several times,’ boasted Kujau. ‘Sometimes a prostitute would sit next to the State Prosecutor. It would go on until late at night.’ Another regular visitor was Wolfgang Schulze, a resident of Miami, who was Kujau’s agent in the United States, dealing on his behalf with the extensive network of American collectors.

Business was conducted both by barter and by cash. Drittenthaler, for example, gave Kujau a nineteenth-century grenadier’s helmet in exchange for 3000 marks and a reservist’s beer mug; on another occasion, in a straight swap, he obtained a set of mugs from Kujau in return for three uniforms. Drittenthaler described Kujau’s collection as ‘very large and valuable’. It included an almost complete set of Third Reich decorations, 150 helmets, 50 uniforms, 30 flags and, according to Kujau, the largest collection of military jugs in West Germany. ‘He told me that the majority of his things came from East Germany,’ said Drittenthaler. ‘He said that he had a brother there who was a general.’ Using this flourishing business as a cover, Kujau was now able to exploit to the full what he had discovered to be his greatest and most lucrative skill: forgery.

By his own account, Kujau first discovered his latent artistic talent at the age of five when his next door neighbour in Loebau, a ‘Professor Linder’, taught him how to draw. From childhood, painting was his main hobby. In Stuttgart, in the early 1960s, he began to sell a few canvases. He discovered that there was an especially large market for pictures depicting battle scenes; he claims to have painted his first in 1962: ‘They were simply torn out of my hands.’ He developed a technique of putting his customers into the centre of famous scenes – one client was painted sitting in a staff car next to Field Marshal Rommel – and these paintings, according to him, could fetch as much as 2000 marks, ‘a lot of money in those days’. It was in 1963 that Kujau applied his talent to copying out luncheon vouchers, his first known act of forgery. How he graduated from this to larger frauds is unclear. At his trial in 1984 he told a typically colourful story of how his talent was first spotted by the legendary Nazi intelligence officer and head of the West German secret service, Reinhard Gehlen. Kujau claimed that Gehlen gave him forty pages of handwriting and signatures to copy out in 1970 and thereafter hired him to do a number of freelance jobs. Gehlen is dead and the story impossible to check – which no doubt explains why Kujau told it.

What is clear is that in the 1970s Kujau began introducing forgeries into the genuine material he was smuggling out of East Germany. The Hamburg police later filled two rooms at their headquarters with examples of his handiwork. To an authentic First World War helmet he attached a faked note, supposedly signed by Rudolf Hess, stating that it had been worn by Hitler in 1917. To an ancient jacket, waistcoat and top hat he added an ‘authentication’ stating that it was the dress suit Hitler wore to the opening of the Reichstag in 1933. ‘When I had completed a piece,’ bragged Kujau after his arrest in 1983, ‘I framed it and hung it on the wall. People went crazy about them.’ He passed off a Knight’s Cross, one of Nazi Germany’s highest decorations, as having once belonged to Field Marshal Keitel. He could execute a passable imitation of the handwriting of Bormann, Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Keitel, Goering, Goebbels and Himmler. The forgeries themselves were invariably crude. Kujau used modern paper. He created headed stationery simply by using Letraset. He aged documents by pouring tea over them. But he guessed, rightly, that his customers would never take them to experts to check. Public display of Nazi memorabilia was illegal and collections were generally kept, a guilty secret, behind locked doors.

At some stage, Kujau even executed an outstandingly clumsy forgery of the agreement signed by Hitler and Chamberlain at Munich. Spelling and grammar were not Kujau’s strong suits, even in German; when, as in this case, he tried to forge something in English, the results were farcical:

When it came to Hitler, Kujau had even more opportunities for forgery: not only could he copy Hitler’s handwriting, he could also forge his paintings.

In 1960, the Marquess of Bath had paid £600 for two Hitler watercolours auctioned at Sotheby’s: The Parliament and Ringstrasse, Vienna and A View of the Karlskirche, Vienna. It was the first step on the way to accumulating what eventually would be the world’s largest private collection of Hitler’s art. By 1971 he had forty-eight paintings in his ‘Hitler Room’ at Longleat; by 1983 he had sixty. Lord Bath acquired the pictures for posterity and confessed to a certain ‘admiration’ for the Nazi leader: ‘Hitler did a hell of a lot for his country,’ he explained. Other collectors followed Bath’s example. Billy F. Price, owner of Price Compressors of Houston, Texas, built up a private exhibition of twenty-four paintings, housed behind bullet-proof glass in his company’s boardroom. The cost of the paintings escalated as the demand grew. By the mid-1970s they were fetching over £5000 (15,000 marks) apiece.

The paintings’ sole attraction was that they were by Hitler; their intrinsic merit was negligible. Hitler took a layman’s view of modern art: Impressionists, Expressionists, Cubists and Dadaists were ‘scribblers, canvas scrawlers, mental defectives or cultural Neanderthals’; once in power, he banned their work. (When someone demonstrated to him that one of the outlawed painters, Franz Marc, was capable of producing ‘traditional’ pictures, Hitler was genuinely puzzled. ‘He could even draw properly,’ he commented, ‘so why didn’t he do it?’) Hitler himself was a painter of such meagre talent that he rarely attempted to depict human beings; he confined himself to stilted pictures of buildings and landscapes. Even to Kujau, a painter of limited ability, their technical poverty made them easy to copy. The other advantage, for a potential forger, was the scale of the Führer’s output. Whatever Hitler lacked in artistic merit he made up for in industry. He is estimated to have produced between 2000 and 3000 drawings, sketches, watercolours and oils.

Kujau was not far behind, turning out fakes literally by the hundred. He added to their plausibility using his favourite trick of attaching a forged letter or certificate confirming their authenticity. On the back of a large painting of German infantrymen in Flanders in 1918 Kujau wrote, in Hitler’s handwriting: ‘I painted this picture in memory of the comrades who fell in the field.’ Next to this he pasted a note supposedly signed by a Nazi official: ‘This work was created by the Führer and Reichschancellor Adolf Hitler in the year 1934.’ Close inspection of the painting reveals Lance-Corporal Adolf Hitler standing in the midst of the battle clutching a hand grenade. Another of Kujau’s efforts, Nude on Green Background, was passed off as a painting by Hitler of his niece, Geli Raubel. ‘Picture remains in flat. Adolf Hitler,’ reads a scrawled note. ‘Geli sat as a model for this for over twenty days.’ Kujau earned tens of thousands of marks for such forgeries. He did not even have to go looking for customers: furtive, wealthy, and eager to believe, they came looking for him.

TEN

FRITZ STIEFEL, FORTY-SEVEN years old, owner of a flourishing engineering works, first noticed Kujau’s shop in Aspergstrasse in 1975 as he was driving past it. The windows were full of military memorabilia. Stiefel was a collector himself. He pulled up outside and rang the bell. The shop was deserted. He came twice more but on each occasion there was nobody there. Then one day he happened to be passing when a small, fat man appeared outside cleaning the windows. ‘I spoke to him,’ recalled Stiefel. ‘He introduced himself to me as Fischer.’ He was taken inside and shown around the Aspergstrasse collection. He bought a Nazi decoration for 650 marks. Before long, seduced by Kujau’s patter, he had become the shop’s best customer.

Stiefel collected militaria of all types, but his specialist interest was in documents and autographed photographs. He was amazed by Herr Fischer’s ability to produce these. ‘I assumed that he must have really good connections. He certainly gave me that impression. He told me often of his journeys to East Germany. He said he had relatives there.’ Stiefel’s gullibility was matched only by his willingness to spend money. Kujau could scarcely believe his luck. ‘He always got excited when he saw something new,’ he said later. ‘If I’d told him I’d got Hitler’s underpants he’d have got equally worked up.’ In six years, according to the Hamburg state prosecutor, Stiefel spent approximately 250,000 marks in Kujau’s shop. He bought 160 drawings, oil paintings and watercolours supposedly by Hitler, along with eighty handwritten poems, speech notes, letters and manuscripts. Stiefel’s obsession led him into fraud. He transferred 180,000 marks from his company’s accounts to the Lieblang Cleaning Company, allegedly to meet ‘cleaning costs’ but actually to pay for Hitler memorabilia. As a result, he was eventually forced to repay over 120,000 marks to the German tax authorities.

In return for this outlay, Stiefel acquired one of the largest collections of fakes in West Germany. His ‘Hitler’ pictures ranged from a design for Hitler’s parents’ tomb, dated 1907, to a portrait of Eva Braun at the age of twenty-four. Some of the paintings were drawn from Kujau’s fervid imagination (for example, a series of cartoons purportedly drawn by Hitler for his regimental newspaper in 1916); others were copies of existing works. One female nude executed in chalk signed ‘Adolf Hitler’ and dated 1933 was a copy of a drawing by Erhard Amadeus Dier. Another, entitled Female Nude, Chubby, Fraulein E. Braun was a poor imitation of Julius Engelhard’s Bathing in the Bergsee: when Kujau persuaded Stiefel to buy it, he actually showed him a copy of the Engelhard painting and, with characteristic cheek, accused Hitler of plagiarism. Kujau also sold Stiefel a leather box, lined with silk, which he had bought at Stuttgart railway station, containing 233 handwritten pages of the ‘original manuscript’ of Mein Kampf. Kujau had simply copied it, verbatim, from the published book. On the title page he wrote, also in Hitler’s hand: ‘The Struggle of the Times, or The Struggle or My Struggle. Which title impresses more? Adolf Hitler.’

Kujau subsequently claimed that he copied out the Mein Kampf manuscript as a means of practising Hitler’s handwriting and there can be no question but that he became extraordinarily proficient at it. He slipped in and out of other people’s handwriting as he did his various pseudonyms and biographies, with complete ease. It is difficult to say with precision when he first hit on the idea of writing a Hitler diary. Kujau’s American agent, Wolfgang Schulze, told Gitta Sereny of the Sunday Times that he handled ‘unbound’ sheets of Hitler writing supplied by his client as early as 1976. According to Kujau it was in 1978 that he sat down and began typing out a chronology of Hitler’s daily life, using an official Nazi Party yearbook for 1935. Having done that he decided to see how it would look in Hitler’s handwriting.

In the cellar of his and Edith’s new home in Ditzingen were some school notebooks, bought for a few marks in a shop in East Berlin. Kujau had originally intended using them to keep a catalogue of his collection. Now he took one out, dipped his pen in a pot of black ink, and started to write. When the ink ran out, he switched to a pencil. ‘It was easy,’ he said later. As a finishing touch, he stuck some imitation metal initials in gothic script on the cover. The initials were bought by Kujau in a department store, were made of plastic in Hong Kong, and were in fact ‘FH’, not ‘AH’ as Kujau had thought. It was, like all his forgeries, slipshod and homemade. It would not have withstood an hour’s expert examination.

Two weeks later, during one of Fritz Stiefel’s regular visits to Aspergstrasse, Kujau brought out the book and laid it on the table in front of him. ‘That,’ he told him, ‘is a Hitler diary.’

Stiefel examined it carefully. ‘He was not so much fascinated by the contents,’ said Kujau, ‘as by the initials I’d stuck on the front of it.’ He asked if he could borrow it and Kujau agreed. ‘I took it home with me and read through it,’ recalled Stiefel. He then locked the book away in his safe with the rest of his faked Hitler manuscripts.

At around the same time that he received the diary from Kujau, Stiefel decided that the time had come when he should seek an expert’s opinion on his remarkable Hitler archive. He asked Kleenau, a firm of Munich auctioneers who handled important manuscripts, if they could recommend an authority on Hitler’s art and writing. Kleenau gave him the name of August Priesack.

‘Professor’ Priesack, as he styled himself, had been employed by the Nazi Party between 1935 and 1939 to track down Hitler’s paintings. His task was to buy up as many as possible and sort out the genuine Hitlers from the fakes which, even then, were polluting the market. For Priesack, as for so many of the ‘Keepers of the Flame’, those years in the sun before the war, when he was young and enjoying the patronage of the Führer, represented the best time of his life. He had piles of yellowing press cuttings and photographs from the Third Reich, his private archive, stored in his cluttered Munich apartment. He was seventy-six years old, a former secondary school teacher, listed in the Munich police records as a well-known sympathizer with the ideals of the Hitler era. He was working on a book of previously unpublished pictures of the Nazi Party rallies. He had also been hired by the American millionaire Billy Price who was compiling a complete catalogue of Hitler’s art. Stiefel invited Priesack to visit him in Stuttgart and evaluate his own collection.

For Kujau, this was a decisive moment. Hitherto he had had to fool only amateur enthusiasts. Now his work was to be judged by a supposed expert. In May 1978 he had signed an agreement with Stiefel guaranteeing that everything he had sold him to date and might sell him in the future was ‘original’ and ‘contemporary’. Under the terms of the contract, if anything turned out to be fake, Kujau had to give Stiefel a complete refund. A great deal therefore depended upon Priesack’s verdict. He need not have worried. The old man took one look at Stiefel’s collection and declared it to be of ‘great historical significance’. He pointed to a watercolour. ‘I last held that in my hands in 1936,’ he told Stiefel and Kujau. ‘It was then,’ said Kujau later, ‘that I knew what kind of an expert he was. I had only finished that painting ten days before.’

Priesack was sufficiently impressed to contact one of Germany’s leading authorities on Hitler: Eberhard Jaeckel, Professor of Modern History at the University of Stuttgart. Jaeckel, the author of Hitler’s Weltanschauung, A Blueprint for Power, had been engaged for some years in the compilation of a complete collection of Hitler’s writings from 1905 to 1924. Priesack had passed on to him some material from his own archive in 1974 (subsequently dismissed by Jaeckel as ‘a few pieces of paper, copies, without any value’). Now he urged the historian to meet with Stiefel and his astonishingly well-connected supplier, Herr Fischer. Jaeckel, aware that important Hitler documents were in the hands of a number of private collectors, agreed. An appointment was arranged for Friday, 21 September 1979.

Priesack arrived at Stiefel’s house before Kujau and Jaeckel. For the first time the industrialist opened his safe and showed him the Hitler diary. Priesack spent an hour reading through it. He was hugely impressed by the existence of such a book, although he had to confess to a certain disappointment in its contents. (Kujau had filled it almost entirely with lists of appointments and proclamations lifted out of the Nazi yearbook.) He made a few notes. ‘I can only remember one page which I copied,’ recalled Priesack. ‘The others were really for the most part just headlines from the Völkischer Beobachter [the Nazi Party newspaper].’ The fullest entry, the one written down by Priesack, was for 30 June 1935:

Despite the triviality of the content, Priesack had no doubts that the book was genuine. When Kujau arrived he paid him an emotional tribute. ‘You are our salvation,’ he told the former waiter and window cleaner. ‘You must find more documents. History will thank you.’

Jaeckel was also impressed by Stiefel’s collection as the industrialist laid it out before him. ‘There were drawings, paintings and documents signed by Hitler,’ he remembered. He was handed the diary and ‘leafed through it quickly’.

Kujau watched Jaeckel going through the book. There was a discussion about how many more diaries there might be. Kujau said that he understood from his sources in East Germany that the diaries spanned thirteen years, from 1932 to 1945. Priesack cut in: assuming that each of the missing books also covered six months, there would be twenty-seven books in total. Jaeckel urged Stiefel to try to obtain them. Kujau claimed later to have sat and listened to all this ‘in amazement’.

Jaeckel’s particular interest was in material up to the year 1924. Stiefel had plenty to show him, including some previously undiscovered poems by Hitler written during the First World War. These included ‘It was in a thicket of the Artois Forest’, an illustrated ballad, and ‘An Idyll in the War’, a work in four verses in which ‘Hitler’ described how a German soldier delivered a Frenchwoman’s baby:

Each verse had an accompanying illustration: the soldier tending the mother and her baby; the soldier showing the baby to a comrade; the soldier milking a cow; the soldier saying goodbye to the Frenchwoman with the child in her arms. Jaeckel saw no reason to believe it was not genuine. Attached to it and to most of the other pieces in Stiefel’s collection was an ‘authentication’ on official Nazi Party stationery. The following year, Jaeckel reprinted ‘An Idyll in the War’ in his book of Hitler’s early writings, along with seventy-five other forgeries produced by Kujau.

At the end of this productive meeting, Jaeckel gave Kujau a lift back into Stuttgart. The ‘antiques dealer’ had scarcely opened his mouth all afternoon. He struck the historian as ‘reserved’ and ‘uneducated’. Jaeckel told him that if he could discover any more volumes of Hitler’s diaries, he would very much like to edit them.

Kujau was by now leading a life of bewildering complexity. He was running the shop in Aspergstrasse. He was organizing the illegal export of memorabilia from East Germany. He was forging documents and paintings. He was still nominally in charge of the Lieblang Cleaning Company. He was answering to at least two different names. And as if this was not enough, he had now begun deceiving Edith by taking a full-time mistress.

Kujau’s corpulent figure had long been familiar to the working girls of Stuttgart’s red-light district where he was universally known as ‘The General’. His favourite haunts were the Pigalle night club and the Sissy Bar. Using the money he was making from Nazi memorabilia, he entertained lavishly. The girl he was with was always well paid; the others were regularly bought bottles of champagne. In March 1975 he met Maria Modritsch, a twenty-five-year-old Austrian girl who was serving drinks in the Sissy Bar. She had left school at fifteen to work in a factory, come looking for work in West Germany and ended up as a bar girl. She was thin, quiet and of homely appearance. Kujau took a liking to her and they began what Maria primly called an ‘intimate relationship’. She gave up work in the Sissy Bar and in May 1978, he set her up in an apartment in Rotenbergstrasse where she lived alone with her pet rabbit, Caesar. Kujau had a key, kept some clothes in the flat, and provided Maria with a monthly allowance of between 1000 and 2000 marks. ‘Conny gave me a loan for the furniture,’ said Maria. ‘He had more money than I did and he spoiled me. He visited me almost every day. We would go out together. Then he would go back to his own flat. From time to time he’d stay overnight. As far as I’m aware, Edith didn’t know about my existence.’ Kujau told Maria he was married to Edith. ‘It was not until later,’ said Maria, ‘that I learned he only lived with her.’ She helped out in the shop occasionally and was under the impression that her lover was some sort of painter.

Three weeks after the meeting with Jaeckel and Priesack, on 15 October, Kujau and Maria went out for a drink. After some schnapps in the Korne Inn they moved on to the Melodie Bar. Shortly before midnight, a group of immigrant workers, Yugoslavs, burst into the bar brandishing guns. While most of the clientele threw themselves to the floor, Kujau, in a fit of drunken bravado, leapt to his feet and attacked them. In the ensuing struggle he was struck on the head and had to be taken to hospital with blood streaming from a three-inch gash in his forehead. He was interviewed by the police and once again could not resist spinning them a story. He was ‘Dr Heinz Fischer’, Maria was his secretary, he worked for the Baden-Wuerttemberg authorities. When this was checked and found to be false, he lied again. He was ‘Dr Konrad Kujau’, until last year a colonel in the West German army, and soon to become a professor. The police searched a briefcase he had with him and found artists’ materials, an air pistol and a photograph of himself posing in the full dress uniform of a general. Kujau said that he had bought the pistol at an auction. He confided to the policeman interviewing him that it had once belonged to Field Marshal Rommel. The policeman told his colleagues that Kujau was either mentally unstable or a military fanatic.

This curious episode was not over yet. Less than a week later, Kujau was invited to return to the police station to explain why he was going around falsely claiming to have a doctorate. Charges were laid against him for misrepresentation. Even the most blatant confidence trickster would by now have given up, but Kujau swore that he was the author of eleven books on Nazi Germany, including Adolf Hitler the Painter, Adolf Hitler the Frontline Soldier, Adolf Hitler the Officer, and a five-volume study, Adolf Hitler the Politician – all published by the Ullstein company in Munich. He declared that as a result of his work he had been invited all over the world to lecture on the Nazis; he possessed not merely one but three doctorates, awarded to him by the universities of Tokyo, Pretoria and Miami. The incredulous police asked him for proof of these honours.

The police waited but the documents never materialized. The following July, Kujau was fined 800 marks for the misuse of titles. He described his occupation in court for the first time as ‘painter’.

On 20 October 1979, five days after the fight in the Melodie Bar, ignorant of his supplier’s difficulties with the police, Fritz Stiefel invited Kujau and Edith to his house for a party. The celebration was supposed to be in honour of the birthday of Frau Senta Baur, wife of Hans Baur, but at the last moment Frau Baur was unable to attend. As a result there were only six guests: the Stiefels, Kujau and Edith, and the former SS man Jakob Tiefenthaeler and his wife.

It was a convivial evening. Stiefel had known Tiefenthaeler as a fellow collector for several years; Kujau had been introduced to Tiefenthaeler as ‘Herr Fischer’ by Stiefel over dinner the previous March, although on that occasion, said Tiefenthaeler, Kujau ‘had kept very much in the background’. This evening was different: the drink flowed, and as the number of empty bottles steadily mounted, so did Kujau’s loquacity. ‘He said that he was a businessman,’ recalled Tiefenthaeler.

After a few more glasses, Kujau began talking about the Hitler diaries. According to Tiefenthaeler he boasted that ‘he could bring to the West diaries which had been on board one of the Führer’s planes’ which had crashed in East Germany at the end of the war.

Tiefenthaeler, whose own Third Reich collection was largely built around autographs and pictures, was fascinated.

This is the first occasion on which Kujau is reported to have used the plane crash to explain the provenance of the diaries. When he had given the first diary to Stiefel sixteen months earlier he had merely said that he had ‘got it from East Germany’ along with his other militaria. At the meeting with Jaeckel only four weeks earlier he had been equally vague. This suggests that at some point in the period 21 September to 20 October, Kujau discovered the story of the crash.

According to Stiefel, he and Kujau had visited Hans Baur at his home in Herrsching some time around September 1979. Priesack had also been there. ‘It was in the evening,’ said Baur, ‘and my wife and I went with them to have dinner in a neighbouring village.’ Baur subsequently claimed to have no recollection of discussing the loss of Gundlfinger’s plane, but the coincidence of this meeting with Kujau’s adoption of the story suggests otherwise. Stiefel admitted to the police that he had certainly heard an account of the crash from Baur himself. Kujau, on the other hand, alleged he had first learned of it from August Priesack, and Priesack, who knew of the crash from Baur’s book, afterwards admitted that he could have been the one who first put the idea in Kujau’s mind. Whichever version is the truth – and it should be remembered that in Baur’s book the whole episode had been available in outline to anyone who was interested since 1955 – this was the decisive moment in the evolution of the fraud. Suddenly to produce a Hitler diary and claim it had been smuggled out of East Germany might be enough to satisfy collectors as gullible as Stiefel. To produce that diary and also to be able to point to Hitler’s distress at the loss of valuable documents in a mysterious air crash – that suddenly made the story seem much more plausible.

At the end of the evening’s festivities, Stiefel put his guests up for the night. The following day was a Sunday. After breakfast the industrialist unlocked the metal door to his collection and showed Tiefenthaeler the diary. A few weeks later, Tiefenthaeler told Gerd Heidemann what he had seen and at the beginning of 1980, Heidemann himself visited Stiefel, saw the diary and heard the story of the crashed Junkers 352.

What gives Kujau’s fraud from this point onwards a touch of real genius is that having made the connection between the wrecked transport plane and the diaries, he left it to others to research the background. Never did the victim of a hoax work more assiduously towards his own entrapment than Gerd Heidemann. While Kujau shuttled between his two mistresses and tended his shop in Stuttgart, it was the reporter in Hamburg who worked long hours and even risked dismissal to make the story of the diaries credible. For Heidemann, each step in his attempts to prove that the diary he had seen at Stiefel’s could be genuine represented an additional investment of time and effort. It is not surprising that by the end he wanted to believe in the existence of the diaries so desperately: by then he had put more work into them than Kujau. It took him a year, but gradually, in 1980, the two men’s paths began to converge.

Stiefel still kept the 1935 diary in his safe, but his importance in the affair now lessened. He disapproved of Stern’s left-wing reputation and refused to help Heidemann by revealing the identity of the diary’s supplier. Tiefenthaeler, who had already acted as Heidemann’s agent in his attempts to sell Carin II, now supplanted him. His motive was almost certainly financial. He admitted that Heidemann told him it would ‘not do him any harm’ to help Stern find the diaries; in 1983 Kujau referred to him, with a laugh, as ‘Mr Ten Percent’. It was in the summer of 1980 that Tiefenthaeler told Heidemann that the diary had been brought into the West by a Herr Fischer of Stuttgart. Heidemann and Walde had then spent hours trawling through the local telephone book. (The reason they never found him was that the Kujau’s home in Ditzingen was listed in the directory under Edith’s surname, Lieblang.) A few months later, after their return from Boernersdorf in November, the Stern men had renewed their contact with Tiefenthaeler and asked him to transmit an offer to ‘Herr Fischer’ on their behalf. Tiefenthaeler did so in a letter to Kujau dated 29 November 1980:

Kujau was already wealthier than he had ever been, thanks to his activities as a forger. But considering that two million marks represented almost ten times the amount he was to make from his best customer, Fritz Stiefel, it is scarcely surprising that he succumbed to this offer. Even if this ‘wealthy company’ discovered that he was passing on fakes, he stood an excellent chance of getting away with something. His anonymity was guaranteed. If anything went wrong he could always fall back on the excuse that he was merely handling material which originated behind the Iron Curtain. Thus it was that at the beginning of 1981 he gave Tiefenthaeler permission to divulge his telephone number and his address in Aspergstrasse.

On 15 January a man calling himself Gerd Heidemann telephoned him in Ditzingen. They discussed the diaries. Kujau repeatedly stressed that he had to have a guarantee of absolute secrecy and that he would deal only with Heidemann personally. True to his past form he also embroidered the story, promising the reporter not simply diaries but a genuine Hitler opera and a third volume of Mein Kampf. Kujau knew that the more improbable his inventions sounded, the more likely people were to believe that he could not possibly be lying. He knew what he was doing. He knew Heidemann’s type. He recognized beneath the affected calm the note of longing that signified the suspension of disbelief. It was all too easy.

Sure enough, on Wednesday 28 January, at about 7.15 in the evening, the telephone rang again. Kujau had a brief conversation, then turned to Edith. ‘That was Heidemann,’ he told her. ‘He’s on his way over.’ Within five minutes he was opening the door to his latest, eager, moon-faced victim, who clutched in his hand a suitcase full of money.