Selling Hitler

ELEVEN

THIS FIRST ENCOUNTER between Kujau and Heidemann lasted for more than seven hours. To begin with, Heidemann later testified, Kujau appeared reluctant to agree to a deal. He told the reporter that he had already had an offer of $2 million for the diaries from America and that the Hearst newspaper group was considering serializing them. According to Edith Lieblang, Heidemann then opened up the suitcase and displayed ‘a huge amount of money’. He offered it to Kujau as a down payment for the diaries. He repeated that his company was willing to pay 2 million marks for all the volumes. As an added inducement, Heidemann also produced the Goering uniform, which appears to have excited Kujau even more than the money. ‘I had to have it,’ he said later. ‘I had all the other uniforms – Hitler’s, Himmler’s, Rommel’s. My one thought was: “How do I get this uniform off this man?”’ Kujau, according to Lieblang, promised the reporter ‘that he could provide the diaries’.

After that, the atmosphere relaxed somewhat. Heidemann, whisky in hand, boasted of his contacts with famous Nazis like Karl Wolff and Klaus Barbie. He described how he had tracked down the crash site in Boernersdorf. He then started recounting his experiences as a war correspondent. By about midnight Edith was beginning to fall asleep. She went off to bed. But Heidemann and Kujau stayed up talking until almost 3 a.m., when the reporter at last left to drive back to his hotel in Stuttgart.

After snatching a few hours’ sleep, at 10 a.m., he was back with Kujau again, this time in the Aspergstrasse shop. His main concern was the diary held by Fritz Stiefel. He was worried that word of its existence would leak out to a rival newspaper. According to Edith, he was ‘insistent’ that they should go and retrieve it. Kujau, who was worried about souring his relations with Stiefel, managed to put him off by telling him that the industrialist was on holiday in Italy. Heidemann was anxious to conclude at least some sort of legal agreement with Kujau before he left. He suggested that he should make contact with Kujau’s lawyer and arrange for him to come to Hamburg to sign an agreement with the Gruner and Jahr legal department – an offer which Kujau hastily declined. Instead, the two men parted with a tentative verbal understanding. Kujau would deliver the books, Heidemann the money. He would call the reporter when he heard from his brother in the East. As a gesture of good faith, they swapped gifts. Heidemann left his genuine Goering uniform behind and returned to Hamburg bearing a faked Hitler oil painting. The relationship had started on an appropriate note.

At 11.30 the following morning, in Stern’s elegant riverfront headquarters – known, irreverently, around Hamburg as ‘the monkey cliff’ – Heidemann went in to see Wilfried Sorge to report on the outcome of his trip to Stuttgart. The supplier of the diaries, he told Sorge, was a ‘wealthy collector’ of Nazi memorabilia whose brother was a general in East Germany. Some of Hitler’s diaries were already in the West. Initially they had come over the border in ordinary travel luggage. Now they were being smuggled across hidden inside pianos (pianos being one of East Germany’s main exports to the West). The general would at once cease supplying the diaries if he thought they were for publication in Stern. Heidemann was therefore posing as a Swiss collector. He repeated: it was imperative that the company maintain absolute secrecy.

In Stuttgart, meanwhile, Konrad Kujau was having to do some explaining to Fritz Stiefel, not about the Hitler diaries, but about the other pieces of so-called Hitler writing he had sold to the collector.

Eberhard Jaeckel and his co-editor, Axel Kuhn, had gone ahead and reprinted material from Stiefel’s collection in their book of Hitler’s writings from 1905 to 1924. The book had been published the previous autumn. To their embarrassment, Anton Hoch of the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich had pointed out that some of Hitler’s ‘poetry’ was obviously fake. In particular, ‘Der Kamerad’, a poem supposedly written by Hitler in 1916, was actually lifted straight out of a book of verse entitled Poems of the Old Comrades by Herybert Menzel, published in 1936. It might have been possible to argue that Hitler himself had merely copied the poem from some earlier edition of Menzel’s work. But unfortunately, as Hoch pointed out, Menzel was only ten years old in 1916. Jaeckel contacted Stiefel to demand an explanation. The outraged Stiefel contacted Kujau.

On 5 February, exactly a week after concluding his agreement with Heidemann, Kujau joined Stiefel and Jaeckel for an emergency meeting in the professor’s office in Stuttgart University. What most perturbed him, said Jaeckel, was the fact that ‘Der Kamerad’ had been accompanied by a letter on official Nazi stationery, signed by a party official, stating that the poem was unquestionably genuine. The fact that ‘Der Kamerad’ was such an obvious forgery meant that the letter was also probably faked. And similar letters had been attached to dozens of pieces of Hitler writing belonging to Stiefel which Jaeckel had printed in his book. It had to be assumed that they were all forged.

This was a nasty moment for Kujau. According to Jaeckel he ‘seemed very unsettled by my doubts’. But he handled the situation adroitly. In view of the aspersions which had been cast, he said, he was prepared to be more specific about the source of the material. He then proceeded, with considerable cheek, to recount to the two men the story of the crashed Hitler plane exactly as it had been described to him for the first time by Heidemann the previous week. Kujau, recalled Jaeckel,

Having used the evidence of one victim in an attempt to soothe the anxieties of another, Kujau then retreated to his customary last line of defence. According to Jaeckel ‘he said he couldn’t add very much more because he was only the middleman. He didn’t really know much about the documents or their historical context.’

There was little more that could be done. Jaeckel had no alternative but to begin preparing an announcement to place in an academic journal admitting that he had been duped. He advised Stiefel in the meantime to submit his material for forensic examination. As for Kujau, he went home to Ditzingen to begin forging the first volume of Hitler diaries for Gerd Heidemann.

To sustain him through his labours over the next two years, Kujau, like any conscientious professional writer, established a regular routine. He would get up at 6 a.m. followed, half an hour later, by Edith Lieblang. The couple would have coffee together and then she would drive off to Stuttgart to her job in the Café Hochland. Kujau would cook himself a heavy breakfast of fried potatoes and two fried eggs and, thus fortified, retire to his studio where he would work right through the day, without even stopping for lunch. When the police raided his premises in 1983 they carried out ten cartons full of books and articles accumulated by Kujau to help him establish Hitler’s daily activities. There were 515 books and newspapers in his workroom, 106 additional periodicals in his cellar. Stuffed into them were thousands of bookmarks – playing cards, blotting paper, old bills and tickets, visitors’ cards and toilet paper – marking passages required for the concoction of the diaries. Kujau would write out a rough draft in pencil and then transfer it in ink into one of the school notebooks kept in his cellar. His work became more sophisticated with time. To start with, he confined himself to writing about Hitler’s early years in power – years full of laws and decrees with which he could fill the Führer’s empty days and which did not require much research into complex political issues. In the evening, when Edith returned from work, she would cook them both a meal. ‘Conny would lie stretched out on the sofa,’ recalled Edith. ‘We’d watch television and often he’d fall asleep. I had no idea what he did during the day. We gave one another a lot of space.’ This sedentary regime was to last until the spring of 1983.

According to Kujau, he finished the first three volumes about ten days after the meeting with Stiefel and Jaeckel. To dress them up, he stuck a red wax seal in the shape of a German eagle on the covers, together with a label, signed by Rudolf Hess, declaring them to be Hitler’s property. He bashed them about for a while to age them, and sprinkled some tea over the pages. He then rang Heidemann to tell him he had the books. Walde said later that these early diaries were not supposed to have come from East Germany ‘but from the United States, where “Fischer” had offered them through a lawyer to an interested party’. Kujau flew up from Stuttgart with the diaries to be entertained by Heidemann on board Carin II. To celebrate the arrival of the first books, the enthusiastic reporter opened a bottle of sparkling white wine.

Only five men at Gruner and Jahr knew the secret of the diaries’ existence. For them, Wednesday 18 February was a memorable day. Shortly before 10 a.m., four of the initiated – Gerd Heidemann, Thomas Walde, Jan Hensmann and Wilfried Sorge – trooped into the office of the fifth, Manfred Fischer. The doors were closed, Fischer instructed his secretary to make sure they were not disturbed, and Heidemann laid the diaries before them.

It appears to have been a moment of almost religious solemnity. Hensmann picked up one of the diaries. It was ‘bound in black’, he recalled, ‘1·5 centimetres thick’. Like most of the others, he could not read the old Germanic script in which it was written, but it undoubtedly felt genuine. ‘I held it with great care in my hands,’ he said later. Manfred Fischer was also impressed by the slightly battered appearance of the books. ‘They were a little bit damaged,’ he remembered. ‘The tops of the pages were bent.’ For Fischer, the arrival of these first Hitler diaries was ‘a great moment’ in his life: ‘It was a very special experience to hold such a thing in your hand. The certainty that this diary was written by him – and now I have it in my grasp….’

The diaries cast a spell over the room. The intense secrecy of the meeting; the thrill of handling contraband, smuggled at great cost and danger from the site of a wartime aircrash; above all, the presence of Adolf Hitler as contained in this unknown record of his intimate thoughts – all these elements combined to produce a highly charged atmosphere, a mood which in its turn created what Fischer subsequently called ‘a sort of group psychosis’. The prospect of possessing something once owned by the Führer affected these cool, modern-minded North German businessmen just as it did the obsessive, ex-Nazi collectors in the South. ‘We wanted to have them,’ said Fischer of the diaries. ‘Even if we’d only believed that there was a 10 per cent chance that they were genuine, we’d still have said, “Get them here.”’ Of all the figures in history, perhaps only Adolf Hitler could have exercised such an hypnotic fascination.

In this atmosphere, the five men now took a series of decisions which were to have profound consequences. Both Heidemann and Walde urged on the group the importance of maintaining absolute secrecy. If the slightest hint of the existence of the diaries leaked out, they told the three businessmen, the East German general would cease shipping the material. Heidemann, according to Hensmann, went further: ‘He didn’t merely warn of the need to protect his sources, but of the danger that human life itself might be threatened.’ For this reason the two journalists argued strongly against bringing in any experts from outside to examine the diaries until the full set was in the company’s possession. ‘These reservations’, stated Sorge, ‘were accepted. They led to the decision to obtain further volumes before authentication tests were carried out.’ Not even Henri Nannen and the three editors-in-chief of Stern would be told what was going on until all the transactions had been completed; that would probably, said Heidemann, be in mid-May.

All these proposals were accepted. ‘It was unanimously agreed,’ stated Hensmann, ‘that we should continue with the project.’

The five men were now effectively bound together in a conspiracy against Stern. Without consulting a handwriting expert, a forensic scientist or an historian, Fischer that day committed the company to the purchase of 27 volumes of Hitler’s diaries at a price of 85,000 marks each; plus a sum of 200,000 marks to be paid for the third volume of Mein Kampf. The total cost of the project would be 2.5 million marks. As the company’s managing director, he signed a document authorizing the immediate transfer of i million marks from the company’s main account for the obtaining of the diaries.

‘We all had a kind of blackout,’ he commented afterwards.

For all this talk of mental aberration, the businessmen’s behaviour was not totally irrational. As publishers they knew the size of the potential market for any venture connected with the Third Reich. In Britain one publisher, Bison Books, had been built entirely on the strength of the public’s fascination with the Nazis. Hitler’s Wartime Picture Magazine was simply extracts from the Nazi propaganda magazine Signal stitched together in a single volume: it sold over a quarter of a million copies in Britain and the United States; between 1976 and 1978 it was reprinted eight times. Another picture book from the same publisher, Der Führer, edited by a former SS officer, Herbert Walther, was bought by more than 50,000 people. Bison’s flamboyant founder, Sidney Mayer, was quite open about the reason for his success:

On the wall of his office, Mayer hung a large picture of himself with a small Hitler moustache and the caption ‘Springtime For Mayer’.

If this was the market for what were basically retreads of material already seen, the marketing possibilities of Adolf Hitler’s secret diaries were clearly stupendous. Gruner and Jahr was well placed to exploit it. The company owned a string of successful West German magazines, including Stern and Geo. It had outlets in Spain, France and the United States (where it owned Parents and Young Miss). Gruner and Jahr had a turnover of almost half a billion dollars and controlled a total of twenty periodicals across the world.

Since 1972, three-quarters of the company’s shares had been held by the West German multinational, Bertelsmann AG, the country’s largest publishing group. Founded in 1835 to produce religious tracts, by 1981 the company had one hundred and eighty subsidiaries operating in twenty-five countries. In America it owned such well-known organizations as Bantam Books and Arista Records. Once this formidable publishing and marketing machine was thrown behind the Hitler diaries, profits could be expected which would easily recoup Fischer’s initial investment of 2.5 million marks.

Hitler was going to make everybody rich, no one more so than Gerd Heidemann. Fischer accepted that the reporter had a special claim to the diaries project. He had pursued it in the face of outright opposition from the Stern editors. He was the only person with whom the supplier of the diaries would deal. Heidemann had already talked vaguely of taking over the project for himself. He could go into partnership with an American publisher. He could sell everything and try to finance the project himself. He could take up those job offers he claimed to have received from Bunte and Quick. He had even mentioned a Dutch oil millionaire named Heeremann, a former member of the SS, who was prepared to put up i million marks towards the purchase of the diaries, providing they proved that Hitler knew nothing of the extermination of the Jews. Fischer was understandably anxious to conclude an agreement with Heidemann. Immediately after the receipt of the first diaries negotiations began, and five days later, on 23 February, the two men signed a contract. Such was the secrecy of the project, the company’s legal department was not told what was happening. Wilfried Sorge personally drafted the agreement in accordance with suggestions from Heidemann.

The first part of the contract set out the reporter’s obligations:

Next came details of his reward:

Despite the caveat contained in the final two clauses, this contract represented a substantial victory for Heidemann. It was inconceivable that if the diaries were genuine they would fail to cover the cost of his advance. Even if Stern never published the material, Heidemann could keep the money, unless he took the diaries elsewhere: in other words, even if they were forged, Heidemann would not be obliged to pay back the advance. That fact alone gives some indication of the management’s complete faith that the diaries were genuine. Assuming publication went ahead, the potential profit to Heidemann was enormous. Worldwide sales of Hitler’s diaries would exceed 50,000 copies by a factor of ten, perhaps a hundred; the royalties that would yield, coupled with a third of world syndication rights, would make Heidemann financially secure for the rest of his life. To have such a golden vision of the future shimmering on the horizon would tend to make the most sceptical journalist incline to a belief in the diaries’ authenticity. Heidemann was not one of the profession’s natural sceptics. He had already shown himself capable of believing any amount of rubbish about the Third Reich. It is scarcely surprising that his attitude to the diaries from now on was one of blind faith. Gruner and Jahr had given the one man they had to trust an overwhelming financial incentive to deceive himself – and them.

TWELVE

HEIDEMANN’S ADVANCE OF 300,000 marks was not due to be paid to him until he had delivered another five diaries. But Manfred Fischer knew of Heidemann’s chronic financial difficulties (the reporter had taken out yet another company loan two months previously for 28,500 marks) and as a gesture of good faith he arranged to have the money paid into Heidemann’s account the day after the conclusion of their agreement, Tuesday 24 February.

The following day, Heidemann rang Sorge to tell him that a new shipment of the diaries had arrived. He needed 480,000 marks. Sorge walked along the corridor to the office of Peter Kuehsel, the finance director, and asked for authorization to withdraw the money.

Kuehsel, a new arrival at Gruner and Jahr, must have wondered what sort of company he had joined. A month ago he had been ordered to find 200,000 marks in cash after the banks had shut; he had driven to the airport, stashed the money into a suitcase like a cashier for a Mafia family; then he had watched as Heidemann headed off into the night with it. Now he was supposed to hand over another 480,000 in cash with no explanation as to what it was for. He was an accountant. It offended his sense of business propriety. He sought out Manfred Fischer. ‘I asked Dr Fischer what the money was for and why payments of this size had to be made in cash,’ he recalled. ‘I asked in order that I could make a proper entry in the company’s accounts.’ Fischer realized that the circle of the initiated would have to be widened from five to six. ‘He swore me to secrecy,’ said Kuehsel, ‘and told me that Herr Heidemann was on the trail of the Hitler diaries.’ Fischer warned Kuehsel that in all he would probably be called upon to hand over about 3 million marks. Kuehsel stared at his managing director in astonishment. ‘I said it was a lot of money.’ Fischer then asked him for some technical advice and the two men ‘discussed how it could be dealt with from the point of view of tax’.

When Sorge had received the authorization, he drove to the main Deutsche Bank in (appropriately) Adolphsplatz. The money, in 500- and 1000-mark notes was packed into a suitcase and given to Heidemann.

This established a routine which was to last for more than two years. Heidemann would hear from Kujau that a new consignment of books was ready for collection. He would then inform Sorge who would in turn approach Kuehsel. According to the accountant:

When Heidemann returned from Stuttgart with the new diaries he would make two photocopies on a machine installed in his private apartment, one for himself and one for the Stern history department. Crucial to the development of the whole affair was the fact that Heidemann was one of the few people at Stern who could decipher the handwriting and make sense of the obsolescent script in which they were written – a type of Gothic composition no longer taught in German schools. For most of those in the diaries’ circle, Heidemann effectively became the Custodian of the Writ, the medium through whom the oracle of the diaries spoke. Once he had made the photocopies, he would take the originals to Sorge or Hensmann on the ninth floor of the Stern building. If those gentlemen had time they would listen while he read out passages to them. After this ritual, the diaries were put into brown envelopes, sealed, and placed in the management safe. The secrecy which surrounded this procedure was very tight. The Stern Report subsequently described how

Walde did not even tell his wife what he was working on.

This mania for secrecy makes it difficult to reconstruct some parts of the story. The only record of deliveries was kept by Sorge. It was handwritten and intelligible only to himself. On the left-hand side of a piece of paper he wrote the date and the amount of money paid to Heidemann. On the right he entered the number of volumes delivered. But, as the Stern Report noted, there was no record of ‘the time lapses between the deliveries, nor the order in which they came: to this day nobody knows at what point a particular book arrived at Stern’. Heidemann was not expected to account for the money he received. ‘It was quite clear to us’, explained Sorge, ‘that in this sort of business, Heidemann wouldn’t be bringing back receipts, nor would there be any indication of who the money was being paid to.’ Having already given the reporter a personal payment of 300,000 marks, and promised him hundreds of thousands more when the diaries were published, the management reckoned they could count on Heidemann’s integrity.

Whenever Kujau had finished forging a new batch of diaries he would telephone Heidemann at his home in Hamburg and tell him that a lorryload of pianos containing a fresh consignment of the books had arrived from East Germany. These telephone calls, according to the reporter, would generally come at about 8 a.m., when he was lying in his morning bath. Heidemann would then hasten down to the Aspergstrasse shop. Kujau would give him an A4-sized package, three or four inches thick, containing the latest instalments. Heidemann would give him a sealed envelope full of money to be passed on to ‘General Fischer’. Sometimes Heidemann would open the package of diaries in Stuttgart and Kujau, pretending not to understand the old Germanic script, would ask him to read aloud from them. Heidemann would do so, a performance frequently interrupted by ‘ahs’ and ‘oohs’ from Kujau, as the forger feigned amazement at such an extraordinary historical document. After Heidemann had gone happily back to Hamburg, Kujau, equally happy, would open the packet of money, which – though he was not aware of it – held considerably less than it had when Heidemann took it from the safe in Hamburg.

Of the 680,000 marks which by the end of February had been paid to him for the acquisition of the diaries, the likelihood is that Heidemann stole almost half of it. It is impossible to be certain about this: it is Kujau’s word against Heidemann’s, the word of a compulsive liar against that of an inveterate fantast. Nevertheless, the balance of probability, for once, is on Kujau’s side. According to both him and Edith Lieblang, the suitcase Heidemann opened up in their house on the night of 28 January contained 150,000 marks – not the 200,000 it had held when Heidemann had left Hamburg twenty-four hours earlier. In 1983, in a raid on Heidemann’s home, the police found a note confirming the reporter’s agreement with Kujau, but at a much lower cost than Manfred Fischer was aware of:

Of the 85,000 marks being given to him for each volume in Hamburg, Heidemann was passing on at most 50,000 and keeping 35,000 for himself. In this way he pocketed 280,000 marks by the end of February alone.

The Hitler diaries project was less than one month old but already it had at least three layers of mendacity. Kujau was deceiving Heidemann; Heidemann was deceiving Kujau and the management of Gruner and Jahr; and the management of Gruner and Jahr was deceiving the editors of Stern.

On Monday 9 March, Manfred Fischer travelled to Guetersloh, one hundred and fifty miles from Hamburg, for a meeting of the senior management of the Bertelsmann group. In his suitcase he had three of the Hitler diaries which he had removed from the ninth-floor safe the previous evening.

A full board meeting of the company on 11 February had confirmed Fischer as the next managing director of Bertelsmann. He was to take up his new job at the beginning of July, easing the workload presently being carried by Reinhard Mohn, head of the family which owned almost nine-tenths of the company. Mohn would shortly be reaching the firm’s retirement age of sixty. Daily operating control of Bertelsmann would be relinquished to Fischer. Mohn would concentrate on broader policy issues as chairman of the company’s board.

It would not be easy for Fischer to establish his authority, stepping straight into the place of such a powerful figure, especially as Mohn would also continue to oversee his work. The Hitler diaries were a means of establishing that he had vision, imagination, a capacity for taking decisive action – proof, in the words of the Stern Report, of ‘his wide-ranging approach to the publishing business’.

At the Guetersloh headquarters, Fischer asked Mohn for a private meeting. The two men retreated to Mohn’s inner office, his secretary was instructed not to let anyone pass, and Fischer brought out Heidemann’s dossier. He handed it to Mohn and drew his attention to Baur’s description of Hitler’s distress at the loss of his valuable papers. ‘We have now found them,’ he said. With considerable pride he laid the diaries before Mohn. ‘These are Hitler’s diaries.’

Mohn leafed through them. His reaction was all that Fischer had hoped it would be. ‘He was just as fascinated as we were,’ he recalled. ‘He thought it was just great.’

‘Manfred,’ said Mohn, ‘this is the most important manuscript ever to have passed across my desk.’

His initiation brought the number within Bertelsmann who knew the secret of the Hitler diaries to seven.

Three days later, on 12 March, Fischer signed a contract with Thomas Walde similar to the one agreed with Gerd Heidemann. Walde’s share of the profits would be a royalty of 4 per cent of book sales up to 10,000 copies, 4.8 per cent up to 50,000, and 6 per cent thereafter; from the sale of syndication rights he would receive 24 per cent of the gross revenue. His advance was 10,000 marks. Like Heidemann, he retained the right to veto the involvement of other historians on the project.

On 2 April, a small drinks party was held on board Carin II to celebrate the way things were going. Manfred Fischer and Jan Hensmann arrived at about 6 p.m. to find Heidemann, Walde and Sorge already waiting for them. For Fischer and Hensmann, this was their first visit to the yacht. Heidemann showed them around, pointing out his various treasures. ‘He showed me Goering’s shoehorn,’ remembered Fischer, ‘and the big loo, installed because Goering had such a big backside.’ To Hensmann, the yacht ‘gave the impression of being clean and cared for’. After the tour, the men sat around drinking whisky and soda for two hours discussing their triumph. Heidemann was particularly excited. His discovery, he said, would ‘make the world hold its breath’.

But already the first doubts about the diaries were beginning to be expressed. Contrary to the agreed policy of strict secrecy, despite his repeated and melodramatic warnings that disclosure would jeopardize human life, Heidemann could not resist showing off his great scoop. Reading through one of the first volumes Kujau delivered, covering the first six months of 1933, he came across references to the Führer’s élite troops, the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. Bursting with excitement he decided to contact a founder member of the Leibstandarte – his old friend Wilhelm Mohnke. In the spring of 1981 Heidemann rang the former SS general to tell him he had the first three diaries. ‘I’ll show you them,’ he said to Mohnke. ‘There are things about you in them.’ Mohnke, who three months earlier, on the day of Doenitz’s funeral, had disparaged the whole notion of ‘Hitler diaries’, hurried round to Heidemann’s flat on the Elbchaussee where he was shown a ‘black book’. He was unable to decipher the writing so Heidemann read out the relevant entries:

Heidemann recited these banalities – typical of the diaries as a whole – and asked Mohnke for his opinion. Mohnke was not impressed.

Heidemann listened to this apparently devastating judgement with equanimity. He had long ceased operating on a rational wavelength: doubts about the diaries’ authenticity were something he was not programmed to receive. ‘Perhaps,’ he suggested to Mohnke, ‘Adolf Hitler planned all that and was putting his thoughts down on paper.’

He was equally unperturbed when, in the spring of 1981, Eberhard Jaeckel published his apology in Germany’s leading historical journal, admitting that documents in his collected edition of Hitler’s early writings were forged. Jaeckel kept his word and did not name Stiefel personally – he described the documents as having ‘been in the hands of a private collector, totally unknown to the public’ – but he conceded that the doubts which had been expressed about their authenticity were ‘justified’. This was not only embarrassing to Jaeckel. It was also embarrassing to Stern. When Jaeckel’s book had first appeared, the magazine had paid him 3000 marks to reprint the Hitler poems under the title Rhymes from ‘H’: Kujau’s handiwork had thus been published in the magazine for the first time two and a half years before the launch of the diaries. Was it possible, wondered Walde, that the diaries came from the same source as the poems? Heidemann was dispatched to the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich to copy the forged documents and check if they too had originated from the Boernersdorf crash. Heidemann did not bother to contact Jaeckel. Instead he sent the documents directly to Kujau for him to inspect, then rang him a few weeks later to ask if he had ever seen them before. Kujau, not surprisingly, said he hadn’t and Heidemann reported back to Walde that there was no need for them to worry.

The publication of Jaeckel’s apology stirred Kujau to another act of forgery. All the doubts about the authenticity of the poems stemmed from the fact that ‘Der Kamerad’ was not the work of Hitler and could not have been copied by him because it was not written until 1936. Kujau attempted to calm the fears of Fritz Stiefel on this point by forging a letter, dated 18 May 1981, purportedly sent by a librarian at the East German ‘State Archive for Literature’ to his brother, ‘General Fischer’:

If Heidemann had bothered to check with Jaeckel, or if Jaeckel had troubled himself to speak to Stern about the forged poems, Kujau’s activities would almost certainly have been exposed. As it was, his victims once again played into his hands and Kujau was allowed to carry on his lucrative business for another two years.

THIRTEEN

ON 13 MAY 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot and wounded in an assassination attempt in St Peter’s Square in Rome. When the news came through in the Stern building in Hamburg, there was an immediate editorial conference. This dramatic story had all the ingredients the magazine specialized in: violence, personal tragedy, conspiracy, espionage, international crisis, vivid pictures – Stern threw all its resources into reporting the evept. Someone with experience of foreign investigations should go to Turkey, home of the would-be assassin. The ideal choice was Heidemann. Had anyone seen him? Where was Heidemann these days?

Henri Nannen had stepped down from the day-to-day editing of Stern at the beginning of the year to become the magazine’s publisher. A triumvirate of editors-in-chief had replaced him: Peter Koch, responsible for politics, economics and foreign affairs; Felix Schmidt, in charge of the arts, entertainment and leisure sections; and a design expert, Rolf Gillhausen. Koch had already spent several fruitless sessions with Heidemann trying to force him to do some normal journalism for a change. Now, Schmidt undertook to track him down. He rang Thomas Walde, Heidemann’s departmental head. Walde said the reporter was not available. ‘I don’t care where he is,’ shouted Schmidt. ‘Get him into my office.’ In exasperation, he went to consult Nannen. ‘Who is Heidemann working for?’ he demanded. ‘The editors or the publishing company?’ Nannen said that obviously he worked for the editors and advised Schmidt and Koch to complain to the management.

Meanwhile, three floors above them, uncertain as to what he should do, Walde was speaking to Wilfried Sorge. Because Manfred Fischer was away the two men approached his deputy, Jan Hensmann, and explained the problem. Hensmann’s objective was a quiet life. His advice was that Heidemann should feign illness; Walde could then lie to the editors and tell them that Heidemann was on sick leave. Neither of the journalists was enthusiastic about this idea. With great reluctance, Hensmann finally accepted that the time had come to inform the lucky editors of the scoop the management was acquiring for them. The diaries were fetched from the safe and arranged in a pile on a small table in the corner of his office. Hensmann then rang Koch, the most senior of the editors, and asked him to come upstairs.

Koch’s first reaction on being shown the diaries was one of anger at having been deceived by the management. He rang down to Schmidt and Gillhausen in the Stern offices below and told them to come up and join him. Schmidt arrived a few minutes later to find his colleague ‘bent over a pile of A4-sized books. Koch said to me that they were the diaries of Adolf Hitler and that Heidemann had got them.’ Like almost everyone else in the company, they were unable to read the antiquated script. They could only concentrate on the diaries’ external features. Gillhausen noted that most of the books had a ‘black cover’, ‘a red cord and a red seal’, and a note pasted on the front ‘on which either Hess or Bormann had written that these books were the property of the Führer’. Hensmann said that Heidemann was not available for normal journalistic work because he was acquiring the books on the management’s behalf. Large sums of money had been paid. Absolute secrecy was necessary.

The editors retreated to Koch’s office to digest this information. Their reactions were mixed. There was unanimous resentment at the way they had been treated: five months into their new jobs it did not augur well for the future. On the other hand, the editors did not have the slightest doubt that the books were genuine. They had to be. Over half a million marks had already been spent. It was impossible to conceive of the shrewd, conservative, financially cautious managers of Gruner and Jahr investing in anything unless they were absolutely certain of its value. The three had to accept that if they rejected the diaries, they risked going down in history as the editors who threw away one of the biggest scoops since the war.

That point was made with brutal frankness a couple of days later, when Manfred Fischer returned and chaired a joint meeting of journalists and businessmen to review the whole project. Koch, Schmidt and Gillhausen faced Heidemann, Walde, Sorge and Hensmann. Fischer was not in the least apologetic for having circumvented the editors. As far as he was concerned their inept handling of Heidemann had almost lost the company this tremendous coup. He had no doubts about the authenticity of the diaries. ‘Do you think,’ he inquired, ‘that I would have committed so much money if I were not convinced?’ If Stern did not want the diaries, they could be marketed elsewhere: Bertelsmann could exploit the world rights; Bantam Books could handle the American publication. Heidemann scarcely opened his mouth. It was Fischer who explained the story of the East German general and his brother in the West whose identity could not be revealed. The three editors listened without enthusiasm. Humiliated and offended by the management’s behaviour, their attitude to Heidemann’s great scoop was, and would remain for many months, one of sullen acquiescence.

On 27 May, Heidemann crossed the border into East Germany and returned to Boernersdorf. This time he was on his own. He wanted to discover more about the crashed transport plane. He found some eyewitnesses to the disaster. Helda Fries, wife of a local hotel owner, described how the plane fell out of the sky, clipping the tops of the trees in the nearby Heidenholz forest. One of its three engines was wrenched off before it hit the ground. Richard Elbe, a local farmer who had been in the fields in charge of some Russian and French slave labourers, was the first to reach the burning wreck. Bullets were exploding, people trapped inside were screaming and hammering to get out. In front of them, one survivor, Franz Westermeier, crawled out of the chaos. ‘Come here you cowardly dogs,’ Elbe recalled him shouting. ‘Come here. You are just too scared.’ But the heat was too intense for the rescuers to get close. A farmworker, said Elbe, called Eduard Grimme later pulled the corpses from the wreckage. ‘They didn’t look like people any more. The arms were gone and the legs and everything else was charred.’ The remains were examined in the local morgue by a German medical officer. On one body was a cigarette case embossed with the symbol of Lufthansa and the words: ‘In memory of 500,000 kilometres flying.’ It had belonged to Gundlfinger. The remains of the plane were cordoned off by German police and SS men. But according to Erwin Goebel, son of the mayor at that time, ‘many people managed to salvage parts from the aircraft and got richer for it, soldiers included.’ Debris and pieces of luggage were scattered all over the forest. Richard Elbe had carried off two cockpit windows and used them to build part of a shed.

It was all very insubstantial – fragments of gossip, hazily recalled thirty-six years after the event. Nevertheless, it was something for Heidemann to grasp at. He bought the two old windows off Elbe and carted them back with him to Hamburg where he showed them off as further proof of the story.

On 1 June he received a further 225,000 marks. Shortly afterwards he returned from Stuttgart with more books. There were now twelve Hitler diaries in the management safe.

In May, Manfred Fischer had let another member of the publishing company’s management into the secret of the diaries’ existence. He was Dr Andreas Ruppert, Gruner and Jahr’s legal adviser. Fischer wanted his opinion of the legality of the whole project. Would Stern be able to publish the diaries? Who owned the copyright?

Ruppert reported back that determining ownership of Hitler’s estate was complex, indeed almost impossible. Hitler’s property, together with 5 million marks owed to him by the publishers of Mein Kampf, was confiscated, after a court case, by the State of Bavaria in 1948. Hitler’s will was declared invalid and in 1951, the Bavarian authorities seized personal objects bequeathed by Hitler to his housekeeper to prevent her selling them. But the following year they had been unable to prevent the appearance of Hitler’s Table Talk: the state apparently owned rights in Hitler’s literary estate only as far as published material was concerned; previously unpublished material fell outside their control. It was impossible to predict how the Bavarians or the Federal Government would react to news of the diaries’ existence. The situation was further complicated by the fact that various private deals had been arranged with Hitler’s descendants. François Genoud, the Swiss lawyer and ex-Nazi, had signed an agreement with Paula, Hitler’s sister, shortly after the war. But Paula was long since dead. Meanwhile, the West German historian, Werner Maser, had a separate contract to act as a trustee for the Hitler family. It was decided, as a first step towards securing ownership of the diaries, to make a deal with Maser.

Maser was a controversial figure. Ten years previously he had written a bestselling biography of Hitler, translated into twenty languages, which was regarded as having dwelt, at suspicious length, on the positive aspects of Hitler’s character and achievements. In 1977 he had written a book attacking the Allied handling of the Nuremberg Trials, stating that, in many instances, the hanged war criminals were victims of a miscarriage of justice. His relations with the left-wing Stern were strained. The magazine therefore approached him through his former assistant, Michael Hepp. According to Maser:

Heidemann arrived at Maser’s home in Speyer, near Heidelberg, on 11 June. Without mentioning the diaries, he asked the historian to sell him the rights to any original Hitler material which he had already discovered or might discover in the future. After a week’s haggling over terms, a handwritten contract was drawn up and signed on 18 June:

Heidemann then opened a suitcase and pulled out a bundle of money. He counted out twenty-two 1000-mark notes and handed them to Maser.

After delivering the twelfth diary, Heidemann suddenly announced a price increase. Instead of costing 85,000 marks each, the books would now cost 100,000 marks. The East German general, he told the Stern management, was insisting on more money: to continue supplying the books, he was having to bribe an increasing number of corrupt communist officials. This news was a disappointment to the company. They had originally expected to have all the books in Hamburg by mid-May; instead, by mid-June, they had less than half. But they certainly did not want to jeopardize the project at such a late stage. They had no alternative but to agree to pay. Not once did they suspect where the additional cash was really going.

After years of living in debt, Heidemann was now awash with money. Over the following months he and Gina went on a spending spree impressive even by Hamburg’s wealthy standards. In one of the city’s department stores he bought 37,000 marks’ worth of furnishings to renovate their flat; he produced the money from his jacket pocket with the bank’s seal still on the bundles. At the Luehrs travel agency he put down 27,000 marks in cash on the counter and booked firstclass cabins for himself and his family on the maiden voyage of the luxury liner Astor. The staff had no difficulty in describing the event to the police in 1983 – years later they could still remember the difficulty they had trying to stuff all Heidemann’s money into the till. Gina got two cars – a convertible BMW 318 for 32,000 marks and a Porsche 911 for 26,000. The Heidemanns eventually moved into larger accommodation on the Elbchaussee, Hamburg’s most exclusive street: not content with one, they rented two apartments. A fortune went on jewellery and carpets.

Inflated by Stern’s money, Heidemann’s compulsion to collect Nazi memorabilia ballooned out of control. Some of it was presumably genuine, like Karl Wolff’s SS honour dagger, for which Heidemann paid the old general 30,000 marks. Most of it, however, came from Konrad Kujau. It included a swastika banner which Kujau passed off as the ‘Blood Flag’, the famous symbol of Hitler’s abortive beer hall putsch of 1923, preserved on Hitler’s orders like a holy relic in honour of the sixteen Nazi ‘martyrs’ killed that day. In reality, Heidemann’s ‘Blood Flag’ was simply an ordinary swastika banner – of which there are thousands in existence – to which Kujau had added his usual forged authentication. The swastika was in an old glass case upon which was glued a note: ‘As the condition of the flag has suffered greatly in the years of confiscation it is shown in the flag hall of the Brownhouse behind glass. According to the wishes of the Führer.’

Heidemann also received from Kujau three hundred oil paintings, sketches and watercolours supposedly by Hitler; Nazi Party uniforms, flags and postcards; and 120 so-called Hitler documents. In addition, he acquired what he believed to be the actual revolver which Hitler had used to shoot himself. Attached to it was a label in Martin Bormann’s handwriting stating that ‘with this pistol, the Führer took his own life’. Heidemann proudly showed it to Wilhelm Mohnke and Otto Guensche. The gun was one of the most palpable fakes in his collection: it was a Belgian FN, whereas Hitler was known to have used a much heavier weapon, a 7.65 millimetre Walther. Both men said as much to Heidemann. Guensche, in particular, was in a position to know. He had helped carry the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun out of the bunker. Indeed he had actually picked up the suicide weapon from the bunker floor where it had slipped from Hitler’s fingers. But as with the diaries, Heidemann could not be swayed from his belief in its authenticity. He seemed to read great significance into the fact that only one of the revolver’s bullets had been fired.

Heidemann felt that such treasures should be exhibited in a setting worthy of their value. During his meetings with Werner Maser in June he raised the possibility of buying Hitler’s childhood home in Leonding. Maser, who knew the area well from his earlier researches, offered to help. On 1 July, the historian and his wife, together with Heidemann and Gina, drove into Austria where Maser had arranged a meeting with the Bürgermeister and town council of Leonding. According to Maser:

As part of their tour that summer, the Heidemanns and the Masers also visited Berchtesgaden where they spent a while poking around in the rubble.

The idea of buying the house in Leonding was not a mere whim. Heidemann was serious. After his return to Hamburg, on 13 July, he wrote to the town council to repeat his proposal ‘once again in writing’. Hitler’s childhood home, said Heidemann, ‘always meant more to him than his birthplace in Braunau’:

The town council met to discuss Heidemann’s offer three days later. Despite his assurances that his Hitler museum would be ‘strictly factual’ there was something about the reporter and his proposal which the burghers of Leonding found faintly sinister. Heidemann’s scheme was rejected.

Thwarted in his plan to install his collection in Leonding, Heidemann had a new idea. He decided to investigate the possibility of moving his Hitler memorabilia to South America and in the summer of 1981, he sought the advice of Klaus Barbie.

Heidemann had met Barbie in Bolivia two years previously, during his honeymoon tour with Gina and General Wolff. The two men had enjoyed a friendly relationship. Unfortunately, from Heidemann’s point of view, a year after his return, in October 1980, Stern had decided to salvage at least something from the trip which they had financed. There had been a military coup in Bolivia in which Barbie, correctly, was suspected of having played a part. Despite strong opposition from Heidemann, the transcript of his interview with ‘the Butcher of Lyons’ had been used by another reporter as the basis for an article entitled ‘New Power for Old Nazis’. The piece depicted Barbie as a brutal SS torturer. Barbie had not been pleased.

Hoping for a reconciliation, Heidemann wrote to him on 22 August 1981. He sent his condolences on the recent death of Barbie’s son. ‘I am very sorry’, he added, ‘that I have also caused you some sorrow.’ He then explained how the transcript of their interview had been taken off him by Stern’s editors and given ‘a completely different slant’:

There is no record of Barbie’s reply.

FOURTEEN

ON 1 JULY Manfred Fischer left Hamburg to take up his new appointment in Guetersloh as managing director of Bertelsmann. He was now in the first rank of European executives, controlling a company with an annual turnover of more than $2 billion. Bertelsmann had expanded so rapidly during the 1970s, growing by as much as 15 per cent a year, that its capital base had become thin; a period of retrenchment was required. Mohn had decided that Fischer was the best man to oversee this new policy: he did so on the basis of Fischer’s reputation as a cost cutter. Similarly, to replace Fischer at Gruner and Jahr, Mohn chose another businessman supposedly with an ability to enforce stringent economy.

Gerd Schulte-Hillen was only forty years old. After leaving school he had spent a year in the Bundeswehr, then qualified as an engineer, joining Bertelsmann in 1969. He was promoted rapidly, from assistant manager in Germany, to technical manager of printing plants in Spain and Portugal. He was put in charge of printing for the whole of Gruner and Jahr and built a huge new factory for the group in the United States. Schulte-Hillen’s appointment as managing director came as something of a surprise. He was a highly respected technician, but he had little experience of handling journalists, of whom he was felt to be slightly in awe. He was quickly initiated into Gruner and Jahr’s great secret. ‘I think it was in June 1981,’ he recalled, ‘that Dr Manfred Fischer swore me to secrecy and then told me that the Hitler diaries were being bought by the company.’

He was soon deeply involved in the operation. On 29 July, Heidemann received 345,000 marks for the next batch of diaries. A week later, on 5 August, he picked up another 220,000 marks. This meant that since January he had removed a total of six suitcases full of cash from the Deutsche Bank, containing 1.81 million marks. There were now eighteen diaries in the management safe.

The next day, Hensmann and Sorge went to see the new managing director in his office. Before any further payments could be made, they explained, Schulte-Hillen had to sign a fresh authorization for the transfer of the company’s funds. Without hesitation, he signed a document endorsing Sorge to use another i million marks of the company’s money. According to Schulte-Hillen:

Manfred Fischer, the man who had initiated the operation, was 150 miles away, grappling with the day to day running of a multinational company. Schulte-Hillen, a relatively inexperienced businessman in a new job with little experience of journalism, was merely carrying on what Fischer had started. Hensmann was a weak man. The finance director, Kuehsel, did what he was told. Sorge’s objectivity was compromised by his friendship with Thomas Walde. Walde and Heidemann, both expecting to make a fortune when the books were published, were the last men to call a halt to the delivery of the diaries. The editors were sulkily refusing to show much interest in the management’s scoop.

The whole project was out of control.

The only person who seemed to be showing any financial sense was Edith Lieblang in Stuttgart. She took charge of the envelopes full of cash which Heidemann was delivering and invested them in bricks and mortar. When it came to money, she said firmly, ‘We didn’t have “mine” and “yours”.’ In May the couple bought a new apartment in Wolfschlugen for 235,000 marks, together with a garage for 18,000 marks. In July she paid 230,000 marks for a flat in Schreiberstrasse. This was on the ground floor of a substantial, heavy masonried, four-storey block, tucked away at the end of a quiet street near the centre of Stuttgart. Schreiberstrasse became Kujau’s new shop. He bought a large building at the back for 120,000 marks, installed heavy steel shutters and a security camera to scan the courtyard, and transferred to it his entire collection from Aspergstrasse. He hired a local taxi company to do the removals.

Kujau continued to work on the diaries during the day at home. Edith knew he was supplying Hitler diaries to Stern but claimed, somewhat implausibly, that she thought they were genuine: she did not know, she said, what Kujau was up to during the day when she was out working at the Café Hochland. ‘I don’t know what he did in my absence. I rarely went into his workroom. He used to clean it himself.’

Once he had done the research, it took Kujau, on average, only four and a half hours to forge a complete diary. His favourite source was a weighty, two-volume edition of Hitler’s Speeches and Proclamations 1932–45, a daily chronology of the Führer’s activities, compiled in 1962 by the German historian Max Domarus. Working against the clock to satisfy Heidemann’s demand for diaries, Kujau resorted to wholesale plagiarism, copying out page after page from Domarus. The Hitler Diaries – the object of one of the most extravagant ‘hypes’ in the history of journalism – were for the most part nothing more interesting than a tedious recital of official engagements and Nazi party announcements. Nine-tenths of the material being so carefully hoarded in the Gruner and Jahr safe was unpublishable. These, for example, are the entries for the first seven days of September 1938 – a typically uninspired week in the life of the Führer, as recorded by Konrad Kujau:

1. The Reich Air Defence Federation received its own insignia and flag. The founding of the ‘Federation for the unity of Germany and Poland’ was today announced by the Polish Prime Minister.

2. Opening of the exhibition ‘Great Germany’ in Japan (telegram). A youth delegation from Japan is received in Munich by Schirach (telegram).

Reception at the Berghof for Henlein. Conference.

3. Admiral Horthy has kept his word. As from today there is compulsory military service in Hungary.

4. Opening of the Party Rally ‘Great Germany’.

Reception in the Nuremberg town hall.

5. Opening of the Party Congress. Proclamation. Handing over of Reich insignia to the mayor of the town of Nuremberg. A cultural meeting.

6. Call to the Reichs Labour Service. Diplomatic reception in the Hotel Deutscher Hof.

The bulk of the diaries, especially the early ones, consisted of padding of this sort – a technique which reached a pinnacle of improbability in the entry for 19 July 1940, when Hitler was supposed to have devoted five pages to copying out the entire list of senior promotions in the German armed forces following the fall of France.

At the end of each month’s entries, Kujau had ‘Hitler’ write a set of more general notes headed ‘Personal’. It was in these sections of the diary, unfettered by chronology and so less vulnerable to checks for accuracy, that Kujau allowed the Führer to think aloud about the state of his affairs. There were occasional revelations: that the burning of the books in May 1933 ‘was not a good idea of Goebbels”; that some of ‘the measures against the Jews were too strong for me’. But overall, the tone remained relentlessly trivial. Health was one recurrent theme: ‘My health is poorly – the result of too little sleep’ (April 1933); ‘I suffer much from sleeplessness and stomach pains’ (June 1934); ‘My stomach makes it difficult to sleep, my left leg is often numb’ (July 1934). Eva Braun was another regular source of concern: ‘Although I have become Reichs Chancellor, I have not forgotten E’s birthday’ (January 1933); ‘She is the sporty type – it has helped her very much to be in the fresh air’ (October 1934). Occasionally, as in June 1941, these twin preoccupations met: ‘On Eva’s wishes, I am thoroughly examined by my doctors. Because of the new pills, I have violent flatulence, and – says Eva – bad breath.’ It was for material of this sort that Stern was to end up paying roughly £50 per word.

Kujau turned out the diaries so quickly that he had soon exhausted the stock of school notebooks in his cellar. In the summer of 1981 he flew to West Berlin, crossed into the East, and in a taxi travelled from shop to shop, buying up the old-fashioned, black-bound volumes. He returned home the same day bearing twenty-two of them. The whole lot cost him 77 marks.

Shortly afterwards Kujau passed on to Heidemann some wonderful news from his brother in East Germany. Contrary to their initial estimate, it now appeared that there were more than twenty-seven diaries. The haul of Hitler writings salvaged from the Boernersdorf crash was much larger than had been thought.

Heidemann returned to Hamburg to tell Gruner and Jahr of this latest development.

On 23 August, less than two and a half weeks after he had been asked to authorize payment of i million marks, Schulte-Hillen had to sanction a second transfer of money, this time of 600,000 marks. Heidemann reported that the price of the diaries had shot up to 200,000 marks each. The East German general, he said, was now having to pay money to members of the Communist government as well as to other corrupt officials. The company once again felt that it had no option but to pay up. Indeed, perversely, the price rise increased the company’s confidence that the diaries were genuine. ‘We weren’t surprised,’ said one of the managers later. ‘In fact, we expected it. Once you’ve bought part of a collection, you naturally want the rest. It’s worth that much more to you. The seller knows that and takes advantage of it. It’s normal commercial practice.’

Schulte-Hillen was hopelessly out of his depth. Every so often, Heidemann would come into his office, escorted by Sorge, and read extracts from the latest diaries out loud to him. The banality of the content meant nothing to the technically minded managing director. ‘I didn’t concern myself with the question of whether they were sensational or not. That wasn’t my affair.’ For Schulte-Hillen, struggling to read himself into his new job, the diaries were an exotic project bequeathed to him by his predecessor. ‘I didn’t really worry about the details,’ he confessed. ‘Sorge and Walde were Heidemann’s principal points of reference.’

Heidemann now began fantasizing about his role as middleman between Stern and the diaries’ supplier. Simply flying down to Stuttgart, handing over the money and picking up the diaries did not accord with his vision of himself as a sleuth reporter. He decided to glamorize the story. ‘I remember a very hot day in the summer,’ said Walde later. ‘Gerd Heidemann arrived in the office in a blue suit looking unusually worked-up.’ According to Heidemann, the lorry driver who used to bring the diaries out of East Germany had been replaced. Heidemann said he was now having to drive into the East himself and smuggle the documents illegally over the border. ‘The whole thing seemed very dangerous to him,’ said Walde. ‘He didn’t know what to do when he got to the frontier. He just put the envelope containing the diary under the car’s mat.’

For the benefit of Schulte-Hillen, Heidemann further elaborated on the story. He told the managing director that he would drive down the autobahn to Berlin. At an agreed point on the journey, another car would draw alongside him with its passenger window open. With both cars travelling at the same speed, Heidemann would toss the packet of money through the open window. The vehicles would then exchange positions and the driver of the other car would throw him the diaries. The managing director had never heard anything like it. He told Heidemann he was ‘crazy’: ‘I said he shouldn’t do it, especially in view of his family responsibilities.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ Schulte-Hillen remembers Heidemann telling him, ‘I’ll do it.’

Despite his misgivings for Heidemann’s safety, Schulte-Hillen was impressed, and now treated the reporter with even greater respect. He would not hear a word said against him. He would rebuke anyone who expressed doubts about Heidemann’s heroism: ‘When a colleague puts himself in personal danger in order to obtain things,’ he used to say, ‘he should be entitled to the trust of others.’ When Heidemann complained to Sorge that his own car was too dilapidated for this kind of work and that he was having to use Gina’s, Schulte-Hillen arranged for him to be given a brand new company Mercedes.

In fact, Gruner and Jahr had a strong motive for believing Heidemann’s story. If they could swear on oath that the money for the diaries had been paid outside West Germany, they would enjoy substantial tax concessions. In November, there was a month-long series of negotiations to provide Heidemann with a special life insurance policy at Gruner and Jahr’s expense. Heidemann insisted on a clause providing for the payment of ransom money in case they should have to buy him out of an East German jail. In the event of his death, his share in the profits from Hitler’s diaries was to be given to his heirs. Heidemann joked that this generous policy might induce his wife to ‘separation, Italian style’. This farce carried on until the first week of December, when Heidemann announced that the piano shipments had resumed.

Around this time Heidemann also complained to Schulte-Hillen that he had not received a salary increase for several years. He hinted that he might be forced to leave the company unless something was done. The managing director immediately called in Peter Koch, Felix Schmidt and Rolf Gillhausen and instructed them, in Koch’s words, ‘to take better care of Heidemann, to motivate him more’. The editors had not recommended Heidemann for a rise because they had not thought his work merited one. Now, under pressure, they once again started paying him regular annual increments. Schmidt was also told by Schulte-Hillen to give Heidemann a special bonus payment of 20,000 marks. ‘The man needs recognition,’ Schulte-Hillen told him, ‘and he needs to be treated with special care.’ Schmidt gritted his teeth and arranged this reward for the reporter who had spent a whole year deceiving his editors. ‘Recognition… special care….’ ‘These words of the management’, said Schmidt two years later, ‘still ring in my ears.’

Heidemann’s fiftieth birthday coincided with a call from Kujau to tell him that more diaries were ready for collection. Heidemann decided to take Gina down to Stuttgart with him and the couple spent the evening of 3 December having a celebration dinner with Kujau and Edith in the local Holiday Inn, close to the Munich motorway exit. It was the first time all four of them had been together. They got on well; Gina particularly liked Edith – ‘a very nice lady,’ she called her, ‘very bourgeois’. There was champagne, and at midnight the gregarious ‘Dr Fischer’ led them in the singing of ‘Happy Birthday’. Amid warm embraces, Gina presented her husband with a solid gold Rolex watch.

It had been a good year for the couple. Heidemann had at last found the recognition he craved so desperately. Soon he would be able to present the world with his magnificent story and he and Gina would be wealthy for life. The Heidemanns beamed at Kujau, the source of their good fortune. ‘We owe you so much,’ said Gina. Kujau grinned.

FIFTEEN

THE NEW YEAR of 1982 witnessed further large withdrawals of cash from the Adolphsplatz bank by Gerd Heidemann: 400,000 marks on 14 January; 200,000 on 27 January; 200,000 on 17 February. On 1 March, after picking up another 400,000 marks, he and Walde were taken out to dine at Hamburg’s Coelln Oyster Restaurant by Gerd Schulte-Hillen.

According to Walde, the purpose of the meal was for Schulte-Hillen ‘to show some recognition to Heidemann and to get to know me better’. Between mouthfuls of oysters, the three men discussed the Hitler diaries. There were already more than two dozen volumes in the management safe. There seemed no sign of an end to the stream of books emanating from behind the Iron Curtain. Even so, the time was approaching when decisions would have to be taken about the form of publication. Obviously there would be those who would seek to denigrate Stern’s scoop. Some form of independent authentication would have to be obtained – not because there were any doubts about the material in the management’s mind, merely to ensure there was a weapon available with which critics could be silenced.

Walde had already made contact with West Germany’s two main police organizations, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) and the Zollkriminalinstitut. Without mentioning the Hitler diaries specifically, he asked them in general terms what sort of tests had to be done to determine the age of documents and the authenticity of handwriting; who could do such tests; how much they might cost; what materials the experts would require for testing. ‘Because neither of these two authorities does work for private individuals, I tried to arrange for people who work there to do tests for us in a private capacity.’ He had then rung the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and the Federal Archives – the Bundesarchiv – in Koblenz, to make arrangements to collect copies of Hitler’s handwriting; this could then be sent to the experts for comparison with Stern’s material. It should be possible to organize such tests within the next few weeks.

Assuming, as they all did, that the Hitler diaries would quickly pass through the formality of authentication, Walde, Heidemann and Schulte-Hillen discussed how the books might be marketed. Their discovery was a scoop, but their content, it had to be admitted, was meagre. Each diary contained an average of only 1000 words. Added together, Gruner and Jahr’s two dozen volumes scarcely added up to a couple of chapters, never mind a book. The three men agreed that the material could not be printed as it stood. It would have to be ‘journalistically worked on’, setting quotations from the diary in their historical context. This would have to be done whilst the diaries were still arriving, in complete secrecy and without outside help – an enormous undertaking, especially since neither Heidemann nor Walde was a qualified historian.

Two days after the meeting with Schulte-Hillen, on Wednesday 3 March, Walde and Wilfried Sorge were invited round for the evening to Heidemann’s flat. The reporter wanted them to meet an important contact of his who could provide Stern with important Nazi documents. According to Sorge Heidemann said ‘he needed our presence if he was to appear to be negotiating seriously on Stern’s behalf’. That night in the elegant Elbchaussee apartment they were confronted by a seedy and furtive character in his mid-fifties, whom Heidemann introduced as Medard Klapper.

Medardus Leopold Karl Klapper exerted a hold over Heidemann similar to that exercised by Konrad Kujau. He spun large and elaborate fantasies about the Third Reich in which Heidemann believed and in which he invested large sums of Stern’s money. Klapper claimed to have joined the SS in 1944 at the age of seventeen and to have been one of Hitler’s bodyguards in the final days of the war. He was now an arms dealer in Karlsruhe in southern Germany. Apart from the Nazis, Klapper’s other obsession was with cowboys and Indians: his shop in Karlsruhe, called The General Gun Store, was designed to look as if it belonged in the American wild west. Heidemann had made his acquaintance in 1971 when he was working on crime stories for Stern. Klapper was a police informer. Like Kujau, Klapper dealt in Nazi memorabilia and occasionally ran a stall selling militaria in the Flea Market in Konstanz. When Heidemann was short of money in the late 1970s Klapper had sold a few Goering mementoes on his behalf: a French collector bought a silver cigarette case and some silver picture frames for 20,000 francs.

Klapper’s speciality was buried Nazi treasure. He promised Heidemann he could lead him to a hoard of enormous value. It would not only provide the reporter with a great story for Stern, it would also make him rich. On 19 August 1981 – shortly after the collapse of his attempts to buy Hitler’s childhood home – Heidemann opened up his suitcase to Klapper, paying him 25,000 marks in cash. ‘He said he now had money “like it was growing on trees”,’ recalled Klapper. ‘He showed me his pocket which was stuffed with 1000-mark notes.’ In return for the money, Klapper provided Heidemann with a photocopy of a map, purporting to show the whereabouts of 450 kilos of gold and platinum, dumped by the Nazis at the end of the war in the Stolpsee, a lake in East Germany. A few weeks later, Heidemann signed an agreement with some East German representatives. He put up an undisclosed amount of money in return for which the East Germans promised to provide the manpower to search the Stolpsee; the proceeds would be split fifty-fifty. Eventually forty engineers from the East German army equipped with tons of dredging machinery were involved in searching the lake; all they sucked out of the water, Heidemann later complained to Klapper, was 350 cubic metres of mud.

Undeterred, Heidemann continued to believe the arms dealer’s stories. Confiscated receipts suggest that over the next eighteen months he paid him almost 450,000 marks. In particular, he believed the gun salesman’s claim that Martin Bormann was still alive: this story, after all, accorded with his own, earlier obsession of 1979. Klapper played on Heidemann’s gullibility, assuring him that eventually he would take him to ‘Martin’. According to him, Bormann led a nomadic existence, shuttling between hideouts in Argentina, Paraguay, Spain, Egypt and Zurich (where he was being watched by the Israeli secret service). Klapper told Heidemann that if he was willing to undergo a secret ceremony called a ‘Sippung’, he would be admitted to Martin’s inner circle. As far as Heidemann was concerned, Klapper was clearly a very important individual indeed, which was why he wanted to introduce him to Herr Walde and Herr Sorge, his colleagues from Stern.

Klapper was more restrained in his storytelling when there were others present than he was when he had Heidemann on his own. He told Sorge and Walde that Bormann had set up a secret Nazi archive in Madrid, administered by a Spanish lawyer named Dr Iquisabel. Among other things, these documents allegedly proved that the Germans had built three atomic bombs by the end of the war. These documents could be made available to Stern, free of charge, providing the magazine agreed to deal with the material ‘objectively’. Walde and Heidemann signed a contract promising to abide by this undertaking and in return Klapper pledged to deliver the documents from ‘Dr Iquisabel’ by the end of the month.

Needless to say, nothing came of this agreement. But Klapper maintained contact with Heidemann and the reporter continued to believe his stories: for example, that he had met Bormann and Josef Mengele at Madrid airport and that Bormann lived in a big house with a garden and a car park in Zurich. Heidemann gradually became certain that through Klapper he was talking to Bormann, and that ‘Martin’ had chosen him to be his intermediary with the outside world. This fantasy became inextricably linked in Heidemann’s mind with the discovery of the Hitler diaries until, by April 1983, when Stern eventually launched its scoop, Heidemann confidently believed that Bormann himself would appear at the magazine’s press conference to authenticate them.

While Heidemann pursued these shadows from the Third Reich, Thomas Walde organized the submission of the diaries for expert analysis.

This should have been the moment at which Kujau’s fraud was exposed. The forger, after all, had failed to take even the most rudimentary precautions. The diaries were written in ordinary school notebooks stained with tea. The initials on the front of at least one volume were made of plastic. The labels, signed by Bormann and Hess, stating that the books were ‘the property of the Führer’ were supposed to span thirteen years but were all typed on the same machine. The diaries’ pages were made of paper manufactured after 1945. The binding, glue and thread which held them together all contained chemicals which proved them to be postwar. The entries themselves, dashed off by a man with no academic training, were pitted with inaccuracies. The ink in which they were written was bought from an ordinary artists’ shop. Logically, the Hitler diaries hoax should have collapsed in the spring of 1982, the moment the experts started work. Instead, Kujau was once again saved from exposure by the behaviour of his victims.

Inside Stern, the idea that the diaries might be forgeries was unthinkable. The project had been allowed to reach a stage where cancellation would ruin careers and cost millions of marks; successful completion, on the other hand, would bring the participants enormous financial and professional rewards. From the start the Stern men had been prepared to suspend disbelief, to have faith that the books were genuine. Now, subconsciously, their minds had become closed to any other possibility. All of them, from Manfred Fischer and Gerd Schulte-Hillen downwards, had a vested interest in the diaries passing the experts’ scrutiny as great as Konrad Kujau’s: the trickster and his dupes were on the same side.

If Stern had been properly sceptical, the magazine would have commissioned a thorough forensic examination of a complete diary volume. Instead, they concentrated on securing the bare minimum of authentication felt necessary to satisfy the rest of the world. The process, consequently, was flawed from the start.

‘The security precautions surrounding the authentication had to be very tight,’ recalled Walde. ‘We had to prevent word leaking out and jeopardizing the life of “Fischer’s” brother in East Germany.’ It was considered too risky to part with an entire book. A single page was cut out of the special volume devoted to the flight of Rudolf Hess which had been delivered to Stern the previous November. The page consisted of a draft, supposedly in Hitler’s hand, of the Nazi Party’s official announcement of Hess’s flight to Scotland. This tiny sample was considered sufficient to determine the authenticity of the entire hoard of diaries. The text of the Hess statement was selected for analysis because it was already well known; the diary page on which it was copied out was to be passed off simply as a hitherto undiscovered Hitler document, part of a larger find which the magazine wanted checked. None of the experts was told that what they were actually authenticating were Hitler’s diaries. This duplicity on Stern’s part, the product of its anxiety to safeguard its scoop, was to lead it to disaster.

On Monday, 5 April, Heidemann and Walde visited the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz to meet two of the archive’s senior officials, Dr Josef Henke and Dr Klaus Oldenhage. They gave them what purported to be a handwritten draft by Hitler of a New Year greetings telegram, dated i January 1940, addressed to General Franco: this was one of the documents Kujau had supplied to Heidemann along with the diaries. The two journalists told the archivists that it was one of a set of documents which Stern believed it could obtain from sources outside the Federal Republic. In return for an assurance that after Stern had finished with it the material would eventually be donated to the Bundesarchiv, Dr Henke agreed to submit the telegram to the West German police for an official handwriting and forensic analysis. The following day, Walde sent the archivists two further original documents: a speech draft dated 29 December 1934 and a letter to Hermann Goering dated 17 October 1940. These too were drawn from the archive accompanying the diaries. In a covering note, Walde stressed the need for secrecy:

Only on 7 April, in a postscript to his letter, did Walde announce that ‘Herr Heidemann and I have decided to give you a copy of a further document’. This was the Hess statement, slipped in casually among the other papers, with no suggestion that it had been cut out of a diary. Two weeks later, on 21 April, the Bundesarchiv sent all the Stern documents (three originals and one photocopy) to the regional police headquarters in Rhineland-Pfalz for a handwriting analysis. For comparison purposes, they enclosed five authentic examples of Hitler writing from their own archives. They would have to wait a month for the results.

Walde, meanwhile, had embarked on a 7000-mile round trip to commission additional experts to give their opinions. On Tuesday 13 April, accompanied by Wilfried Sorge, he flew to Switzerland to see Dr Max Frei-Sulzer, former head of the forensic department of the Zurich police. Frei-Sulzer was living in retirement in the small lakeside town of Thalwil, but was always willing to undertake freelance work. According to Walde, he advised them not to bother with a paper test: ‘With today’s technology it is possible to make paper look any age you choose.’ He agreed to conduct a handwriting analysis. Walde, swearing him to secrecy, provided him with two photocopies of documents from the Stern hoard: the Hess statement and a draft telegram to the Hungarian ruler, Admiral Horthy. As comparison material, Frei-Sulzer was supplied with the same copies of authentic Hitler writing that the Bundesarchiv had given to the Rhineland-Pfalz police. A third set of documents for comparison was provided by Gerd Heidemann from his private collection: a paper from 1943 recording the promotion of General Ewald von Kleist to the rank of Field Marshal, along with three signed Hitler photographs. Unfortunately for Frei-Sulzer, these supposedly genuine examples of the Führer’s writings were also the work of Konrad Kujau, a confusion which meant that the scientist in some instances would be comparing Kujau’s hand with Kujau’s, rather than with Hitler’s.

The following day, leaving Frei-Sulzer to begin his examination, Walde and Sorge flew from Switzerland to the United States to see a second freelance expert. They spent the night of 15 April in the Hyatt Hotel in Greenville, South Carolina, and early the following morning headed off to their final destination: the town of Landrum, an hour’s drive to the north.

Ordway Hilton, like Max Frei-Sulzer, was an elderly man, living in retirement, happy to undertake freelance work. He had been employed by the New York Police Department for almost thirty years and was a distinguished member of his own particular fraternity – a contributor to the proceedings of the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners, the American Academy of Forensic Science and the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners. Hilton now operated from his house in Landrum to which, at 10 a.m. on Friday i6 April, he welcomed his two visitors from Germany.

The American was handed the originals of the two documents copied for Frei-Sulzer: the page from the Hess volume and the telegram for Horthy, together with an accompanying folder of ‘authentic’ Hitler writing for comparison, part of which was genuine and part from Heidemann’s collection of forgeries. ‘Some bore signatures that were his or that they told me were his,’ he later recalled. ‘Some were photocopies they said came from their archives.’ Hilton promised to keep their visit secret and to deliver his verdict as quickly as possible.

Walde and Sorge began the long journey back to Hamburg unaware that the only result of their four-day mission was to botch one of Stern’s last chances of avoiding catastrophe. If only they had taken the Hess page to a practising forensic expert – for example, Dr Julius Grant, a freelance consultant based in London – they would have discovered within five hours that it contained chemicals of postwar origin and therefore had to be forged. But in their ignorance they chose to depend on the much less reliable and slower process of handwriting analysis. They compounded this error by selecting as experts two men unsuited to the task. True, Frei-Sulzer and Hilton both had international reputations – they were chosen because it was felt their approval would be an advantage in syndication negotiations in Europe and America. But Frei-Sulzer’s speciality was investigating biological microtraces, not handwriting; and Ordway Hilton was handicapped by the fact that he could not even understand the language in which the diaries were written. Neither man was a specialist in Nazi documents. In 1983, an expert who was – Charles Hamilton, a New York autograph dealer – estimated that on the American market only Abraham Lincoln’s signature commands a greater price than Hitler’s. A page of the Führer’s writing might fetch $15,000 and no man’s autograph is more commonly forged: Hamilton reckoned to see a dozen forgeries a year. If Hilton and Frei-Sulzer had been aware of the extent of the market in Hitler fakes they might have been more suspicious of the gentlemen from Hamburg. And as if all this were not enough, Walde and Sorge had crowned the confusion by unwittingly introducing forgeries from Heidemann’s collection into the process of authentication.

Little suspecting the potential for chaos they had left behind them, the two Germans returned to Hamburg. They remained supremely confident that within a month they would have proof that the diaries were genuine. Once that was in their hands, plans could at last be drawn up for publication.

SIXTEEN

AT THE SAME as Walde and Sorge were landing in Hamburg, August Priesack and Billy F. Price arrived in London. They made an odd couple: the impoverished, white-haired Nazi ‘professor’, and the rich, barrel-chested, aggressive Texan, drawn together by a shared obsession for the paintings of Adolf Hitler.

When Price was not in Europe, searching salerooms and private collections for Hitler’s art, he could generally be found in his native city of Houston, pounding round the artificial-grass running track in the grounds of the Houstonian Country Club, or driving across his farm taking pot shots at squirrels with a Magnum from his convertible Cadillac El Dorado, ‘custom built for Mr Billy F. Price’. (‘Did you give them your design?’ ‘Hell no, boy, I gave them my cheque.’)

At first sight, Price seems a bizarre figure, but he is not unique. It has been estimated that there are 50,000 collectors of Nazi memorabilia throughout the world, of whom most are Americans, involved in a business which is said to have an annual turnover of $50 million. In the United States a monthly newsletter, Der Gauleiter, published from Mount Ida in Arkansas, keeps 5000 serious connoisseurs and dealers informed of the latest trade shows and auctions. Prices increase by 20 per cent a year. ‘In the States,’ according to Charles Hamilton, ‘the collectors of Hitler memorabilia are 40 per cent Jewish, 50 per cent old soldiers like me and 10 per cent of them are young, fascinated by people like Rudel.’ In Los Angeles, a collector enjoys himself in private by donning Ribbentrop’s overcoat. In Kansas City, a local government official serves drinks from Hitler’s punch bowl. In Chicago, a family doctor has installed a reinforced concrete vault beneath his house where he keeps a collection of Nazi weapons, including Hermann Goering’s ceremonial, jewel-encrusted hunting dagger. In Arizona, a used-car salesman drives his family around in the 1938 Mercedes which Hitler presented to Eva Braun; it cost him $150,000 to buy and he expects to sell it for $350,000.

In 1982 Billy Price was fifty-two and a multi-millionaire. (‘Hell, if you can’t become a millionaire in Houston, you’re an asshole, boy.’) His money was derived from his ownership of the Price Compressor Company Incorporated, manufacturers of nine-tenths of all compressors used in undersea oil exploration. Like Fritz Stiefel – whom he had met in Stuttgart – Price was a wealthy engineer, no scholar, whose success had given him the means to indulge his interest in Adolf Hitler. He had first become fascinated by the Nazis in the 1950s during his service with the US Army in Germany. While he was stationed in Europe he sought out former Nazis and witnesses from the Third Reich, including Rommel’s widow. In the early 1970s, having made his fortune, he returned to begin buying memorabilia, particularly Hitler paintings, paying between $2000 and $12,000 for each one.

Hitler seems to hold a special interest for businessmen, particularly when – as in the case of Billy Price and Fritz Stiefel – they are self-made men. Hitler’s career represented the most extreme, as well as the most monstrous, example of what an individual can do if he dedicates himself to the exertion of his will. ‘People say Hitler couldn’t have kept diaries,’ said Price after the forgery had been exposed. ‘They say he couldn’t have done this, he couldn’t have done that – shit, Hitler could paint paintings, he could write operas. Hell, he controlled more real estate than the Roman Empire within three years. There’s nothing Hitler couldn’t have done if he set his mind to it.’ The years of Hitler’s ‘Triumph of the Will’ coincided with the years when the philosophy of self-help was at its height – the Depression was an era of personal improvement courses and guides to success which culminated in 1938 with the appearance of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Everything was possible, given the drive to achieve it. ‘A man is not what he thinks he is,’ wrote the American clergyman Norman Vincent Peale, ‘but what he thinks he is.’ ‘My whole life’, said Hitler in 1942, ‘can be summed up as this ceaseless effort of mine to persuade other people.’ With his studied mannerisms, his cultivated habit of staring into people’s eyes, his hunger to read manuals and absorb technical data, Hitler was self-help run riot. ‘I look at that picture,’ said Price, staring at one of his Hitler paintings, of flowers in a vase, ‘and I just can’t imagine what was going through the man’s mind when he did it.’

The gates to Price’s farm are thirty feet high and topped by stone eagles – scale replicas of a set of gates designed for Hitler by Albert Speer. Beyond them, on the lawn outside his house, stand a tank and a piece of field artillery. The bulk of his collection is housed in his company’s headquarters close to Houston’s Hobby Airport. On one wall is a portrait of Rudolf Hess in Nazi uniform. In the lavatory is a painting of Hitler. In glass frames are a few small souvenirs – the bill of sale for the first automobile Hitler bought for the Nazi party; a laundry note in Hitler’s handwriting; a letter, on prison stationery, from Goering to his wife at the time of the Nuremberg trial; and a letter from Goering to Field Marshal Milch. On a side table stands a large picture of Goering in a swastika-decorated silver frame. Next to it is a heavy, vulgar birthday card sent by Hitler to SS General Sepp Dietrich. There are busts of Hitler. There are two of Hitler’s wartime photograph albums – silverbound with SS flashes and swastikas in the corners and a large eagle on the cover; as one opens a bookplate flutters to the floor: ‘Ex Libris Adolf Hitler’. An ornate cabinet houses Hitler’s cutlery and napkins. Price likes showing off his souvenirs but is anxious not to offend visitors. ‘I do a lot of business with Jews,’ he says. ‘When Jews come I put it all away.’

The pride of Price’s collection, the fruit of a decade’s labour, takes up an entire wall at the end of his conference room: thirty-three Hitler paintings, insured for more than $4 million, arranged in an illuminated display behind armour-plated glass, protected by a sophisticated array of burglar alarms. The pictures are lifeless and uninspired: clumsy landscapes, fussy reproductions of Viennese buildings, a couple of paintings of flowers, two crude architectural sketches, scrawled in pencil, bought by Price from Albert Speer. The Texan’s favourite is a watercolour of the Vienna City Hall, completed in 1911. ‘Most knowledgeable people say he was not the best artist in the world, but I think he was certainly a good artist considering the amount of training he had.’ Price claims to have bought the paintings ‘in the interests of history’: one day, he thinks, given current advances in technology, ‘it might be possible to feed them into a computer to get a read-out on Hitler’s brain’.

Price’s dream, for the sake of which he had gone into partnership with August Priesack, was to track down every extant Hitler painting and drawing in order to catalogue them in a book which he would publish himself. Price had no personal liking for his companion: it was a relationship founded on necessity. ‘Sure, I know Priesack’s a Nazi. But if you want to know about Hitler, you have to hire Nazis. Hell, if I was going to investigate cancer, you wouldn’t start saying to me, “Why are you hanging around all those cancer victims?” would you?’ Together the two men had done the rounds of the private collectors in America and Germany. It was this mission which in the spring of 1982 brought them to Britain.

In the final week of April they drove down to the West Country, to Longleat, one of the finest stately homes in England, ancestral seat of Sir Henry Frederick Thynne, sixth Marquess of Bath. Lord Bath, seventy-seven years old and deaf in one ear, but otherwise remarkably sprightly, took them up in his ancient lift to the third floor, a part of the house closed to the public. He unlocked a door next to the library and led Price and Priesack into a long, narrow room, cluttered with Nazi memorabilia. Dominating the scene at the far end was a life-size wax model of Hitler wearing a black leather overcoat and a swastika armband. But neither this, nor Himmler’s spectacles, nor the Commandant of Belsen’s tablecloth interested Price. What he had come to see was Lord Bath’s private exhibition of Hitler paintings. It ran all along one wall, the finest collection in the world: sixty paintings – worth, in Price’s opinion, $10 million.

A few days later, back in London, on the afternoon of Thursday 22 April, August Priesack telephoned David Irving in his flat in Duke Street, Mayfair. Priesack explained why he and Price were in Britain and asked him if he would like to come round to their hotel for dinner that night. Irving agreed.

Priesack had been looking forward to meeting the British historian for a long time. Of all Hitler’s biographers, Irving was the most controversial. In Hitler’s War, published in 1977, he had quoted one of the Führer’s doctors, who described how Hitler had expressed his admiration for an ‘objective’ biography of the Kaiser written by an Englishman. According to the doctor:

Irving was in no doubt that he was the man the Führer had in mind. Hitler’s War, ten years in the making, had been based on a wealth of previously unpublished documents, letters and diaries. Irving’s aim was to rewrite the history of the war ‘as far as possible through Hitler’s eyes, from behind his desk’. This made for a gripping book, but one which was, by its nature, unbalanced. However ‘objectively’ he might piece together the unpublished recollections of Hitler’s subordinates, they were still the words of men and women who admired their ruler. And confined to Hitler’s daily routine, the biography had a curiously unreal quality: the death camps, the atrocities, the sufferings of millions of people which were the result of Hitler’s war were not to be found in Hitler’s War as it was reconstructed by David Irving.

Irving’s stated purpose was to portray Hitler as an ordinary human being rather than as a diabolical figure of monstrous evil. It was an aim which was bound to arouse offence: ‘If you think of him as a man,’ says one of the Jewish characters in George Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., ‘you will grow uncertain. You will think him a man and no longer believe what he did.’ Irving pilloried earlier biographers who had depicted Hitler as a demon: ‘Confronted by the phenomenon of Hitler himself, they cannot grasp that he was an ordinary, walking, talking human weighing some 155 pounds, with greying hair, largely false teeth, and chronic digestive ailments. He is to them the Devil incarnate.’ Central to Irving’s thesis ‘that Hitler was a less than omnipotent Führer’ was his argument that Hitler did not order, indeed did not even know of, the Holocaust. It was an assertion which provoked uproar. In Germany, after a dispute with his publishers, the book was withdrawn from sale. In Britain, he became involved in a furious row with a panel of academics during a live edition of David Frost’s television chat show. In America, the book was savaged by Walter Laqueur in the New York Review of Books and boycotted by the major US paperback publishers. Irving revelled in the publicity, aggressively offering to pay $1000 to anyone who could produce a document proving that Hitler was aware of what was happening in the extermination camps. He claimed that the book upset Jews only ‘because I have detracted from the romance of the notion of the Holocaust – that six million people were killed by one man’.

Irving admitted that in writing Hitler’s War he had ‘identified’ with the Führer. Looking down upon him as he worked, from the wall above his desk, was a self-portrait of Hitler, presented to him by Christa Schroeder. He did not smoke or touch alcohol. (‘I don’t drink,’ he would say. ‘Adolf didn’t drink you know.’) He shared Hitler’s view of women, believing that they were put on the earth in order to procreate and provide men with something to look at: ‘They haven’t got the physical capacity for producing something creative.’ He had married and had four daughters, but wished he had remained single: his marriage had been ‘my one cardinal mistake… an unnecessary deviation’. In 1981, at the age of forty-three, he had founded his own right-wing political group, built around his own belief in his ‘destiny’ as a future British leader. With his black hair slanting across his forehead, and a dark cleft, shadowed like a moustache between the bottom of his nose and the top of his upper lip, there were times, in the right light, when Irving looked alarmingly like the subject of his notorious biography.

When Priesack rang he was hard at work on his latest project: a vastly detailed account of Churchill’s war years, designed to prove his contention that Britain’s decision to go to war with Nazi Germany had been a disastrous mistake. But by 1982, though Irving still had his smart home and his Rolls-Royce he was going through a hard time. He was in the middle of a rancorous and expensive divorce. He was short of money, and smarting from the reception given to his last two books – one of which, Uprising, had been dismissed by a reviewer in the Observer as ‘a bucketful of slime’.

Irving arrived for dinner at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, overlooking Hyde Park, at 9.45 p.m. Billy Price and his wife were unable to join them, so he and Priesack dined alone. Priesack told Irving that he was in difficulties and needed his help. In October of the previous year he had at last brought out his book of unpublished pictures of the Nuremberg rallies. But on 27 November, the Bavarian authorities had decreed that the book contravened anti-Nazi legislation. They ordered that every one of the 5000 copies printed should be confiscated. ‘The printers and every bookshop in Germany were raided in a dawn swoop,’ noted Irving in his diary. ‘On 31 December the order was revoked and the books were returned. On 11 January this year the whole silly confiscation procedure was repeated.’ Priesack asked Irving if he would be willing to appear as a character witness at his forthcoming trial. Irving agreed. ‘It is difficult’, he wrote, ‘to distinguish between these practices and the book burnings of the thirties.’

But sympathetic as he was to Priesack’s problems, it was another of the ‘professor’s’ stories which most interested Irving that night:

Irving was always interested in documents. Documents were the lifeblood of his career. Probably no other historian in the world had spent as long as he had trawling through the wartime archives in Europe and America. He had tried to track down Eva Braun’s diary in New Mexico. He had spent weeks fruitlessly searching an East German forest with a protonmagnetometer, trying to find the glass jar containing the final entries in Goebbels’s diaries. Over the past twenty years, like the Zero Mostel character in The Producers with his constant trips into ‘little old lady land’, Irving had visited countless lonely old widows in small German towns, perched on countless sofas drinking cups of tea, made hours of polite conversation, waiting for the moment when they would invite him to look at ‘a few pieces of paper my husband left behind’. In this way he obtained a mass of new material, including the diaries of Walther Hewel, Ribbentrop’s liaison officer on Hitler’s staff, and the unpublished memoirs of Field Marshal Richthofen. Priesack’s story of the ‘mystery man in Stuttgart’ naturally intrigued him, and when he returned home to Duke Street that night he made a careful note of the conversation. He decided that when he was next in Germany he would make a few inquiries about these ‘Hitler diaries’.

SEVENTEEN

SPREAD BEFORE HIM in his office in South Carolina, Ordway Hilton had nine samples of writing for analysis. His task was to determine whether two of them – the Hess document and the Horthy telegram – were genuine. The other seven pieces of material were supposedly authentic ‘standards’ which he understood had been ‘identified as being in the handwriting of Adolf Hitler’. There were three photocopies from the Bundesarchiv: a short postscript signed ‘Adolf H’ at the end of a typewritten letter dated 1933; a handwritten letter to a party official dated 1936; and copies of eleven Hitler signatures, also from 1936. The other four samples were originals from Heidemann’s collection: a handwritten note recording the promotion of General von Kleist dated February 1943 (‘In the name of the German people as Reichs Chancellor and Supreme Commander, I award Colonel-General Ewald von Kleist the rank, dignity and protection of a Field Marshal of the German Reich…’); and three signed photographs showing, respectively, Hitler with Goering, Schaub and Bormann, Hitler with Konstantin Hierl, leader of the Reich Labour Service, in May 1940, and Hitler standing with a group in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris after the fall of France.

Hilton quickly noticed a puzzling discrepancy in this comparison material. Using a binocular microscope he could see that in the photocopies, Hitler signed the ‘A’ in Adolf with a cross-stroke ‘slanting downward’. In the originals, this stroke was horizontal. Unfortunately for him and for Stern, he did not pay much attention to this seemingly trivial detail: signatures, after all, often vary over the years and the original documents were all dated at least four years after the photocopies.

Three and a half weeks after Walde’s and Sorge’s visit, on Tuesday, 11 May, Hilton completed what he described as ‘an extensive examination’ of the documents he had been given. His findings were exactly what Stern had hoped and expected. The Hess document, he wrote in his report, ‘reveals a free, natural form of writing’:

After studying the Horthy telegram he reached a similar conclusion. He was particularly impressed by the signature. ‘The name Adolf has been condensed to a capital “A” followed by a straight crossed downstroke’; whilst in the signature of the surname:

Hilton’s report, couched in five pages of professional gobbledegook, was conclusive. But, based as it was on the assumption that all the documents he had been given for comparison were authentic, it was also completely wrong. It was scarcely surprising that the signatures in the Kleist document, the Horthy telegram and the photographs proved ‘consistent’: they were all forged by Kujau.

At first sight, this mingling of genuine and false material would seem to suggest that Hilton was deliberately misled by the Stern men. In fact, neither the police nor Stern’s own subsequent internal inquiry found this to be the case. According to the Stern Report: ‘Heidemann cannot be accused of imposing material on [the experts]. Walde and Sorge asked him for it.’ Walde confirmed this. ‘Heidemann’, he told the police, ‘left the organization of the authentication tests completely to me and Sorge. I have no reason to believe that he wanted to obstruct or twist the authentication of the documents.’ The bungling of the tests was the result of straightforward incompetence, typical of the negligence with which the whole diaries affair was handled. Walde and Sorge, in commissioning Hilton, failed to differentiate between documents from the Bundesarchiv and material from Heidemann’s collection. And Hilton, working in isolation 3000 miles away, unfamiliar with the script in which the documents were written, did not bother to check.

The American could at least plead in mitigation that his mistake was based on an initial error by Stern. The police department of Rhineland-Pfalz had no such excuse.

The police were busy. A routine request from the Bundesarchiv was low on their list of priorities. It was a month before one of their handwriting experts, Herr Huebner, was able to look at the material they had been sent. Huebner had four samples to check: a photocopy of the Hess announcement and originals of a message to General Franco, some speech notes and a letter to Goering. His comparison material, five original Hitler documents from the Bundesarchiv, was unpolluted by Heidemann’s fakes. Nevertheless, in a brief report submitted on 25 May, Huebner declared ‘with a probability bordering on certainty’, that three of the Stern documents were genuine. He could not be quite so positive about the Hess communiqué because he had not seen the original, but in his opinion it was ‘highly probable’ that it was in Hitler’s hand.

When this news was relayed to the Stern offices in Hamburg, champagne was opened in the history department. The fact that an official government agency had certified that the papers were genuine was an occasion which called for a celebration. There could be no doubt now. The world would have to accept that the magazine had obtained one of the greatest scoops in history. Only Heidemann seemed unaffected by the general jubilation. ‘Aren’t you pleased?’ asked Walde. Heidemann replied that he saw no reason to celebrate: he had known all along that the diaries were genuine.

On 2 June, Walde wrote to Dr Henke at the Bundesarchiv to thank him for sending them the police report. ‘Its result greatly pleased us. With the certainty that it has given us, we are going to intensify our efforts to obtain further original material.’ Walde added that ‘to thank you, and as a gesture to the Bundesarchiv’ Gerd Heidemann would like to make them a gift of the originals of Hitler’s speech notes and of the Franco telegram.

Nine days later came the third and final handwriting report.

The meticulous Max Frei-Sulzer had been determined not to rush to a premature conclusion. On 4 June, unwilling to make a judgement on the basis of photocopies, he travelled from Zurich to Koblenz where he was met by Dr Henke and shown original Hitler material from the vaults of the Bundesarchiv. After Hilton had finished his report, Frei-Sulzer was given the originals of the Hess statement and the Horthy telegram, along with the photographs and Kleist document from Heidemann’s collection. He also received a dossier containing copies of Hitler’s writing from 1906 to 1945, pieced together by Heidemann to show how the Führer’s writing had changed over the years; and a guide to the old-fashioned script in which the documents were written. By the time he had finished assimilating all this, he had been working on the project for two months and his analysis ran to seventeen pages.

‘The script of Adolf Hitler’, wrote Frei-Sulzer, ‘is highly individualistic and offers a good basis for the examination of questionable handwriting.’ He singled out fourteen special characteristics, analysed the is, the hs and the ts, the gaps between the letters and the pressure that had been applied to the pen. He made large photographic blow-ups of individual passages, and at the end of it all his conclusion on the Hess communiqué and the Horthy telegram was unequivocal: ‘There can be no doubt that both these documents were written by Adolf Hitler.’

What had gone wrong? The police report certainly appears to have been rushed. The Bundesarchiv’s request had been treated as relatively trivial in comparison with the police department’s real task of dealing with criminals. Their analyst had been provided with only a relatively small sample of handwriting to work on, and in the case of the longest document, the Hess statement, he had only had access to a photocopy. He had no idea that he was putting a seal of approval to what ultimately would be an archive of sixty volumes of Hitler diaries. How was Herr Huebner to know that so much rested on his findings?

Of the two private experts, one was unable to understand the language in which the documents were written; the other was operating outside his specialist field. Both were misled by the introduction of fakes into supposedly genuine Hitler writing.

But even after allowance has been made for all these factors, it has to be said that the success of Konrad Kujau’s forgeries casts serious doubts on the ‘science’ of handwriting analysis – or ‘holography’ as its practitioners prefer to call it. Freelance analysts are always under pressure to reach a definite conclusion. Their clients want to hear ‘yes’ or ‘no’, not ‘maybe’. Hilton and Frei-Sulzer were not the first experts to fall into the trap of committing themselves to rash overstatements on the basis of flimsy evidence. In 1971, when Clifford Irving faked his notorious ‘autobiography’ of Howard Hughes, one ‘holographer’ gave odds of a million to one against the possibility that it could be anything other than genuine. The reputable New York firm of Osborn, Osborn and Osborn, specialists in handwriting analysis since 1905, declared that it would have been ‘beyond human ability’ to have forged the entire autobiography.

The Hitler diaries fiasco has close parallels with the Hughes case. Like Stern, McGraw-Hill, publishers of the autobiography, were obsessed with leaks and failed to commission a handwriting analysis until late in the project: when they finally did so, they allowed the experts to see only a fraction of the material. The tests were not ordered in a spirit of impartial inquiry: they were required as ammunition to fight off the attacks of sceptical outsiders. Kujau and Clifford Irving were both fluent forgers. They did not give themselves away by being over-cautious, copying out words in the slow and tedious manner which produces telltale tremors: Irving, like Kujau, could write in another person’s hand at almost the same speed as he could write in his own. When the discovery of the Hitler diaries was announced by Stern, Irving recognized at once that they were probably the work of a forger like himself. ‘Once you have the mood,’ he commented, ‘you can go on forever. I know that from personal experience. I could write sixty volumes of Howard Hughes autobiography and they would pass. Once you can do one page, you can do twenty. Once you can do twenty, you can do a book.’ Handwriting experts were useless: ‘Nine times out of ten they come out with judgements their clients expect…. They’re hired by people who want an affirmative answer.’

Clifford Irving and Konrad Kujau succeeded in the same way that most confidence tricksters succeed: by playing on two of the most ancient of human weaknesses – vanity and greed. There came a point during the duping of McGraw-Hill when one of Irving’s confederates found it impossible to accept that a powerful company led by intelligent men could be stupid enough to accept their often ludicrous forgery. ‘It’s got to occur to them,’ he said. ‘How can they be so naïve?’ In his account of the hoax, Irving recalled his answer:

Twelve years later, the analysis fitted Stern’s behaviour to perfection.

EIGHTEEN

WITH THE DIARIES’ handwriting now apparently authenticated as Adolf Hitler’s, work on the project within Stern intensified. Five people were now engaged virtually full time on the operation: Thomas Walde; Walde’s thirty-five-year-old assistant, Leo Pesch; two secretaries; and Gerd Heidemann. To safeguard the secret of the diaries’ existence, the group moved out of the main Stern building to new offices a few minutes’ walk away. The diaries were also moved. Every few weeks, Manfred Fischer would empty the management safe of the latest volumes and take them back with him to his own office at Bertelsmann’s headquarters in Guetersloh. Eventually, fearful of a robbery, Fischer and Schulte-Hillen decided to transfer them out of the country altogether, to a bank vault in Switzerland. Not for the first time, the saga of the diaries assumed the trappings of a cheap thriller. Safe deposit box number 390 was rented from the Handelsbank in Talstrasse, Zurich. Periodically Fischer himself would board Bertelsmann’s private jet carrying a suitcase containing the diaries and fly to Switzerland. Herr Bluhm, director of the Handelsbank, would meet him and the two men would descend into the vaults. Bluhm would unlock two steel mesh doors, retrieve the large metal box, and discreetly turn his back while Fischer filled it with the latest diaries. One key to the box stayed with the bank. The other was taken back to Germany by Fischer and locked in the safe in Hamburg.

Gradually, a publication strategy for the diaries began to evolve. On Tuesday, 25 May – the day on which the Rhineland-Pfalz police expert concluded that the writing he had been given was Hitler’s – a conference was called to discuss the marketing of the material. Present were Wilfried Sorge, Thomas Walde, Peter Koch, Felix Schmidt, Leo Pesch, Henri Nannen and Gerd Heidemann; Schulte-Hillen presided. Neither of the two editors said very much. Their status within the company had recently been eroded still further, when Stern, humiliatingly, was scooped by its rival, Der Spiegel, over a trade union scandal. Peter Koch, who had originally turned down the story, had offered to resign. He had been allowed to stay on, but in the aftermath of the affair, neither he nor Schmidt was in a position to argue with the management. The fact that their mishandling of Heidemann had almost cost the company the diaries scoop as well hung, unspoken, over the entire proceedings.

Thomas Walde put forward the plan which he had discussed with Pesch and Heidemann. One of the most interesting documents so far delivered to Hamburg was the special diary volume Hitler had devoted to the Hess affair. This had been with the history department since November. Entitled ‘The Hess Case’, it consisted of a few pages of notes scrawled in the early summer of 1941, proving that the Führer had known all along of his deputy’s flight to Britain. ‘From November 1940,’ Hitler had supposedly written, ‘Hess was whispering in my ear that he thought as I did that England and Germany could live together in peace, that the sufferings of our two peoples could bring satisfaction to one person, namely the old fox in Moscow, Stalin.’ The content was sketchy – little more than 1000 words – describing how Hess had evolved his plan, how Hitler had been ‘kept informed about preparations’ and how he had been forced to deny all knowledge of the mission when the British had imprisoned Hess.

Walde’s proposal was that this material should be used as the basis for a sensational story to be published in January, the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler’s accession to power. The Hess volume stood on its own. There was no need to refer to the actual diaries, whose existence could be kept secret for a few more months. The advantage of Walde’s idea was that it would give the magazine a good cover story whilst also enabling it to test the water prior to the launch of the main diary hoard. The plan was accepted by the conference. The only mildly dissenting voice was Henri Nannen’s. Would it not, he suggested, be a good idea to bring in Sebastian Haffner or Joachim Fest, recognized authorities on the Third Reich, to work on the material? The idea was angrily slapped down. This was Stern’s story, and Stern’s men should take all the credit. Neither Nannen nor the editors were aware that Heidemann and Walde had contracts with the management which enabled them to veto the involvement of outside historians.

Ten days later, on Friday 4 June, Manfred Fischer, Gerd Schulte-Hillen and Jan Hensmann flew down to Munich to meet Olaf Paeschke, the head of Bertelsmann’s international publishing division. It was agreed, without reference to the Stern editors, that Walde and Pesch would first turn the Hess material into a book, provisionally entitled Plan 3. This would then be serialized in the magazine. The idea of marketing the Hess scoop through the book publishing industry was attractive to the businessmen. It would enable Bertelsmann to bring its foreign companies into the action and take control of the syndication negotiations. Shortly afterwards, Paeschke briefed Louis Wolfe, President of Bantam Books in New York, on the contents of the forthcoming manuscript. Wolfe was a lucky man, said Paeschke. Plan 3 would be ‘the publishing event of the century’.

On 5 July, Leo Pesch went down to Koblenz to hand the Bundesarchiv the original of the Hess announcement and the Horthy telegram which had now been returned to Stern by Frei-Sulzer. These, together with the original documents already in the archive’s possession, were then forwarded to the West German Federal Police for a final forensic examination to confirm the age of the paper and the ink. Stern had hoped for a quick result. But the police laboratories were involved in anti-terrorist investigations and were swamped with work. Weeks passed and despite occasional reminders from Walde, nothing was done. There was no particular sense of urgency in Hamburg. The documents had, after all, been authenticated by three different handwriting experts: the forensic tests were only a safety check.

Meanwhile, Heidemann carried on draining the company’s special diaries account – 200,000 marks was withdrawn on 29 March, 600,000 marks on 21 May, 400,000 marks on 2 June, 200,000 marks on 10 June – and the Heidemann family spending spree continued. Precise details of what was bought and when will probably never be known. More than 80,000 marks was spent in auction houses, mainly to buy Third Reich memorabilia. Ninety thousand marks went on jewellery and carpets; 37,000 on furniture. A futile attempt to recover Mussolini’s treasure, supposedly dumped in Lake Como at the end of the war, swallowed 185,000 marks. At least a quarter of a million marks was paid into one or another of Heidemann’s six known bank accounts. To house his Nazi relics, the reporter rented a gallery in Milchstrasse, in the heart of one of Hamburg’s most expensive shopping areas. In the middle of April, Gina visited an estate agent. ‘She said she was interested in buying a large house with a view over the Elbe,’ recalled the agent, Peter Moller. ‘The price was no object.’ Over the next year they maintained contact and he sent her details of property costing in the region of 1–2 million marks.

On 14 July, after Heidemann received the largest single payment for the diaries to date – 900,000 marks – contracts were signed to start the long-awaited renovation of Carin II’s hull. The yacht alone cost Heidemann a fortune. Experts were flown in from England. New engines were installed. The boat was rewired. The interior was refurbished. The total cost exceeded 500,000 marks. To restore the woodwork, Gunther Lutje, a Hungarian boatyard owner who had known Heidemann and Carin II for almost a decade, was paid 300,000 marks.

In his prosperity, Heidemann did not forget those who had helped him in the past. In June, Axel Thomsen, the young seaman who had sailed Carin II from Bonn to Hamburg, rang Heidemann to ask for a loan. He had heard that the reporter now had plenty of money. ‘He said immediately that he was perfectly willing to lend me 6000 marks,’ recalled Thomsen. ‘Two or three days later he came to my house and gave me the money, in 500-mark notes. It was lying around in his briefcase.’ Encouraged by Heidemann’s readiness to help, Thomsen rang him again two months later to ask for a further 13,000 marks. ‘From his reaction, I could see that he was slightly hesitant, but he said he was willing to lend me the money. He said he felt duty bound to assist me. He said I could have it and that I should go round to his flat in the Elbchaussee to collect it.’ When Thomsen appeared, Heidemann handed him an envelope containing 13,000 marks in cash. Thomsen put the money in his pocket. Heidemann asked him to make sure that Gina did not get to hear about it. Heidemann also remembered Hannelore Schustermann, the secretary from whom, in his hard-pressed days, he had been forced to scrounge money to go to the canteen. She was let into the secret of the Hitler diaries and went to work for Heidemann in his special suite of offices. The diaries, he confided to her, were going to make him a millionaire.

On 29 July, Heidemann flew to Spain and arranged to buy two holiday villas in the Mediterranean town of Denia, midway between the resorts of Valencia and Alicante. The two houses, which stood next to one another, cost him 390,000 marks in cash. In August, he suggested to Kujau that he should buy one of them. The two villas, he said, both had spacious cellars which could be knocked together to make a large underground vault. Heidemann proposed that they should each move their Nazi collections there. Together they would create the biggest museum of Third Reich memorabilia in the world. The plan came to nothing the moment Edith Lieblang got to hear of it. She told Kujau, in forceful tones, that she was ‘absolutely against’ it. ‘It seemed to me completely worthless,’ she recalled, ‘owning it and only spending a couple of weeks a year in it. For 200,000 marks, I could go on holiday around the world until the end of my life.’ Edith’s word was final and Heidemann’s dream of erecting a monument to the Führer amid the haciendas and cicadas of the Costa Blanca evaporated.

Not all the money Heidemann spent at this time belonged to Stern; at least some of it was his own. He was now drawing a salary of over 100,000 marks a year. He had received a bonus of 20,000 marks. He had already been given an advance of 300,000 marks by Manfred Fischer and his position as the sole contact between Gruner and Jahr and the ‘antiques dealer’ in Stuttgart meant that he found no difficulty in extracting more. His moodiness and periodic threats to take his great scoop elsewhere were guaranteed to throw the Stern management into a panic. Without him, the flow of diaries from East Germany would dry up. Like wealthy drug addicts, they were prepared to pamper their supplier: to ensure he continued to deal with them, they were willing to give him whatever he asked.

In June 1982 Heidemann told the company that in order to keep up the pretence of being a Swiss collector, he was having to buy additional material from the communist general: Nazi documents and paintings and drawings by Adolf Hitler. Although as a collector he was naturally interested in obtaining such items, he did not see why he should have to go on paying for them out of his own pocket. Gerd Schulte-Hillen accepted Heidemann’s argument and on 11 June concluded a new contract with him, by which the reporter was to be paid a ‘loan’ of 25,000 marks for each volume of diaries he delivered. To date, there were thirty-five books in the company’s possession. Heidemann was therefore entitled to receive 875,000 marks, minus the 300,000 marks advance paid to him in February 1981, and the 80,000 marks still outstanding for his unwritten books – Bord Gespräche and My African Wars. The money was described, for tax purposes, as an ‘interest-free loan’ to be recovered through ‘profit-sharing and royalty fees’ following ‘the commercial exploitation of the diaries’.

But Heidemann wanted more than mere money. Incapable of writing up the stories he researched, he had, throughout his career, suffered from an inferiority complex. Now, as he watched Walde and Pesch start putting together a book based on the material he had gathered, his resentment welled up in a demand for praise for his achievement. He craved respect and recognition. It was like dealing with a child. Gerd Schulte-Hillen had already had to cope with one of these bouts. On that occasion, at the end of 1981, he had forced the editors to give Heidemann a salary increase. In the summer of 1982, Wilfried Sorge warned him once again that the company’s ageing prima donna was proving difficult. ‘He was portrayed to me,’ remembered the managing director, ‘as being rather like a circus horse: because he’d made this find, you had to say “hello” to him and pat him on the head from time to time.’

Acting on Sorge’s advice, on Monday 28 June, Schulte-Hillen took Heidemann out ‘for a meal on expenses’. They met in the Ovelgonne, a restaurant in a picturesque street overlooking the Elbe. For three courses, Schulte-Hillen listened patiently to Heidemann’s stories. He heard of the reporter’s adventures in Africa and the Middle East, of his experiences with the white mercenaries in the Congo, of his long search for Traven. Finally, over dessert, Heidemann invited him back to his home in the Elbchaussee to see part of his collection. ‘He showed me drawings by Hitler,’ said Schulte-Hillen, ‘and the pistol with which Hitler was supposed to have shot himself.’ The businessman inspected Heidemann’s archive: the shelves full of history books and folders crammed with documents, all neatly arranged and catalogued. He congratulated Heidemann on his professionalism and, after a couple of hours, the two men parted on excellent terms.

Heidemann was given another opportunity to show off a few weeks later, when Henri Nannen also decided to visit him at home. Nannen had retired from daily involvement in Stern to devote himself to the erection of his own memorial: an art gallery in his home town of Emden, to house his collection of German Expressionist paintings. But to Heidemann – as to most West German journalists – Nannen, despite his retirement, was Stern, and he was determined to impress his old employer. Nannen parked his car beside the Elbe and got out to see Heidemann on his balcony, waving at him with one hand, and raising a glass of iced champagne to him with the other. Climbing the stairs, he suddenly realized that Heidemann not only had the top floor apartment, but the one underneath as well. Inside, the impression of luxury continued. ‘The place was decorated in the very best taste,’ recalled Nannen. ‘There were some superb pieces of furniture – Queen Anne, I think – and on the walls were drawings. The first thing that hit me was the original manuscript of ‘Deutschland über Alles’ by Hoffman. He also had the autographs of Bismark and Moltke, along with other historical documents under glass and in frames. I was astonished. Where has he got all this from? I thought.’ Heidemann told him he had been forced to buy it from the supplier of the Hitler diaries in order to disguise the fact that he was interested only in the diaries themselves. ‘He gave me some convoluted story and showed me thirty or forty Hitler drawings,’ said Nannen. ‘I’m something of an art historian. They seemed to me to be perfectly genuine.’

After seeing Hitler’s suicide weapon, and a pair of busts supposedly sculpted by the Führer, Nannen inquired about the diaries.

Heidemann crossed the room, pulled a cord, and a pair of black curtains slid back to reveal a bookcase full of files. These were Heidemann’s private photocopies of the diaries, each sheet protected by a transparent plastic cover.

‘What do you want to see?’ asked Heidemann.

‘The Roehm putsch,’ replied Nannen.

He was handed the relevant volumes and read a few pages. He found them ‘unbelievably boring’ – a fact which further convinced him that they must be genuine: ‘I couldn’t believe that anyone would have gone to the trouble of forging something so banal.’

But although Nannen had no doubts that the diaries were authentic, his visit convinced him that Heidemann was a crook. Unlike Schulte-Hillen – who had known Heidemann for only a year – Nannen had been his employer since the 1950s. The change in the man’s fortunes was startling. It was inconceivable that he could have moved from near bankruptcy to such affluence without robbing the company. Nannen left the Elbchaussee and immediately drove to the Stern building. Within ninety minutes he was in Schulte-Hillen’s office. ‘I’ve just come from Heidemann’s,’ he told him, ‘and he’s shitting on us – from a great height.’ Schulte-Hillen asked if he meant that the diaries were forgeries. ‘No,’ said Nannen, ‘but he’s clearly pocketing our money.’ Privately, Stern’s editors thought the same: Peter Koch had been in no doubt ever since he learned of the expensive renovation work being carried out on Carin II. But they could have warned Nannen that to raise such suspicions with Schulte-Hillen was useless. The managing director regarded himself as a good judge of character; he was convinced of the reporter’s integrity; and having made up his mind, he was unshakeable. He reacted, in Koch’s words, ‘like a man with an allergy’ whenever Heidemann’s honesty was questioned. That afternoon, when Nannen told him of his fears, Schulte-Hillen stared at him with contempt. Heidemann, he said, was being well rewarded for his work: the only sort of person who would think that he was robbing the company was someone who was capable of committing such a crime himself.

Meanwhile, as the summer wore on, Thomas Walde and Leo Pesch worked hard on the manuscript of Plan 3. Heidemann appeared in the offices occasionally and continued to deliver new volumes of diaries, but they had no time to look at them. To help them with the background for the Hess book, the two would-be historians hired a team of freelance researchers. ‘We employed them without telling them the context in which they were working,’ said Walde. ‘We simply asked them to do some research in certain areas.’ At the beginning of September, after three months’ intensive work, more than half the book was completed. On Monday, 6 September, chapters 2–7 were submitted to the editors of Stern. Walde explained in a memorandum to Felix Schmidt how the book would be structured. The first chapter would be an account of Hess’s life in Spandau and of his relations with his family. ‘We have already won over Hess’s son,’ confided Walde, ‘but not yet Frau Ilse Hess.’ Not until chapter 8 – which had still to be written – did the authors intend to introduce quotations from the Hitler notebook on the Hess affair. Then would come an account of Hess’s experiences in Britain, the Nuremberg trial, and his sentencing to life imprisonment. There was to be no mention of the existence of the diaries.

Schmidt later described himself as ‘amazed’ at Walde’s proposed treatment. He was a journalist. It was ridiculous, in his opinion, to start publication of the documents with a history lesson on Rudolf Hess. Stern should launch its scoop with an account of the discovery of Hitler’s diaries. Once again the editors realized that decisions had been taken behind their backs. Plan 3 was the child of the Bertelsmann marketing division, not the company’s journalists, part of a long-term commercial scheme to exploit the diaries.

The sales strategy was based on two premisses. First, to enable the company to recoup its investment, publication would have to be spread over as long a period as possible – somewhere between eighteen months and two years. Secondly, the company would have to find reliable foreign partners to syndicate the material. Plan 3 would enable Bertelsmann to begin earning money, whilst leaving the bulk of the diaries untouched. The manuscript would be sold to news organizations all over the world. Only if they paid promptly, adhered to Stern’s publishing timetable, and generally behaved ‘correctly’, would they be told of the existence of the real prize – Hitler’s diaries – and be offered a share in its exploitation.

The moment Walde and Pesch had finished the first part of the manuscript, Wilfried Sorge and Olaf Paeschke flew to New York to hold discussions with the management of Bantam Books. The talks took place on Friday, 10 September. They did not go well. The Germans wanted to draw on Bantam’s experience of the American and British markets. They wanted to know which would be the best magazines and newspapers to approach. As far as Bantam was concerned, their interest was in a book, not a newspaper serial – especially as the two Germans were insistent that they should retain the syndication rights. As paranoid as ever, Sorge and Paeschke refused to reveal the secret of the diaries, leaving the American publishers with a feeling that they were being used. The talks ended, according to one of the participants, with a ‘bitter feeling’ on both sides.

Sorge flew back to Hamburg over the weekend. On Monday he went in to see Schulte-Hillen to brief him on his trip. The managing director wanted to know how much the diaries were likely to fetch on the world market. This was a difficult question to answer. Sorge had no idea of the total sales potential. The project was unprecedented. After the discussions in New York, it was clear that the only author who might remotely be compared to Adolf Hitler was Henry Kissinger. His memoirs had been syndicated across the globe in 1979 in an intricate network of deals, simultaneous release dates and subsidiary rights, which was a wonder to behold. Hitler was probably bigger than Kissinger – ‘hotter’, as the Americans put it. Certainly, the company was looking at an income of upwards of $2 million.

Sorge’s report did not please Schulte-Hillen. The company had already paid out 7 million marks – roughly $2 million – to obtain the diaries. Under the terms of the contracts agreed with Heidemann and Walde in 1981, Gruner and Jahr was entitled to only 40 per cent of the revenue from syndication sales. That figure made sense when there were only twenty-seven diaries; but now there were more than forty, the tally was still rising and the costs were going to be more than four times the amount originally predicted. Unless something was done, the company was going to end up making a loss. During a business trip to Majorca, Schulte-Hillen took the opportunity to tell Manfred Fischer that he had decided to renegotiate the original contracts. On 14 October, he summoned Heidemann and Walde to a meeting in a Cologne hotel and explained the problem.

Legally, both men would have been entitled to reject Schulte-Hillen’s proposal. Nevertheless, they were forced to accept the logic of what he said. A new, handwritten contract was drawn up, under which both men would be entitled to the same percentage of the syndication revenue – but only after Gruner and Jahr had cleared its costs. Walde signed, reluctantly. Heidemann, characteristically, demanded something in return. He pointed out that he was giving up a probable income of 2.3 million marks. Schulte-Hillen had no alternative but to agree to pay him yet more ‘compensation’. Under the terms of the contracts of February 1981 and June 1982, he had already received 1.1 million marks in advances and ‘loans’. Schulte-Hillen arranged for that sum to be converted into a once-and-for-all ‘fee’ of 1.5 million marks.

Heidemann also extracted another concession. From now on, it was written into his contract that he was ‘not obliged to reveal in fine detail the method by which the diaries were acquired, nor the names of his sources’. Schulte-Hillen took this as further evidence of Heidemann’s integrity – of his determination to protect the lives of his suppliers. In reality, Heidemann’s manoeuvre was almost certainly designed to cover up his own fraudulent activities: if he could prevent the company checking with Kujau, no one would ever know precisely how much he had paid for the diaries. Schulte-Hillen’s concession, seemingly trivial at the time, was to have important consequences.

The day after the meeting in Cologne, Heidemann withdrew another 450,000 marks from the bank in Adolphsplatz.

NINETEEN

ON SATURDAY 20 NOVEMBER, the German People’s Union (DVU), a right-wing political group, organized a meeting in the Westphalian village of Hoffnungsthal. The speaker – a regular favourite among DVU audiences, with his stirring denunciations of communists and socialists – was David Irving.

Irving arrived at the hall to be met by the unmistakable figure of Otto Guensche. The devoted SS major, whose claim to fame was that he had burned Hitler’s body, was a local DVU supporter. ‘He talks to nobody,’ noted Irving in his diary, ‘but has been an informant of mine for twelve years or more.’ After a few pleasantries, Guensche abruptly asked the historian: ‘What’s your view of the Rudolf Hess affair?’ According to Irving:

Suddenly, Irving remembered his dinner with Priesack in London back in April.

The conversation ended when Irving had to go up on to the platform to deliver his speech. Afterwards, hoping to pick up more information, he went back to Guensche’s house for tea. But Guensche had not withstood ten years of interrogation in the Soviet Union in order to be tricked into disclosure in his own home. He refused to say any more about the diaries and Irving left frustrated.

Despite his elaborate show of concern for secrecy, Heidemann had always been remarkably indiscreet about the diaries. He had shown original volumes to former Nazis like Guensche, Mohnke and Wolff and to such shady contacts as Medard Klapper. On several occasions, Walde and Pesch had been forced to restrain him from boasting openly about his discovery to colleagues in the corridor at Stern. In 1981, he had sat his old friend Randolph Braumann down on the sofa in his apartment. According to Braumann: ‘He said: “Are you sitting comfortably?” and then from under the sofa he pulled out a plastic bag stuffed with bundles of money. He said it was for the diaries and asked me not to tell anybody.’ The following year, meeting Braumann in the Stern canteen, Heidemann had taken him outside to his car ‘and produced a packet containing seven or eight books. He seemed very proud, positively euphoric.’ Now Stern was to pay the price for Heidemann’s showing off.

Returning to London twelve days later, Irving telephoned Phillip Knightley, the senior reporter on the Sunday Times, and told him of the existence of the Hitler diaries. ‘He is interested,’ wrote Irving in his diary. ‘I said I’d let him have a note about it at his private address.’ That same afternoon, Irving wrote to him, enclosing an account of his conversations with Priesack and Guensche, and stressing the usefulness of his reputation as a right winger: ‘I would be prepared to set up or conduct such negotiations with traditionally awkward German personalities as might prove necessary in an attempt to secure this material.’ In return, he made it clear that he expected a ‘finder’s fee’ of 10 per cent of the cost of the diaries. Knightley – who was about to return to his native Australia for four months – passed Irving’s offer on to Magnus Linklater, the features editor of the Sunday Times. On Wednesday .8 December, Linklater telephoned Irving to confirm that the paper was interested. At 9.15 that night, Irving rang August Priesack in Munich to try to extract more information from him. The first part of the conversation concerned itself with the old man’s forthcoming trial for ‘propagating the swastika’ in his book about the Nazi Party rallies.

‘You promised to provide a reference for me,’ said Priesack, reproachfully.

‘Yes,’ lied Irving, ‘that’s why I’m calling.’ (He had found the old man, frankly, to be rather a bore and had never had any intention of allowing his name to be associated with such an obvious crank.) He then had to endure five minutes of Priesack alternately moaning about his persecution and bragging about the book on Hitler’s art he was working on with Billy Price. (‘The book is written by me in every way. But it can’t be put out like that because the American has paid 400,000 marks for it – so he has to appear as the author.’) At last, after a number of false starts, Irving managed to turn the conversation to the diaries. According to Priesack ‘six or seven’ were already in America, where they were to be published. ‘That’s interesting,’ said Irving.

PRIESACK: They’re just headlines from the Völkischer Beobachter.

IRVING: The whole twenty-seven volumes?

PRIESACK: Yes. He wrote them as something to jog his memory…. I’ve only seen a half-yearly volume from 1935, and there were in total only six interesting pages. You can read them in Hitler’s handwriting here [i.e. in Priesack’s apartment].

IRVING: Good. When I’m there, I’ll—

PRIESACK: But I’ve also got Mein Kampf. The third volume.

IRVING: [emits stifled cry]

PRIESACK: Haven’t you heard about that?

IRVING: When did he write that?

PRIESACK: He started that on the day after the seizure of power. Mein Kampf Three. I’ve got a few pages. They’ve not been sold. They’ll probably end up in America because America pays better.

IRVING: Do you know where all this is? Can you find that out?

PRIESACK: Up to a point, yes.

IRVING: You are a real gold mine.

PRIESACK: [laughs]

After promising to send Priesack a character reference (describing him as ‘a well-known scientist’), and suggesting he might come and see him in Munich in a few days’ time, Irving hung up and switched off his tape recorder.

The following day in Hamburg, the Hitler diaries team received an unpleasant surprise. In the belief that it might shake loose some information from someone, somewhere in Germany, Irving had written letters to dozens of West German newspapers to alert their readers to the existence of the diaries. On Thursday, 9 December, these seeds of mischief began sprouting in news columns and letters pages across the country:

Among the thirteen West German newspapers which eventually carried Irving’s letter was Kujau’s and Stiefel’s daily paper, the Stuttgarter Zeitung.

The effect of this burst of publicity on the furtive circle of south German collectors was dramatic. Like insects whose stone had been kicked away, they scurried for cover. Kujau rang Heidemann to warn him that Irving was on their trail. The reporter told him to put as much pressure as he could on Stiefel to ensure he kept quiet: above all, Irving must not get to see the 1935 diary which Stiefel still had in his safe. Kujau contacted the industrialist and warned him that he had heard from his brother that sixty-four East German generals had been summoned to Berlin in an effort to flush out whoever was supplying the diaries. Stiefel panicked. Convinced that he would be raided by the police at any moment, he packed his entire collection – his medals, papers, paintings and concentration camp china – and shipped it out of the country to his holiday home in Italy. He also wrote to Priesack. ‘I must ask you,’ he told him, ‘under the terms of our agreement, to, return to me all the copies and photographs which are in your possession and which come from us.’

At four o’clock in the afternoon, Heidemann spoke to Irving on the telephone. He pleaded with him to keep quiet about the diaries. Not all the material, he said, was in the West: he was having to make repeated trips into East Germany and his life would be in danger if there were any more publicity. Irving replied that Priesack had told him that most of the material had already been smuggled out. ‘What has Priesack got?’ asked Heidemann. For a moment, Irving – who had not yet seen any of the material – was stumped for an answer. Recalling his conversation with Guensche he replied that Priesack had a letter from Hess to Hitler dated May 1941. As the conversation went on, Heidemann began to realize that Irving was bluffing. He did not know the scale of the archive in Stern’s possession. He thought that some of the books were still in America. He did not know about Hitler’s special volume on Hess. Almost all his information was either two years old or based on nothing more than regurgitated gossip. ‘Priesack’, he warned Irving, ‘is talking about things of which he knows nothing.’

At the end of the conversation, Heidemann reassured his colleagues in the history department that the leak was not as serious as it appeared. He played them a tape recording of his telephone call from Kujau during which ‘Conny’ told him not to worry about Irving. According to Leo Pesch, Heidemann told them that ‘“Conny” was putting so much pressure on Stiefel, there was no way he would hand over his diary volume to Irving.’

That same day, Heidemann collected another 450,000 marks from Sorge.

In London, Irving began transcribing the tape of his telephone call to Priesack. It was a laborious task and took him until after midnight to complete. At 2 a.m. he drove round to the offices of the Sunday Times in Grays Inn Road and left a copy of the transcript in reception addressed to Magnus Linklater. He fell into bed, exhausted, half an hour later.

Linklater found Irving’s envelope when he came into the office the next day. He was in a dilemma. Obviously he wanted to pursue the story. On the other hand, it was not wise, in his opinion, for the Sunday Times to become involved with a man of Irving’s reputation. Irving’s suggestion – that he should fly out to Hamburg and Munich at the paper’s expense in order ‘to identify and talk with the Stuttgart source’ – filled him with unease. Instead, he decided to do some checking of his own. He rang the German historian Hermann Weiss at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and explained what Irving had told him. Weiss’s reaction was that the story was rubbish: it was inconceivable that there were any such ‘Hitler diaries’. The Sunday Times also contacted Gerd Heidemann, whose name had been given to them by Irving. Heidemann, according to Linklater, confirmed he was involved in trying to obtain Hitler material, but said that as a result of recent publicity much of it had ‘gone back’ over the border to East Germany.

Early in the morning on Wednesday 15 December, five days after receiving Irving’s transcript of his conversation with Priesack, Linklater rang Irving at home. He told him that the Sunday Times could not afford to fly him to Germany: ‘We don’t have the large sums of money to throw around that we used to have.’ They would much prefer to send Hermann Weiss or one of their own reporters down to see Priesack. The paper wanted to involve someone who was ‘neutral’. Apologetic for the obvious inference in this remark, Linklater offered to pay Irving £250 for having given them the information in the first place. ‘We don’t want you to think we are trying to go behind your back,’ he said. He offered to give him time to think it over. Irving thanked him for his honesty and said he felt inclined to accept his offer.

As soon as Linklater had hung up, Irving telephoned a contact at the German publishing company Langen Mueller. He told them that if they wanted to secure Hitler’s diaries they should move fast because the Sunday Times was on to them. By mid-afternoon, the publishers had called him back and offered to pay his air fare if he would inspect the material on their behalf. Irving immediately booked seats on a flight to Munich. He had no intention of being double-crossed by the Sunday Times.

At the same time in Hamburg, Heidemann and Walde were being presented with a formal copy of the agreement sketched out in Cologne in October with Gerd Schulte-Hillen. Once the company had recovered its costs, the revenue generated by the diaries would be divided up between the journalists and Gruner and Jahr – and for the first time, in recognition of his work on the Hess manuscript, Leo Pesch was to be given a slice of the cake. Heidemann would receive 36 per cent of the money; Walde, 16 per cent; Pesch, 8 per cent; the company would take the remaining 40 per cent. These percentages would apply both to the sale of the syndication rights and to the sale of the actual diaries themselves.

An appendix to the contract set out in detail exactly how the agreement might work in practice. Supposing syndication sales brought in 10 million marks: the company would immediately claim 9 million to defray its own costs; of the remainder, Heidemann would receive 360,000 marks, Walde 160,000 and Pesch 80,000 – Gruner and Jahr’s 40 per cent share would yield it 400,000 marks. If the books were sold – say, to an archive or a collector – for an additional 5 million marks, the company would immediately take half to cover its initial outlay. Of the remaining 2.5 million marks, Heidemann would then take 900,000, Walde 400,000 and Pesch 200,000; again, the company’s share would be 40 per cent – i million marks. In other words, despite the readjustment insisted upon by Schulte-Hillen, the journalists still stood to become rich men as a result of the diaries’ publication.

Although individual volumes, mainly from the war years, were continuing to come in, the Hess manuscript was now finished. The most difficult task had been securing the cooperation of Frau Hess, from whom Walde and Pesch had wanted information about her visits to see her husband in Spandau. The Hess family had called in a lawyer who had insisted on payment of a fee of 5000 marks as well as a guarantee that the family’s ‘political standpoint’ would be represented when the story appeared in Stern. It had finally been agreed that this would be done in the form of an interview.

A copy of the manuscript of Plan 3 was sent to Henri Nannen for his approval while Felix Schmidt briefed the head of Stern’s serialization department, Horst Treuke. Schmidt told Treuke to begin planning on the assumption that they would be running the Hess story in the summer of 1983. He also let him into the secret of the existence of the diaries. Treuke, startled by the news, asked if they were sure they were genuine. Schmidt reassured him. Did he seriously think that Schulte-Hillen would have paid out nine million marks to buy a set of forgeries?

David Irving arrived at August Priesack’s apartment at 8.30 a.m. on Saturday morning. The much-vaunted ‘archive’ was spread out on the floor. ‘It consisted’, recalled Irving, ‘of some twenty folders, A3-sized, with photographs stuck on the front and photocopies of documents of the entire Hitler period, from his birth to the end of his life. A special folder covered the years from 1939 to 1945.’ When Stiefel had called Priesack in to look at his collection in 1979, he had rashly provided the ‘professor’ with photocopies of much of his Hitler material, including half a dozen sheets covering the most interesting entries from the 1935 diary. Several times, while Irving was skimming through the material, the telephone rang with urgent messages. The caller was Fritz Stiefel, but despite pressure from Irving, Priesack refused to identify him. He referred to him either as ‘Fritz’ or ‘the client’. He said that he was in trouble for having said as much as he had, that according to ‘Fritz’ the entire higher command of the East German Army had been summoned to Berlin for an inquiry into the rumours that one general was smuggling Hitler’s diaries to the West.

If he was ever to get to the diaries, Irving knew that he needed to speak to this mysterious ‘client’. He decided to trick his doddering old host. ‘I persuaded Priesack – who would not give me Fritz’s other name however hard I tried – to telephone him reassuringly from the neighbouring room.’ Irving crept across to the door and counted the clicks as Priesack dialled the number. In this way he managed to make out the prefix code. (‘It’s easy. You know the first number is “0” and you can work out the rest from that.’)

Making an excuse that he had to go out for a while, Irving left Priesack’s apartment and found a neighbouring telephone office. ‘I checked all the phone books and found that the area code was for Waiblingen, and the number was for one Fritz Stiefel, whose address I thus obtained.’

The search took Irving several hours. By the time he returned at 5.30 p.m., Priesack had already finished entertaining another visitor. Wolf Rudiger Hess, son of Rudolf Hess, had called to inspect the letter supposedly sent by his father to Hitler in May 1941. ‘He had roundly denounced the handwriting as a forgery,’ noted Irving. ‘If that is faked, what else might not be too?’

Promising to try to arrange a publisher for him, Irving managed to persuade Priesack to part with his precious folders.

Next morning, Irving left Munich for Stuttgart. He caught a train to Waiblingen and marched, unannounced, up to Fritz Stiefel’s front door. ‘Reluctantly, he appeared,’ recalled Irving, ‘and reluctantly invited me in.’ The historian explained that he had not telephoned because ‘one never knew who was listening in’. Stiefel said that if he had phoned him, he would have told him there was no point in coming. ‘He approved my method of gaining entry this way and congratulated me.’ To thaw the atmosphere further, Irving produced from his inside pocket one of his most valuable possessions: one of Adolf Hitler’s monogrammed teaspoons from the Berghof. Whenever Irving was researching in Germany, he carried it with him, a talisman to charm reluctant old Nazis into helping him. ‘That spoon’, says Irving, ‘has opened a lot of doors.’ Stiefel examined it and then went and fetched one of his own to show Irving.

Having compared cutlery the two men settled to business. Irving asked about the Hitler diaries and Stiefel – as Heidemann had predicted – proceeded to lie. A local dealer, he said, had been to see him a few years earlier and shown him a diary. He had kept it for one or two weeks and then given it back. Irving asked if there was any way of finding out where the other volumes were. Stiefel ‘answered that he’d heard they’d all been sold to an American’. The industrialist would not reveal the American’s name, nor would he identify the diaries’ supplier.

All Irving’s hard work and cunning appeared to have been in vain. His only consolation was that he had managed to get hold of Priesack’s photocopies.

On Tuesday 21 December he flew back to London. He rang Alan Samson, his publisher at Macmillan, and told him about the diaries. Samson was interested and they arranged an appointment for the following day.

Irving did not begin a detailed examination of the Priesack material until 8.30 the next morning. He sat in his first-floor study, pulled out his own folder of authenticated Hitler writing and then began indexing Priesack’s papers ‘to try to get an impression of their value’.

Whatever allegations may be levelled at Irving as an historian – and there have been many – there is no doubting his ability to sniff out original documents. Over the past twenty years he had become only too familiar with the scale of the trade in forgeries. He had himself almost been fooled by a faked ‘diary’ of the German intelligence chief, Wilhelm Canaris. He therefore approached Priesack’s papers critically – and almost at once he began finding discrepancies. The writing of words like ‘Deutsch’, ‘Nation’ and ‘NSDAP’ which recurred regularly varied in style from document to document. The most damning piece of evidence as far as he was concerned was a letter purporting to have been written by Goering in 1944. The word ‘Reichsmarschall’ in the printed letter-heading was misspelt ‘Reichsmarsall’. ‘By lunchtime,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘I was unfortunately satisfied that the Priesack collection is stuffed with fake documents.’ He cancelled his appointment with Macmillan and rang Priesack. ‘There are such huge variances,’ he told him, ‘that the documents cannot be genuine.’ Priesack, according to Irving, ‘gasped’. If Stiefel’s documents were fakes, how reliable was the rest of the businessman’s memorabilia? At that moment, one of the largest printing companies in Italy was busy producing several thousand copies of Billy Price’s book, Adolf Hitler as Painter and Draughtsman, which was full of pictures from Stiefel’s collection.

‘Does this mean’, asked Priesack, ‘that the watercolours are also forged? They come from the same source.’

Irving replied that he was no art expert. He could not answer that question. He did however say that in his opinion ‘the entire story about East German involvement’ was ‘part of an elaborate Schwindel to prevent the purchasers from showing their acquisitions around…. I urged him to advise Fritz Stiefel to buy nothing more from this source.’

According to Irving’s diary, Priesack was fawning in his gratitude. There were those, he said, who believed that Irving should be given the title ‘doctor’. He disagreed: in Germany, the name ‘David Irving’ was honour enough. To which Irving, angry at having wasted his time, and weary of this tiresome old man, added in his diary the single word: schmarm.

But if Irving’s visit to Germany had done little to restore his own fortunes, it did at least bring profit to August Priesack.

So far, using Kujau to pressure Fritz Stiefel into keeping quiet, Heidemann had been able to contain the damage done by Priesack’s disclosure. Now, the reporter acted to seal the leak altogether. Hard on the heels of David Irving, Heidemann travelled down to Munich to see Priesack. He offered him 30,000 marks in cash for his archive – a sum which Priesack, scraping a living on a school teacher’s pension, was happy to accept. ‘This is worth a lot to me,’ Heidemann told him. ‘Now I will own everything Stiefel has.’ He did not mention Stern’s diaries: Priesack assumed that he and Stiefel were simply rival collectors. Anyway, the reason for the offer was of less interest to him at that moment than the 500- and 1000-mark notes his visitor now pulled out of his briefcase. If Heidemann wanted to throw his money about buying up photocopies, who was he to complain?

TWENTY

NINETEEN EIGHTY-THREE WAS going to be a big year for Gerd Heidemann and he and Gina were determined to greet it in style. At a cost of more than 5000 marks, the couple flew to New York to attend the annual New Year’s Eve Ball at the Waldorf Astoria.

As 1982 came to an end, Gerd Heidemann’s behaviour was – if anything – even odder than usual. Two-and-a-half years after his honeymoon visit to South America, he was once more obsessed by Martin Bormann, gripped as if by a bout of some recurrent tropical fever. He was utterly convinced by Medard Klapper’s stories that Bormann was still alive, presiding over a circle of old Nazis, shuttling between various countries in Europe and the Middle East. Klapper gave Heidemann Bormann’s telephone number in Spain and Bormann’s Spanish cover name, ‘Martin di Calde Villa’. He showed him a house in Zurich where the ‘Bormann Group’ had its headquarters and allowed Heidemann to photograph the building. He was always on the point of taking the reporter to meet Bormann – only to have to tell him, regretfully, a few days later, that ‘Martin’ couldn’t make the appointment. Heidemann commissioned one of his oldest colleagues, a photographer named Helmut Jabusch to fly to Zurich to take pictures of ‘one of the most prominent Nazis’: he even booked airline tickets, but once again, the assignment fell through.

In November 1982, Klapper gave Heidemann six Polaroid photographs of an old man whom he claimed was Bormann. The reporter paid him 25,000 marks for the pictures which he then began showing to colleagues. He pointed out to Felix Schmidt that the man in the photograph – who wore, as Schmidt recalled, ‘a Basque cap’ – had a birth mark on the left side of his forehead, exactly as Bormann had. According to Schmidt: ‘Heidemann explained that it was possible to make contact with Bormann. Everything had to go through a middleman but he was sure he would meet Bormann shortly, either in Zurich or in Cairo. The Nazis who surrounded Bormann were going to allow him to meet him. Heidemann always spoke of Bormann as “Martin”.’ Schmidt was incredulous: not least, because it was Stern that had actually proved that Bormann was dead. He began to have doubts about Heidemann’s mental health and confided his worries to Peter Koch. Koch shook his head. ‘With Heidemann,’ he said, ‘anything’s possible.’ Heidemann sent one of the photographs to Max Frei-Sulzer, who was commissioned to investigate it for fingerprints. The versatile Frei-Sulzer reported back on 21 November that he could not reach a positive conclusion: ‘Unfortunately, at the critical place there are several prints on top of one another which cannot be separated. The others are so fragmented, there is no question of being able to evaluate them.’ There was only one clear print, said Frei-Sulzer: its owner was unknown.

His colleagues at Stern treated Heidemann’s behaviour at this time as if it were no more than a minor eccentricity. It does not seem to have occurred to any of them that a man capable of such obvious self-delusion over Martin Bormnn might be equally unreliable on other matters. Leo Pesch recalled that Heidemann now seldom came into the office. When he did so, it was to show them the photograph and to ‘talk very intently about Bormann’. Pesch and Walde regarded it as a ‘half-crazy story’ and used to have ‘teasing conversations’ with him about it. It was another example of Heidemann showing off, trying to convince people of his importance. ‘My impression was that Heidemann had lost more and more contact with reality through his success,’ Pesch said afterwards. ‘In my view, Heidemann had a great deal of vanity. Again and again, quite unprompted, he would tell colleagues stories about the diaries and about Martin Bormann.’ The general view was that funny old Heidemann was up to his usual tricks; as long as it didn’t interfere with his real work, the best thing was to humour him. ‘Our main concern’, admitted Walde, ‘was that Heidemann might be diverted by this myth about Bormann from the task of obtaining the diaries.’

Was there a connection between the two stories? Heidemann certainly acted as though there were. Whenever he came across a flattering reference to Bormann in the diaries, he photocopied it and gave it to Klapper to pass on to Bormann. Klapper reported back that ‘Martin’ was so pleased, he had hung an enlargement of one extract on his study wall in Madrid. Heidemann also talked about Bormann to Kujau. During one of these conversations, the forger told Heidemann that his East German brother could obtain Hitler’s gold party insignia, allegedly given to Bormann at the end of the war. Heidemann reported this to Klapper who subsequently passed on ‘Martin’s’ confirmation that the story was indeed correct. Heidemann told Kujau and shortly afterwards, a reference to the decoration appeared in the final volume of the diaries.

Further evidence of possible collusion between Kujau and Klapper surfaced at the beginning of December 1982. Every reference in the Hess special volume was being checked methodically against published sources to make certain it contained no errors. The name of one SS captain, supposedly appointed by Hitler to watch over Hess, proved to be almost indecipherable. Even Wilfried Sorge was called in to give an opinion. Lautman? Lausserman? Eventually, the consensus was that the name was Laackman. Because Walde and Pesch could find no mention of the name in any of their reference books, they asked Josef Henke of the Bundesarchiv to undertake a search on their behalf in the closed records of the Berlin Document Centre. Three weeks later, Henke sent them thirty photocopied pages of SS Captain Anton Laackman’s military record. Heidemann also asked Klapper to check with Bormann. In January, Klapper returned with three original pages from Laackman’s personnel file which he told Heidemann he had removed from Bormann’s office in Spain. There was no question but that the documents were authentic. Once again, the Bormann story and the Hitler diaries appeared to be substantiating one another.

Naturally, the Laackman papers did not come from Bormann. They were stolen, at Klapper’s request, along with other Nazi documents, by a corrupt employee of the West German state archives named Rainer Hess. But Heidemann was not aware of that. For him, the production of the papers was the clinching proof that Bormann was still alive.

Months later, after the diaries were exposed as forgeries, the Sunday Times used this episode as the basis for its assertion that ‘Klapper played a pivotal role – perhaps the central role – in the diary fraud.’

The kindest thing that can be said about the Sunday Times investigation is that it overstated its case. If Laackman’s name had not appeared in any book, and Kujau could have forged the diary entry only on the basis of documents supplied by Klapper, the evidence that the two men were working together to trick Heidemann would be conclusive. But Laackman’s name does appear in a book. It occurs – as the Sunday Times was forced to admit – on page 221 of the Nazi Party’s Yearbook for 1941: police discovered it, carefully marked by Kujau, when they raided his home in 1983. Moreover, the Hess volume was forged by Kujau in 1981. If the planting of Laackman’s name was part of a carefully laid plot, it is hard to see how he could have known fourteen months in advance that Stern would fail to spot the reference in the 1941 Yearbook and ask Klapper to obtain the documents.

It is possible there was a link between Kujau and Klapper. The fact that both men, proven liars, deny knowing one another, is no proof to the contrary. But if they were working together, they have covered their tracks with great care. The only place in which the Bormann story, the hunt for secret Nazi treasure and the discovery of Hitler’s diaries all came together with any certainty was in the overwrought imagination of Gerd Heidemann.

Now that the Plan 3 had been completed, sale of the syndication rights could begin in earnest. On Wednesday 5 January, Manfred Fischer turned over control of the safe-deposit box in Zurich to Dr Jan Hensmann, deputy managing director of Gruner and Jahr. The following day, Hensmann, Wilfried Sorge and Gerd Schulte-Hillen, accompanied by Olaf Paeschke representing Bertelsmann, flew back to New York for a second round of negotiations with Bantam Books.

Knowing the extent of the market for books on the Second World War, Bantam was enthusiastic about the project. Plan 3, based on new writings by Hitler, with its revelation that the Führer authorized Hess’s peace mission, would make headlines all over the world. If the hardback edition appeared that autumn, the paperback could tie in with Hess’s ninetieth birthday in April 1984. But once again, the discussions foundered. Bantam’s President, Louis Wolfe, wanted to involve expert historians in the project. He also demanded extensive guarantees of compensation should the book’s authenticity be called into question – an open-ended commitment which the Germans were reluctant to make. A more serious problem concerned newspaper rights. Bantam was prepared to offer $50,000, but their visitors were insistent on retaining syndication rights for themselves. Wolfe ‘found it difficult to grasp what Schulte-Hillen and Hensmann actually wanted’. He was not aware that Plan 3 was regarded in Hamburg merely as a trial balloon for a much bigger scoop. Wolfe could not understand it. He thought that ‘the whole thing was being handled in an amateurish way’.

While the businessmen were arguing in the United States, David Irving was preparing to speak to a packed meeting in West Germany. At noon on 9 January, 2000 supporters of the DVU jammed into one of Munich’s enormous beer cellars to listen to Irving speak at a memorial meeting for Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the highly decorated fighter pilot who had lived in exile in Brazil and Paraguay, an unrepentant admirer of Adolf Hitler until the end of his life. ‘I spoke first,’ noted Irving, ‘and was interrupted by a huge roar of applause as I called the Bonn politicians Charakterschweine for not allowing military representation at the Rudel funeral.’

At the end of the meeting, Irving drove across town to see August Priesack to return his Hitler documents. The material was so riddled with fakes, he told him, he was not going to waste any more time trying to sort it out. He showed Priesack the misspelt Goering notepaper. ‘He indicated by his manner that he had already noticed that, but did not consider it important. At this I mildly exploded: “If even the printed letter head of the second most important man in Germany contains a printing error, how can the document be anything other than a fake?” He implied that in 1944 even Goering would be happy to have headed notepaper, printing error or not. I did not even bother to discuss that remark.’ Priesack said that he thought he should contact Gerd Heidemann. ‘Why contact him?’ asked Irving. ‘It is quite obvious from these documents that they are fakes.’ He told Priesack that he suspected Fritz Stiefel had a hand in the forgeries. Priesack flushed and insisted that was not the case. ‘Throughout the half hour conversation he kept putting his hand on my shoulder,’ noted Irving, who was as fastidious as the Führer about physical contact. ‘At one stage he even held my hand, which was not pleasant.’

Priesack accompanied Irving out to his car. ‘I don’t suppose I shall be seeing you again?’ he said. ‘He seemed sad about that,’ recalled Irving in his diary, ‘though not at all about the prospect of the money he had lost.’ (Irving did not know that Priesack’s apparent stoicism was that of a man who had sold his collection – fakes and all – to Heidemann for 30,000 marks.) The historian drove off in a bad mood. He, at any rate, had lost money. Even allowing for the expenses paid to him by Langen Mueller he reckoned he had spent 2000 marks he could ill afford. ‘But’, he wrote that evening, ‘I do not regret that as it would have been much worse if I had proceeded any further before realizing that his files of documents were largely forgeries.’

‘I suspect’, he added, ‘that Heidemann has also been tricked.’

The following day in New York the negotiations between Gruner and Jahr and Bantam Books finally broke down. In their hotel suite that evening, the Germans discussed what they should do next. The English language market was largely a mystery to them. Clearly, if they were to exploit their property to the full, they would need some professional advice. Sticking to their original model of the Kissinger memoirs, they decided to enlist the help of Kissinger’s agent, Marvin Josephson. Josephson was the head of International Creative Management (ICM), the largest artistic agency in the world. Josephson did not handle their business personally. Instead, the Stern men were referred to Lynn Nesbit, Senior Vice President of ICM, whom they were told was the company’s expert on magazine rights.

According to Ms Nesbit, at a meeting with Sorge, she undertook to handle ‘the North American serial rights to a document called Plan 3’, based on original, unpublished notes written by Adolf Hitler. She did not bother to check its authenticity herself. Sorge told her that Stern had a series of expert reports which proved that the Hitler material was genuine. The magazine would be willing to show these reports to potential purchasers. ‘The word “diary” was never mentioned to me,’ she recalled. If she had known she was actually representing sixty volumes of Hitler’s diaries, she would have been ‘much more sceptical’:

Sorge was insistent that the material should be offered only to ‘reputable’ organizations. Time, Newsweek and the New York Times were the obvious candidates. Ms Nesbit promised to arrange a series of meetings at which Sorge could meet potential clients. Her tentative estimate of the market value of Plan 3 in the United States was $250,000.

The next week in Hamburg was a busy one for Gerd Heidemann. On Tuesday 18 January he finally signed the revised contract, drafted in October, finalized in December, guaranteeing him 36 per cent of the syndication revenue once the company had cleared its costs. This immediately entitled him to claim 300,000 marks – the balance owing on his ‘compensation’ settlement of 1.5 million. On Wednesday, he withdrew 150,000 marks in cash from the Adolphsplatz bank, telling Sorge he needed it for the next batch of diaries. On Saturday he was in Munich with Gina, at the invitation of August Priesack, for the launching party of Billy F. Price’s book, Adolf Hitler as Painter and Draughtsman.

For Mr Price, millionaire compressor manufacturer and connoisseur of the Führer’s art, Saturday 22 January was a great day. He had already spent at least $100,000 on producing his book and to celebrate its publication he spared no expense. A room was booked at the Four Seasons, one of the most expensive hotels in Munich. There was plenty of fine wine and food. The guest list read like a Berghof reception.

There was Frau Henriette Hoffmann von Schirach – daughter of Hitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann and widow of Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth and Gauleiter of Vienna. When she was a young girl, Hitler had taught Henriette to play the piano; when she was a bride, he had been best man at her wedding. She was suing the United States Government for the return of two Hitler paintings, allegedly stolen from her house at the end of the war and now hanging in the National Army museum in Washington. Price was paying her legal fees.

There was Frau Gerda Christian, most dedicated of Hitler’s secretaries. Next to her was her old colleague, Christa Schroeder, 75 years old and ill with a kidney complaint. She had helped Price with his book and sold him some pictures from her own collection. In return, Price was paying her medical bills.

There was Frau Schmidt-Ehmen, wife of one of Hitler’s favourite sculptors, and Eva Wagner, descendant of his favourite composer. There was Peter Jahn, the Viennese ‘art expert’, who had worked with Priesack cataloguing Hitler’s paintings in the 1930s and who had helped the Marquess of Bath acquire much of his collection. There was one of Hitler’s doctors. There was Bormann’s adjutant….

Price moved among them, proud and prosperous, in a dark three-piece suit, signing copies of his book. He realized, he said later, that the only reason most of his guests wanted to know him was that he was rich – ‘but what the hell?’ He felt he was performing a service to history by gathering together Hitler’s art. What he did not know was that of the 725 pictures in his book, at least 170 were the work of Konrad Kujau. At one point, Fritz Stiefel – who had supplied the pictures to Price – approached the Texan and asked him actually to autograph a copy of the book for his ‘good friend Conny Fischer’. But for some reason, Price never signed the book. ‘God’, he declared afterwards, with revivalist fervour, ‘stayed mah hand.’

For Gerd and Gina Heidemann, the reception was filled with familiar faces and when the time came to leave, a tipsy Frau Heidemann thanked their host for ‘a wonderful party’. Gerd Heidemann invited Price to come to Hamburg to see his own collection of Hitler’s art. He confided to his fellow devotee that he had ‘something big’ himself coming out in a few months’ time. ‘He couldn’t tell me what it was,’ recalled Price, ‘and I didn’t question him too much about it.’

A few days after the party, Price took up Heidemann’s offer and visited him at his home in the Elbchaussee. The Texan had met plenty of Hitler obsessives, but seldom anyone as far gone as Heidemann: ‘Priesack’s in love with Hitler. But Heidemann’s more in love with Hitler than anyone I’ve ever met in my life.’ He was impressed by much of the reporter’s collection, but even he – who had been taken in by Stiefel’s pictures – found some of it ‘ridiculously fake’. Heidemann showed him one painting (admittedly, one of Kujau’s more exuberant efforts) which almost made him burst out laughing: a portrait, supposedly by Hitler, of King Farouk of Egypt. Price was still shaking his head about the episode a year later. ‘Hell, man. King Farouk. No way would I accept that.’

Another foreign visitor entertained by Heidemann in the two Elbchaussee apartments at this time was Gitta Sereny of the Sunday Times.

According to David Irving, he had warned the Sunday Times in a telephone call on 30 December that the material he had seen was ‘dangerously polluted with fakes’. But the newspaper was not inclined to take his word for anything, let alone the authenticity of Adolf Hitler’s diaries. They decided to send a reporter of their own to make contact with Heidemann, and Gitta Sereny was the obvious choice. Brought up in Austria before the war, she was trilingual in English, French and German, and a regular contributor on Nazi subjects. In 1974 she had written Into that Darkness, an examination of Franz Stangl, Commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp. She was also, as it happened, a personal enemy of Irving’s, having published a damning attack on Hitler’s War in the Sunday Times when it first appeared in 1977.

Over the course of two days, Heidemann and Sereny spoke for about eight hours. He took her on a tour of his archive. She found his collection ‘breathtaking’. Filed away, protected by clear plastic covers, was a series of what appeared to be ‘extraordinary’ documents, including the original of Hitler’s order to liquidate the Soviet commissars. He showed her a letter from Karl Wolff in which the general appointed him his literary heir and executor. He showed her his library of negatives from the Hoffmann photographic archive. The walls of the Heidemanns’ two flats were crammed with Hitler paintings. ‘I was stunned,’ she recalled, ‘absolutely stunned.’

Heidemann told Sereny that he was making regular, clandestine trips to East Germany. He assured her that the Hitler diaries existed. He was not, however, prepared to say whether they were in his possession. Although Heidemann struck her as a man obsessed by the Nazis, characterized by ‘an extraordinary political and intellectual naïvety’, she believed he was telling the truth. If anyone could obtain the diaries, he could.

Inadvertently, despite his concern not to give anything away, Heidemann also provided her with a clue to the origin of the diaries’ trail. He mentioned Professor Eberhard Jaeckel as an historian who knew something about the East German material. From her hotel in Hamburg, Sereny telephoned Jaeckel who confirmed that some years previously he had seen something: not a diary exactly, but a ‘yearbook’. Sereny asked him if he thought it was authentic. He said it was ‘interesting’. He would not go any further on the telephone. ‘Come down to Stuttgart,’ he said. Sereny asked if he could introduce her to the person who obtained the diary. Jaeckel replied that if she came down, it might be possible for them to go and see some people. Sereny telephoned Magnus Linklater in the Sunday Times office with this exciting news. But to her amazement, he refused to authorize a trip to south Germany. The paper’s new owner, Rupert Murdoch, had demanded that the editorial department reduce its costs: the Sunday Times was gripped by what Sereny later called ‘a rabid economy drive’. Even in sending her to Hamburg for two nights, Linklater had risked incurring the wrath of the editor, Frank Giles. She had to return to London at once.

If the Sunday Times had not decided on this false economy, the events of the next three months would probably have developed very differently. Sereny would have met Jaeckel and learned of the forgeries printed in his book of Hitler’s writings. She would probably have met Stiefel. She might even have met ‘Herr Fischer’. ‘I could have stopped the whole goddam thing right there,’ she complained later. As it was, the Sunday Times passed up one of the few remaining chances of uncovering the hoax. The impending fiasco, swollen by the profligacy of West Germany’s journalism, was abetted by the parsimony of Great Britain’s.

TWENTY-ONE

ON WEDNESDAY 16 FEBRUARY, Wilfried Sorge arrived in the international departure lounge of Hamburg airport to catch a flight to Denmark. It was almost two and a half years since that stroll in the Black Forest when Walde had first told him of the hunt for Hitler’s diaries. Now, with a copy of Plan 3 in his luggage, he was about to depart on the first stage of a three-week odyssey to sell the story to the world. In terms of his career, Sorge – like Walde and Heidemann – had a great deal staked on the Hitler diaries. To have been entrusted with such an important mission, six weeks short of his fortieth birthday, was a clear sign of the young executive’s growing stature within the company. Gruner and Jahr were counting upon him. Schulte-Hillen personally was watching the way he handled things.

Sorge was well equipped for his mission. Immaculately tailored, endlessly charming, permanently tanned, he was the epitome of expense-account smoothness. The strategy which he was about to put into action had been agreed in Hamburg after consultations with Bertelsmann and ICM. A list of foreign companies had been compiled to whom the Hess story would be offered. In some countries – the United States and Spain for example – several news organizations would be approached at the same time, in order to encourage competition and push up the price. In others, such as France and Italy, Sorge would deal with one company exclusively.

Sorge flew first to Copenhagen for discussions with Bertelsmann’s agent in Scandinavia. From there he caught a transatlantic flight to New York. Lynn Nesbit had arranged three interviews for him. At the offices of Newsweek he met the magazine’s editor-in-chief, William Broyles, and its managing editor, Maynard Parker. Peter Koch had mentioned the project to Parker during a visit to America shortly before Christmas. At the time he had been rebuked for his indiscretion, but Sorge found that the notion of publishing original Hitler material had taken hold at Newsweek. Broyles and Parker told him they were very interested and would probably be submitting an offer. At Time, the response of William Mador, former Bonn correspondent, also sounded promising. The only person who did not seem enthusiastic was the woman who represented the New York Times. After a few days in the United States, Sorge flew back to Europe – to Amsterdam, where he discussed the prospects for Holland and Belgium with the Bertelsmann people. Then it was on to France, to make a sales pitch to Paris Match. From there, Sorge flew south to Madrid to see representatives from the magazine Cambio 16 and the newspaper El Pais. Leaving Spain, he headed east: first to Milan for a meeting with the publishing group Mondadori, then on again for the longest leg of the journey so far – to Tokyo, and the ancient mysteries of the Far Eastern market….

It was during one lunchtime the following week, while Sorge was midway through his sales trip, that Heidemann met Henri Nannen and Peter Koch in the street near the Stern building. They passed on some devastating news. It had been decided to abandon the current publishing plan in favour of launching the scoop with the story of the diaries’ discovery. Heidemann hurried back to the special office to tell Leo Pesch and Thomas Walde. In the afternoon, Heidemann and Walde went over to see Koch to find out what was going on.

Neither Koch nor Schmidt had ever been happy with the idea of starting with the serialization of the Hess scoop. It might make sense commercially, but from a journalistic point of view it was ridiculous. The sensation was in the fact of the diaries’ existence, not in the single revelation of Hitler’s knowledge of Hess’s flight, buried in the biographical detail of Plan 3. Alone, Koch and Schmidt had been unable to convince Schulte-Hillen and the Stern management. But now they had a powerful ally. Henri Nannen had taken the manuscript of Plan 3 home to read over Christmas. ‘I was amazed to find that it was simply the Hess story with Hitler quotations in it,’ he recalled. He gave the book to a girlfriend for her opinion. She was forty-two. What did she think her generation would make of it? ‘She found the story interesting, but she didn’t appreciate its historical importance, and she didn’t grasp at all that she was looking at part of a sensational find of Hitler’s diaries.’ When Nannen returned from his holiday in January he told Schulte-Hillen that he was in danger of squandering his investment by being overcautious: ‘If one had Hitler diaries, one should start the story with this announcement, and with the story of the find.’ Henri Nannen was one of the most successful journalists in West Germany. Schulte-Hillen listened to him with respect. He endorsed Nannen’s decision.

The meeting in Koch’s office that afternoon was noisy. Heidemann was horrified by the new idea. He returned to his old argument that premature publication would endanger lives and jeopardize the supply of the remaining diaries. Koch was sarcastic: the reporter had already spent more than two years bringing in the books; how many more were there? Schmidt and Gillhausen also arrived to add their support to Koch. Schmidt was worried that if they delayed much longer, David Irving or some rival organization would obtain photocopies of the diaries. Gillhausen – the most junior of the editors, but nevertheless respected as a man with a ‘nose’ for a good story – added his opinion. ‘His feeling’, recalled Walde, ‘was that the newsworthy part came in three little paragraphs before the end. The whole story should be published the other way round, starting with the story of the find.’

Walde shared Heidemann’s fears. He also had two additional concerns: he did not want to see his book swamped by the controversy which would be aroused by the announcement of the diaries’ discovery; and secondly, he wanted to write the story of the find himself – something which would be impossible if he had to prepare extracts from the diaries as well. Suddenly, he saw his dreams of becoming an authority on Hitler disappearing into the maw of Stern’s accelerating timetable. But Koch had been pushed around by his own staff for long enough. According to Walde he ‘threatened’ him. He said that ‘he would take the work on the diaries out of my hands if I persisted in obstructing publication by my “inflexible” behaviour’.

‘Despite my huge reservations about whether publication was possible in the time allowed,’ said Walde, ‘I gave in. That was my big mistake.’

Walde had one particularly good reason for being alarmed by the decision to speed up publication. Although the company had obtained three reports authenticating the handwriting of its Hitler archive, no part of it had yet been subjected to forensic tests. If he had contacted a freelance chemical analyst, these could have been performed in a matter of days. Walde’s mistake had been to rely upon the West German Federal Police, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA). On 5 July 1982, under the auspices of the Bundesarchiv, the BKA had been sent the originals of the material studied by the handwriting experts – the Hess statement and the Horthy telegram – with a request that they conduct tests to determine the age of the paper. Later, they had also been sent the various signed Hitler photographs and the Kleist document. Nothing happened. Despite occasional reminders from Walde, the BKA forensic experts continued to concentrate on their official police work. In December, Stern had asked for their request to be given ‘the highest priority’. Still nothing had been done. Now the unpleasant meeting with Koch galvanized the history department into making a new approach, this time enlisting the help of the Bundesarchiv. On Tuesday 1 March, Leo Pesch telexed Dr Oldenhage, pleading with him to contact Stern as quickly as possible: ‘We have some urgent deadline problems regarding the expert reports.’

On Friday 4 March, Wilfried Sorge, jet-lagged in his bedroom in a hotel in Tokyo, was telephoned by Peter Hess, Gruner and Jahr’s publishing director, and summoned back to Hamburg. ‘What’s happened?’ he asked. ‘The whole publishing concept has been changed,’ he was told: he must return immediately ‘in order to pitch the sales strategy in line with the new plan’. Sorge was bitter at this news. In the space of a single telephone call, thousands of miles of air travel and days of meetings and planning had been ruined. He had no choice but to book himself on the first available flight back to Germany.

In New York, Lynn Nesbit’s contract to sell Plan 3 was terminated. She received a fee of $10,000 for her efforts. Newsweek, which had already submitted a tentative offer of $150,000 for the serial rights to the Hess book, was told that Stern had changed its mind. From Hamburg, telexes were dispatched to all Sorge’s potential customers informing them that they ‘could no longer be offered the material’.

The following Tuesday, Gerd Schulte-Hillen convened a meeting in a conference room on the ninth floor of the Stern building. It was attended by all those involved in the diaries project: Nannen, Gillhausen, Koch, Schmidt, Walde, Heidemann, Pesch, Sorge, Hess and Hensmann. The history department’s flickering hope that the new publication plan might be abandoned was crushed by Schulte-Hillen’s opening words. ‘Gentlemen,’ announced the managing director, ‘the time has come. We intend to publish.’ Nevertheless, Walde, Pesch and Heidemann were determined to make one last stand. The source of the diaries, they warned, would be threatened, and important volumes had yet to be delivered. Walde reported that they had no books from the year 1944: ‘If we did not get hold of those volumes… we would be unable to settle some very important questions about the Third Reich.’ Imagine what Hitler might have written about the German response to D-Day or the July bomb plot. Sorge supported his old schoolfriend. Speaking as a salesman, he would find it much easier to offer the diary archive in its entirety, rather than having to tell customers that part of it had not yet arrived.

Schulte-Hillen was not convinced. He accepted the argument of Nannen and the editors: to start with the Hess story and not to mention the diaries was the wrong way of doing things. If they delayed any longer there was a danger of leaks. They should go ahead and begin printing the story in May.

That settled, the conference went on to take a series of decisions on the timetable for publication. The existence of the diaries would be revealed in eight weeks’ time, in Stern’s issue of 5 May. To wring the last ounce of sensation and profitability out of the diaries, serialization would be divided into three separate periods, spaced out over a period of eighteen months. In May and June, the magazine would run eight weekly instalments, covering the story of the diaries’ discovery, the Hess flight and the Nazis’ rise to power. There would then be a break over the summer. In the autumn they would relaunch the scoop with a ten-part series based on the pre-war diaries. This would be followed by a second and much longer interruption while the final extracts were prepared. Finally, in the autumn of 1984, Stern would publish another ten extracts based on the diaries from the war years. Heidemann was instructed to deliver the missing volumes by 31 March. Another Stern reporter, Wolf Thieme, was given the task of putting together the story of how the diaries were found – once again, Heidemann was expected to turn over all his information for someone else to write up.

The magazine, concluded Schulte-Hillen, had less than a month to produce the first eight-part series: it would need to be shown to potential foreign customers during syndication negotiations at the beginning of April.

Early the next morning, the peripatetic Sorge was back at Hamburg airport to catch the first flight to London. He had already scheduled meetings with potential British customers before Stern changed its publication strategy. In view of the importance of the British market, it was decided to go ahead with the London sales trip as planned. At Heathrow, Sorge was met by Stern’s bureau chief in London, Peter Wickman, and the two men drove to their first appointment: with Sir David English of Lord Rothermere’s Associated Newspaper group.

English, editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday, listened to Sorge’s presentation of the Hess story. His immediate worry was the possibility that the Hitler document might be a fake. He had been caught himself, when editor of the Daily Mail, by forged correspondence supposedly originating from Lord Ryder. Another worry was the reputation of the Mail on Sunday, to whom the Hess scoop would be given as ammunition in its circulation battle with the Sunday Express. The Mail on Sunday’s editor, Stewart Steven, was the man who had helped Ladislas Farago track down Martin Bormann for the Daily Express in 1972 only to discover, too late, that ‘Bormann’ was actually an innocent Argentine high school teacher. English told Sorge he was interested in Stern’s story, but he would require absolute guarantees of authenticity before going any further.

In the afternoon, Sorge and Wickman went to see their other possible client, Times Newspapers. Colin Webb and Charles Wilson attended the meeting on behalf of The Times, Brian MacArthur for the Sunday Times. Before revealing what he had to offer, Sorge made the three men sign a pledge of secrecy. They were more interested in the story than David English, but before they could make any commitment, they would have to consult the editors of the two papers and their proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. The secrecy pledge was amended to allow these three gentlemen to be informed of Stern’s scoop.

Sorge spent the night in the Savoy Hotel and the following morning returned to Hamburg.

Heidemann dreaded the impending launch of the diaries. His comfortable existence of the last two years – the suitcases full of money, the flattery of his superiors – was bound to come to an end. He would cease to have a hold over the company. He would suffer the humiliation of watching while the diaries were passed to other writers for exploitation. Already, he had been forced to entertain Wolf Thieme in his gallery in Milchstrasse and tell him the story of the diaries’ discovery. This meeting had posed another problem for Heidemann. It was safe for him to talk about the evacuation of documents from Berlin and the loss of the plane. He could describe how he had located the crash site using Gundlfinger’s name. He could talk of the local peasants who had salvaged material from the wrecked aircraft. But then, of necessity, there was a gap of more than thirty years, until the books started accumulating in the management’s safe in Hamburg. Heidemann explained to Thieme that he could not say any more without jeopardizing the lives of his informants. Naturally, he did not tell Thieme the other reason for his reticence: that if Kujau’s identity were ever disclosed, and if the garrulous relics dealer ever spoke to anyone else from Stern, it would only be a matter of time before the company discovered he had been defrauding them for the past two years.

To try to ward off publication, with all its attendant hazards, Heidemann used every argument, cajolement and threat at his disposal in a desperate attempt to make the company change its mind. On Thursday 17 March he went to see Schulte-Hillen and handed him a closely typed two-page memorandum ‘for his eyes only’. The managing director, said Heidemann, must destroy it as soon as he had read it. ‘Dear Herr Schulte-Hillen,’ it began,

Heidemann went on to list fourteen separate sets of Hitler documents which his ‘business partner’ had told him were on offer:

1. Six diary-like volumes which Hitler wrote alongside the diaries which are known to us.

2. Adolf Hitler’s handwritten memoirs, My Life and Struggle for Germany, written in the years 1942–44.

3. Hitler’s book about women, in which there are said to be descriptions of his experiences with women.

4. Hitler’s plan for the solution of the Jewish question, written after the Wannsee Conference on 28 January 1942, in which he gives Himmler precise orders as to what is to happen to the Jews (eighteen handwritten pages).

5. Hitler’s handwritten Documents about Himmler, Ley and Others, including notes about the Jewish origins of those concerned.

6. Hitler’s notes from 18 April until his death on 30 April 1945.

7. Goebbels’s notes following Hitler’s suicide.

8. Hitler’s handwritten testament and marriage documents (twenty-one pages).

9. Hitler’s documents about his supposed son in France.

10. Hitler’s documents about his origins and relatives.

11. Secret Thoughts about Different Military and Political Problems.

12. Hitler’s book about Frederick the Great.

13. Hitler’s book about King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

14. Hitler’s opera, Wieland the Blacksmith.

Heidemann added that there were ‘three hundred other drawings and watercolours by Hitler’ also available in East Germany.

Heidemann was not necessarily lying when he outlined this fantastic catalogue to Schulte-Hillen. He appears to have genuinely believed what Kujau told him: that these documents could be rescued from behind the Iron Curtain and that premature disclosure might lose Stern the chance of obtaining them. Not all the items were new to Stern. For example, Kujau had first offered to sell Wieland the Blacksmith to Heidemann at the beginning of 1981. The forger had hit on the idea after reading the memoirs of August Kubizek. In The Young Hitler I Knew, published in 1955, Kubizek described how Hitler set about writing an opera, a sub-Wagnerian epic of rape and murder, set in the rugged wastes of Iceland, complete with flaming volcanoes, icy glaciers and winged Valkyries in shining helmets rising from the waters of ‘Wolf Lake’. In the end, Wieland the Blacksmith was too much even for Hitler, and he abandoned it, after a few weeks’ work, in 1907. The incident provided Kujau with a perfect cover story for another fake, and for more than two years he kept promising to supply the opera to Heidemann. The imagination recoils at the thought of what Bertelsmann’s marketing department might have done with a Hitler opera – especially as one of the company’s American subsidiaries was Arista Records. Mercifully, Wieland the Blacksmith was one piece of Hitleriana that Kujau never got round to forging. (He would have done it, he said later, but for the fact that he did not read music.)

Another of the new documents – the biography of King Ludwig II of Bavaria – was also familiar to Heidemann. One of the first diaries the reporter delivered to Hamburg contained a description of a visit supposedly made by Hitler to the town of Hohenschwangau. ‘During my address,’ noted ‘Hitler’ on 12 August 1933, ‘I mention that in earlier years I once wrote a small book about Ludwig II. This must be in Munich.’ Thus Kujau, with characteristic cheek, used one forgery to prepare the way for another.

In his memorandum, Heidemann warned Schulte-Hillen that it would be impossible to obtain all these treasures by 31 March – the managing director’s ‘target date’ for the completion of Stern’s archive. Therefore, said Heidemann, he proposed to deliver the material to ‘other interested parties’, and asked to be released from his contract with Gruner and Jahr.

Schulte-Hillen was not impressed by Heidemann’s bluster. The reporter had threatened to resign so often over the past few years, the bluff no longer carried any conviction. It was not that Schulte-Hillen saw anything inherently implausible in such documents as Hitler’s ‘book about women’, it was simply that the time had passed when he was prepared to tolerate this sort of procrastination. Besides, the company already had enough Hitler material to fill Stern for the next eighteen months. He was a stubborn man, and he had made up his mind. They would begin publishing the diaries in May.

Schulte-Hillen also ignored Heidemann’s request that he should burn the memo. When he had finished reading it, he locked it away in the same file as Heidemann’s various contracts. Afterwards he mentioned the episode during a conversation with Henri Nannen. To Nannen, Heidemann’s determination to try to postpone publication was further evidence of fraud. ‘Heidemann’, he thought, ‘was only really interested in providing further material in order to obtain further payments.’ But recalling Schulte-Hillen’s reaction the last time he had aired his suspicions, he said nothing.

Three days later, Sorge announced to his clients that in addition to the Hess story, Stern was now offering to sell syndication rights in Adolf Hitler’s diaries. Interested organizations were invited to send representatives to inspect the material in Zurich at the end of the first week of April.

TWENTY-TWO

THE FIRST INTIMATION that there might be something seriously wrong with Stern’s great scoop came a week and a half later. Walde had at last succeeded in persuading the West German Federal Police to carry out the long-awaited forensic tests. On Tuesday 22 March he telexed Dr Henke and Dr Oldenhage at the Bundesarchiv to tell them he had fixed an appointment to hear the results the following Monday morning. He hoped they could both make it: ‘Colleague Heidemann will attend for us.’

At 10 a.m. on 28 March, Heidemann, Henke and Oldenhage duly assembled at the police headquarters at Wiesbaden. It was assumed that the meeting would be a formality. The material had, after all, been authenticated by three different handwriting analysts. The police expert, Dr Louis Werner, appeared. He had been given nine samples to examine: the Hess statement, the Horthy telegram, the Kleist document, the draft telegram to Franco, some speech notes, a letter to Goering and the three signed Hitler photographs. His conclusion: of the nine documents, he thought at least six were forgeries.

To begin with, Heidemann could not believe what he was hearing. He asked Dr Werner to elaborate. Werner explained that under ultraviolet light, six of the samples, including all the signed photographs and the Horthy telegram, appeared to contain a substance called ‘blankophor’, a paper-whitening agent which as far as he was aware had not come into use until after the Second World War. In his opinion, it was therefore impossible that they could have been written at the time their dates indicated. He proposed to consult an expert from the Bayer chemical company for confirmation. In addition, the Kleist document contained glue of recent manufacture, and one of the letters had been typed on a machine built after 1956.

Heidemann asked about the other three samples, which included the Hess statement, the only page to come from the actual diaries. They, at least, were definitely genuine? Not necessarily, replied Werner. He could not be sure until he had carried out further tests.

How long would that take?

A week.

Heidemann asked if he could borrow the telephone. Werner told him to go ahead. In the scientist’s presence, he rang Walde and repeated what he had just heard. He handed the receiver to Werner.

Walde asked the expert if he could absolutely guarantee that the Hess document was a fake. Werner said he couldn’t: he would have to carry out further tests. These would necessitate damaging the page by cutting away part of it which could then be broken down into its separate components.

Greatly relieved, Walde thanked him and asked him to put Heidemann back on the line. Walde told Heidemann to retrieve the material and return with it to Hamburg immediately.

The two men discussed this unexpected setback the next day. There was no question in their minds that the material was genuine. They had three handwriting reports to prove it. Clearly, there had been a misunderstanding somewhere. Perhaps the documents had become contaminated with whitener in the course of their travels around Europe and North America during the previous year. Perhaps Werner had made a mistake. Or perhaps somehow a few dubious papers had been mixed up with the genuine material.

Heidemann rang Kujau and explained what had happened. ‘Oh, don’t worry about the BKA,’ Kujau assured him. ‘They’re all mad there.’ He told Heidemann that he had encountered this problem before. According to a police official he knew, paper whitener had been in use since 1915. Werner was talking nonsense.

Heidemann relayed this conversation to Walde. They agreed, as a safety check, to arrange further forensic tests, this time specifically concentrating on material from the diaries. They did not bother to tell Stern’s editors or management of Werner’s preliminary assessment.

To launch Hitler’s diaries, Stern was planning the biggest publicity campaign in its history. There would be a press conference in Hamburg. There would be advertisements in all West Germany’s leading newspapers. There would also be a special television documentary, packaged and ready to sell to networks throughout the world.

On Thursday, 31 March, Wilfried Sorge called in the head of Stern’s TV subsidiary, Herr Zeisberg, and briefed him on the story of the diaries’ discovery. Could he have a forty-minute film ready by 3 May, to coincide with the launch? Zeisberg said it was possible. They discussed who they might commission to make it. The obvious choice as producer was Klaus Harpprecht: he had made programmes on historical subjects, he had an excellent reputation, and he had worked extensively in America – an important qualification, as Sorge wanted to include an American element to help US sales. As presenter, they picked Barbara Dickmann, an experienced journalist, occasionally tipped as a potential German equivalent of ABC’s Barbara Walters.

Peter Koch approved their choices. He called Dickmann at her office in Bonn that afternoon. Would she come to a confidential meeting at his home in Hamburg next Monday? She asked him what it was about. He refused to tell her over the telephone. Intrigued by Koch’s secretive manner, she agreed.

In America, Maynard Parker of Newsweek telephoned Gordon Craig, Professor of History at Stanford University. Swearing him to secrecy, Parker told him about the Hitler diaries and asked if he would be willing to advise Newsweek on their authenticity. Craig, author of The Germans, was not an expert on Hitler: his speciality was the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He advised Parker to ask someone else. Parker asked him if he could recommend anyone. Craig suggested Gerhard Weinberg of the University of North Carolina. Parker said he would try him.

Craig promptly rang his old friend Weinberg. He could not go into details, he said, but ‘off the record’ Newsweek would be getting in touch with him very shortly. Weinberg, fifty-five years old, quiet and punctilious, had managed to pursue his profession in peace for more than three decades and had only limited experience of journalists. ‘I don’t think that’s very likely, Gordon,’ he said.

‘You’ll see,’ insisted Craig. ‘They’ll be in touch.’

In London, Peter Wickman spoke with Sir Edward Pickering, executive vice chairman of Times Newspapers. Pickering said the company wanted to send a historian out to Zurich to give them an opinion on the diaries: ‘We thought we’d ask Trevor-Roper.’ He was not only considered an authority on Hitler, he was also one of the company’s five Independent National Directors. Wickman said that Stern did not mind who Times Newspapers nominated as long as it was someone discreet. The next day – Friday, 1 April – Colin Webb, assistant editor of The Times, tried to contact Trevor-Roper.

For the ‘Sleuth of Oxford’, the years since the publication of The Last Days of Hitler had been filled with honours and success. In 1957, his friendship with one Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had helped bring him the post of Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University; and in 1979 Margaret Thatcher granted him a peerage. He was an honorary fellow of two Oxford colleges, a member of three London clubs, and a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. In 1954 he had married Lady Alexandra Howard-Johnston, elder daughter of Field Marshal Earl Haig, and the couple had become renowned for grand dinner parties at which Trevor-Roper would occasionally appear in velvet smoking jacket and embroidered slippers. His friend, the philosopher A. J. Ayer, ‘admired his intellectual elegance’ and ‘appreciated his malice’.

Intellectually, even in private, Trevor-Roper could be faintly menacing; in print, he was devastating. An attack on one historian’s work (on the Elizabethan aristocracy) was described as ‘a magnificent if terrifying work of destruction’ and brought him a rebuke from the venerable R. H. Tawney: ‘An erring colleague is not an Amalekite, to be smitten hip and thigh.’ In the course of one intellectual dogfight with Evelyn Waugh on the subject of the Catholic church, Waugh advised him to ‘change his name and seek a livelihood at Cambridge’. Trevor-Roper did so in 1980, taking the title Lord Dacre of Glanton and becoming Master of Peterhouse, the oldest and most conservative college in Cambridge. Since then, anecdotes of the running battle between the college’s High Church fellows and their anti-clerical Master had reached mythical proportions within the university. At his first dinner on High Table, Trevor-Roper was said to have objected to the consistency of the soup. ‘Gentlemen,’ he announced, ‘only have clear soup at dinner.’ The following evening’s menu began with Potage de Gentilhomme, a soup thick enough for the Master to stand his spoon in.

Trevor-Roper was not at home in Peterhouse when Webb tried to reach him on the telephone. It was Good Friday, and he and Lady Alexandra had retired for Easter to Chiefswood, their country house in Scotland, once the property of the novelist, Sir Walter Scott. Here, Trevor-Roper was able to escape the in-fighting of Oxbridge and affect the habits and costume of a laird of the Scottish borders; and it was here, on 1 April, that Webb tracked him down, told him of Hitler’s diaries, and asked him to fly to Zurich the following week.

On Easter Sunday, Peter Koch made several trips to Heidemann’s home on the Elbchaussee to pick up drawings and paintings from the reporter’s collection. The idea was to take them to Zurich and exhibit them alongside the diaries to create the right atmosphere for the negotiations. It was the first time Koch had seen Heidemann’s lifestyle at first hand, and he was shocked by its luxuriousness. As he was led from room to room he-tried to reckon up in his mind how much this would cost in rent. Ten thousand marks a month at least, he thought. Heidemann said he found it rather cramped. ‘He told me he was thinking of buying a house on the Elbchaussee,’ recalled Koch. ‘It was a place with a view of the Elbe.’ A house like that would cost over a million marks.

Heidemann pointed out some of his treasures. ‘There was a whole pile of antiques,’ said Koch. ‘There were some old walking sticks, drawings by Rembrandt and Dürer, a memento of Napoleon…. He also told me he had about three hundred paintings by Hitler.’ Heidemann produced Hitler’s suicide weapon, with Bormann’s note attached to it. ‘There was also a ladies’ pistol, which was supposed to have been Eva Braun’s.’ Heidemann told him it had all come from the Boernersdorf crash. Koch asked him how he had paid for it. The reporter told him the company had compensated him for buying it with a payment of 1.5 million marks.

Heidemann mentioned this quite casually, apparently assuming that Koch already knew of it. It was the first Koch had heard of any special payment and he confronted Schulte-Hillen with the story at one of the company’s routine financial meetings the following week. ‘He behaved as if he didn’t know anything,’ Koch remembered. ‘Then he asked his deputy, Hensmann, if he knew anything. They both looked very embarrassed, running their hands through their hair and behaving as if they had great difficulty in remembering. They hesitated and then they said they had made a special payment of 1.5 million marks to Heidemann.’

Koch told Felix Schmidt what the management had done. They were both angry. Money had been paid out to a member of their staff behind their backs, and they had learned of it only by accident. But they were not surprised. The longer the affair went on, the more private deals they seemed to discover. What might they stumble on next?

For all those involved in the Hitler diaries project, the pace of events now began to accelerate.

On Monday, 4 April, Klaus Harpprecht and Barbara Dickmann, together with executives from Stern’s television company, arrived at Peter Koch’s apartment to meet Sorge, Walde, Pesch and Heidemann. The two television journalists were informed of the existence of the Hitler diaries. Koch said that Stern wanted a film ready to launch the scoop. It would almost certainly be bought by one of the West German networks, and probably by foreign stations as well. It would have a budget of 160,000 marks. Harpprecht and Dickmann were worried about their reputations as impartial reporters. To avoid being seen to be making a publicity puff for Stern, they asked for editorial freedom to make the film as they wished. Sorge and Koch readily agreed to their demands: all the information contained in the film would have to come from Stern, and most of the potential interviewees – old Nazis like Karl Wolff and Hans Baur – were acquaintances of Heidemann’s; in the time available, there was no chance of the television team carrying out independent investigations of their own.

On Tuesday, Heidemann withdrew another 300,000 marks from the diaries account.

On Wednesday, Walde telexed Dr Werner at the police headquarters in Wiesbaden: ‘I cannot yet give you our company’s decision regarding the material for authentication. We will ring you or your colleague on Monday 11 April to inform you what material can be given to you, and when.’

On Thursday, Dr Klaus Oldenhage of the Bundesarchiv drove up from Koblenz to the Gruner and Jahr offices for a meeting with the company’s lawyers.

In March, Gerd Schulte-Hillen had suddenly learned some shocking news. After more than two years of paying out money for the diaries, he was informed by the Gruner and Jahr legal department that the company did not actually own the diaries. The lawyers had revised their earlier opinion; the agreement with Werner Maser, they warned him, was probably worthless. It was impossible to say with certainty who held the copyright on the diaries: it could be the Federal Government; it could be the State of Bavaria; it might even be some distant relative of Hitler’s of whose existence no one was aware; at any rate, it was not Gruner and Jahr. Schulte-Hillen found himself preparing to hold syndication negotiations which technically involved the handling of stolen property. There was only one hope: an agreement with the Bundesarchiv.

The Federal Archives had known of the existence of Stern’s hoard of Hitler’s writings for more than a year, ever since Walde had sent them samples for handwriting analysis. Legally, they were aware that ownership of the material might well be theirs anyway, as the archive’s lawyers thought that the copyright was vested in the West German Government. On the other hand, it was undeniable that without Stern’s expertise and money, the documents would never have come to light. At his meeting with the lawyers in Hamburg on Thursday, Oldenhage therefore announced that the Bundesarchiv was prepared to do a deal with the magazine, allowing them exclusive rights to the material for a limited period – on condition that eventually the originals would all be deposited in the Bundesarchiv. A contract was drawn up. To avoid accusations that the authorities were giving special treatment to Stern, the agreement was in Heidemann’s name.

‘Herr Gerd Heidemann’, stated the contract, ‘has access to unpublished written and typed documents belonging to Adolf Hitler.’ The material came from ‘outside the Federal Republic of Germany’ and was ‘of political and historical significance’. (Oldenhage still had no idea that the documents in question were Hitler’s diaries.) The Bundesarchiv agreed to give Heidemann ‘unlimited newspaper, book, film, TV and audio-visual rights in the material for him to dispose of as he thinks fit’. The rights would remain his for ‘as long as the material has a marketable value’, a period which was not to exceed ten years. At that point, the documents would revert to the Bundesarchiv ‘in order to preserve them and allow them to be used in a proper historical context’.

For Stern’s lawyers, the agreement was a triumph. It was, of course, still possible that when the diaries were launched, some unknown descendant of Adolf Hitler would step out of the shadows to claim his inheritance. But now the magazine would have the West German authorities on its side. The contract also gave the company’s salesmen a legal document to wave at potential purchasers in the syndication talks. Gruner and Jahr had secured ownership in its scoop a bare twenty-four hours before the sales negotiations began.

That night, the principal figures in the first stage of those negotiations began moving into position. Sorge, Hensmann and Koch flew from Hamburg to Zurich, while Hugh Trevor-Roper travelled south from Scotland to London to be ready to catch a flight to Switzerland the next morning.

Trevor-Roper had finished breakfast and was preparing to leave for Heathrow on Friday when the telephone rang. It was Charles Douglas-Home, the editor of The Times.

The grandson of an earl, the nephew of a prime minister, educated at Eton, commissioned in the Royal Scots Greys, a dedicated hunter of the English fox – Douglas-Home’s qualifications to edit The Times were perfect to the point of caricature. Trevor-Roper knew him well, and liked him: as one of the five independent directors of the paper he had supported his candidature for the editorship on the grounds that he was ‘more academic’ than his rival, Harold Evans. Nevertheless, he was not pleased at being bothered by Douglas-Home that morning.

In the course of the previous week, Trevor-Roper had had several conversations with The Times. He had told them that it would be impossible for him to reach an instant decision about the diaries’ authenticity. He had been assured that he would not be required to do so. He should get a feel of the diaries in Zurich, and on his return to London he would be given a typed transcript of the material up to 1941. Only after he had studied that would he be required to deliver a verdict. The purpose of Douglas-Home’s call ran contrary to that understanding. The editor of The Times told Trevor-Roper that Rupert Murdoch was taking a personal interest in the project, that he was determined to secure serial rights in the diaries, that there were rival news organizations equally determined, and that Murdoch wanted to be in a position to make his bid quickly. He could not afford to sit around while transcripts were studied; if he did, he would lose the deal. Douglas-Home therefore asked Trevor-Roper if he would ring London from Zurich that same afternoon with a preliminary assessment of the diaries’ authenticity.

Trevor-Roper was ‘very irritated’ and ‘surprised’ by the request. It was ridiculous to expect him to reach a conclusion so quickly. But, ‘under the pressure of events’ and with assurances from Douglas-Home that this would only be an interim opinion, he agreed.

The next four hours were a blur of taxis and airports. Shortly after 9.30 a.m. he was picked up by car and driven to Heathrow. At 10.30 a.m. he met Peter Wickman. At 11.15 a.m. he took off on a Swissair flight to Zurich. He read the outline of Plan 3 on the aircraft and thought it so phoney that his entire journey was wasted. At 1.50 p.m., Swiss time, he landed in Zurich. Wickman hurried him through immigration and customs. At 2.30 p.m. they dropped their luggage off at their hotel. At 3 p.m. he was led into the entrance hall of the Handelsbank, taken through a door immediately to his left, and found himself staring – ‘astonished’ – at fifty-eight volumes of Hitler’s diaries.

This was the first occasion on which a trained historian had seen their treasure and the Stern men had prepared for it thoroughly. The diaries had been brought up from the vault and arranged in a neat pile on a table at the end of the room, embellished by other Hitler documents, paintings, drawings and memorabilia, including a First World War helmet, supposedly authenticated as Hitler’s by a note from Rudolf Hess. Seen in its entirety, the archive looked stunning in its scope and variety. As Trevor-Roper bent over the stack of books, Sorge, Koch and Hensmann swiftly surrounded the elderly gentleman.

Trevor-Roper’s specialist field – The Last Days of Hitler notwithstanding – was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He was not a German scholar. He was not fluent in the language and had admitted as much in a review of Mein Kampf published a decade earlier: ‘I do not read German’, he confessed, ‘with great ease or pleasure.’ Written in an archaic script, impenetrable even to most Germans, the diaries might as well have been composed of Egyptian hieroglyphics for all the sense Trevor-Roper could make of them. He had to rely on the Stern men for translation. The conversation was entirely in English.

Sorge, who had spent three months perfecting his sales patter, did most of the talking. He showed Trevor-Roper Heidemann’s dossier of how Hitler’s handwriting had changed over the years. He showed him the extract in Baur’s book in which the pilot referred to the Führer’s anguish at the loss of Gundlfinger’s plane. He showed him photographs of the graves in Boernersdorf. He talked of their ‘star reporter’, Heidemann. He gave him the reports of three independent handwriting experts who all confirmed that the writing they had seen was Hitler’s. He pointed out that the diaries were not the only cargo salvaged from the plane. He handed him a box full of drawings and paintings. As Trevor-Roper leafed through the books, listening to Sorge, his doubts ‘gradually dissolved’.

Recollections of the meeting vary between the participants, but on at least two points it would seem that Trevor-Roper was deliberately misled. He was told that the age of the paper had been chemically tested and found to come from the right period. This was not true. He was also told by Peter Koch that Stern knew the identity of the ‘Wehrmacht officer’ who had originally kept the material in East Germany, and that this same individual was the supplier of the diaries. This, too, was false. Heidemann was the only man who had dealt with Kujau and knew the route by which the diaries had supposedly reached the West.

Trevor-Roper has never been renowned as a trusting and simple soul. Nevertheless, it does not seem to have occurred to him that his hosts might lie to him. Stern stood to gain a fortune if the syndication negotiations proved successful: for that reason alone, their statements should have been treated with scepticism. But Trevor-Roper trusted them. He could see no reason why Stern should choose to sell forgeries. They might not be a particularly reputable organization, but he believed them to have high professional standards. As he put it afterwards in characteristic terms: ‘I took the bona fides of the editor as a datum.’

‘I was also impressed’, he said, ‘by the sheer bulk of the diaries. Who, I asked myself, would forge sixty volumes when six would have served his purpose?’

He was struck by Stern’s ‘almost neurotic fear of leakage’. At one point, Koch produced a sheet of paper and wrote out in longhand a pledge of secrecy which he asked Trevor-Roper to sign. He was not to discuss what he had seen with anyone except those authorized to discuss the project on The Times. Trevor-Roper asked why he had to give such an undertaking. ‘In case The Times doesn’t buy the diaries,’ replied Koch. ‘It seemed a reasonable request,’ recalled Trevor-Roper, ‘so without thinking any more about it, I signed.’

By the time Trevor-Roper left the bank, he was convinced that the diaries were genuine. He did not like the fact that Stern had refused to tell him the name of its supplier, but then, in his experience, an insistence on anonymity was not unusual: ‘Both the papers of Bormann and the diaries of Goebbels have come to publication through persons who have never been identified; and no one doubts that they are genuine.’ He went straight back to his hotel, the Baur au Lac, and from his bedroom telephoned Charles Douglas-Home. ‘I think they’re genuine,’ he told him. Douglas-Home, excited, thanked him for calling and said he would ring him back in an hour.

Believing that he would have an opportunity to study a transcript of the diaries on his return to Britain, Trevor-Roper had done no preparation for his visit to Zurich. He had not brought out a sample of Hitler’s writing or any kind of chronology of the dictator’s life with which to carry out a random check of the diaries’ contents. The only thing he had brought, jotted on a scrap of paper, was the telephone number of a German historian he knew and respected – someone with whom he had planned to discuss the diaries. The historian whose name he had written down was Eberhard Jaeckel.

‘If I had rung him,’ lamented Trevor-Roper afterwards, ‘he would have told me of his experience. He would have warned me.’

But it was not until Trevor-Roper was back in his hotel that he remembered the pledge of secrecy he had signed at the bank. He did not dare break it. He decided not to call Jaeckel.

The telephone rang. Trevor-Roper answered it, and a voice announced: ‘Rupert Murdoch’s office. I have Mr Douglas-Home on the line for you.’ Trevor-Roper realized at once that the editor of The Times must have gone straight from speaking to him to see the proprietor.

‘I’ve spoken to Rupert,’ said Douglas-Home. ‘We’re both coming out to Zurich tomorrow.’

Trevor-Roper said that he was in a hurry to get back to Britain. He wanted to resume his holiday in Scotland. What flight were they coming on?

Douglas-Home told him not to worry. They were coming in a private plane.

Months later, the historian looked back and saw this as the decisive moment in the developing disaster:

There was no liking between Murdoch and Trevor-Roper. The Australian tycoon regarded the Master of Peterhouse as a typical English establishment waxwork of the type he had been forced to acknowledge in order to purchase The Times. He was also ‘too clever by half’: Harold Evans described the historian at board meetings of Times Newspapers, sitting with ‘eyes screwed up behind pebble glasses… permanently sniffing the air for non sequiturs’. For his part, Trevor-Roper thought Murdoch ‘an awful cad’.

When the millionaire bought The Times and Sunday Times in 1981, he had been obliged to sign an agreement designed to safeguard the integrity of the papers. The undertakings subsequently proved a feeble restraint, but at the time they had seemed to promise a curb on Murdoch’s legendary ruthlessness. According to Evans, Trevor-Roper had boasted that ‘we have Leviathan by the nose’. He was about to discover, as scores of others had done before him, that Leviathan was not so easily restrained.

TWENTY-THREE

ON FRIDAY NIGHT, the Stern team took Trevor-Roper out for a meal in one of Zurich’s most expensive restaurants. The following morning, he flew back to Britain.

As Trevor-Roper left Switzerland, Murdoch arrived. With him on board his private jet he brought his tough Australian lawyer and business adviser, Richard Searby, along with Sir Edward Pickering and Charles Douglas-Home. Gerald Long, the former chief executive of Reuters and deputy chairman of News International, flew in to join them on a separate flight from Paris. Peter Wickman met them in the lobby of the Baur au Lac and took them through to a private dining room for lunch.

Around the table, there was an unmistakable feeling of anticipation. Murdoch sat next to the senior Stern negotiator, Jan Hensmann. Wickman sat beside Douglas-Home. Koch talked with Maynard Parker and William Broyles who had flown in from New York to make an offer on behalf of Newsweek.

Murdoch seemed particularly excited. In the spring of 1983, his corporation News International controlled more than thirty newspapers and magazines, four book publishers, three television companies and a variety of firms specializing in transport, energy and leisure. He ruled his empire in a manner not dissimilar to that which Hitler employed to run the Third Reich. His theory of management was Darwinian. His subordinates were left alone to run their various outposts of the company. Ruthlessness and drive were encouraged, slackness and inefficiency punished. Occasionally, Murdoch would swoop in to tackle a problem or exploit an opportunity; then he would disappear. He was, depending on your standing at any given moment, inspiring, friendly, disinterested or terrifying. He never tired of expansion, of pushing out the frontiers of his operation. ‘Fundamentally,’ Richard Searby, his closest adviser, was fond of remarking, ‘Rupert’s a fidget.’

The sudden decision to buy the Hitler diaries was a perfect example of Murdoch in action. He loved the concept of The Deal – spotting the opening, plotting the strategy, securing the prize. Already, in Zurich, he had his eyes on more than simply the British rights, which were all that Stern had originally offered him. Sure, the diaries could run in The Times or the Sunday Times (he would work out which later). But they could also run in the New York Post and the Boston Herald and The Australian and in one of the outlets of New Zealand’s Independent Newspapers group (of which he owned 22 per cent). He had also recently acquired a 42 per cent stake in the Collins publishing company: he was aiming to buy the book rights to the Hitler diaries as well. It was this ability to spread the cost of his purchases throughout his many holdings which made Murdoch such a formidable force in international publishing. The Hitler diaries deal was exactly what he was looking for: he would publish the book, serialize it in three continents, and – given that he had recently joined forces with Robert Stigwood to produce Associated R & R Films – he might even make the movie which he could eventually show on Channel Ten, his television station in Sydney. The Hitler diaries potentially were a model for the internationally integrated media package.

After lunch, the Stern men took Murdoch and his entourage over to the bank. Seated around the table in the ground floor conference room, Sorge read out extracts from a typed transcript, Gerald Long provided a simultaneous translation, while Murdoch skimmed through a handful of diaries, nodding intently. He had no doubts that Hitler would help sell his papers. The diaries were sensational. At one point, he asked the Germans if they were sure their security was good enough: in his view it was possible that the Israeli secret service might try to seize the material.

A couple of hours later, back in Stern’s suite at the Baur au Lac, Murdoch made Hensmann an offer. He told him he wanted to bid for syndication and book rights. Hensmann said he could not discuss a book deal – Bertelsmann was insisting that Bantam retained the first option. Disappointed, Murdoch submitted an opening bid for American, British and Commonwealth serial rights. Hensmann considered it too low. Murdoch and his team retired to confer and to make some telephone calls. Shortly afterwards, they returned. News International, announced Murdoch, was willing to offer $2.5 million for the American rights, plus an additional $750,000 for serialization in Britain and the Commonwealth.

Three and a quarter of a million dollars. It was a good offer. It would clear Gruner and Jahr’s costs and still leave them European and Asian serial rights and a percentage of the book sales. Hensmann, provisionally, agreed. He said he would give Murdoch a final answer at 5 p.m. on Monday. The two men shook hands and the News International team returned to London.

Meanwhile, Broyles and Parker were inspecting the books for Newsweek. They too considered the diaries a wonderful story. Serialization would attract tens of thousands of readers and give them a coveted boost in their ceaseless circulation battle with Time: whereas Newsweek sold roughly 3.5 million copies around the world each week, its rival had sales of almost 6 million.

The Hitler diaries appealed to Broyles in particular. A Texan, a former marine, only thirty-eight years old, he had been appointed editor the previous September. It had been a surprising choice. Broyles’s background had been in glossy magazines – Texas Monthly and California. He had no background in immediate news coverage. Announcing his arrival, Newsweek’s owner, Katherine Graham, had declared: ‘He will add a whole new dimension.’ He had, and Newsweek’s staff did not like it. He appeared to be more interested in features than news. Fashion, show business and social trends seemed to be his priorities. When Time led on the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in the Lebanon, Newsweek’s cover story was the death of Princess Grace of Monaco. Broyles’s editorial standards were attacked, but he tried to keep above the intrigue. He saw it as his task to provide long-range direction; he did not bother with the day-to-day running of the magazine. Just as the Hitler diaries suited Murdoch’s style of running his company, so they fitted Broyles’s approach to editing Newsweek.

Returning from the bank at about 8 p.m., the Americans offered Hensmann $500,000 for serialization rights in the diaries. Hensmann, sitting on Murdoch’s offer of $3.25 million, found this ‘totally unacceptable’. Newsweek doubled its offer to $1 million. Hensmann told them he wanted $3 million for the American rights. He would not take less. Broyles and Parker said they would have to return to New York. They would telephone him on Monday with an answer.

Back at the bank, Wilfried Sorge supervised as a guard carried the diaries down from the negotiating room to the vault. He watched to make sure the volumes were safely stowed, locked the deposit box, and took a taxi to the airport. He managed to catch the last flight home. It was his fortieth birthday party in Hamburg that night and he had no intention of missing it.

At his house in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Gerhard Weinberg was telephoned by Maynard Parker.

Weinberg was fifty-five, a neat and bespectacled man, fastidious in his personal and professional habits. His origins were German Jewish. His family had fled the Third Reich when he was twelve and he now spoke in a broad New York accent which gave no hint of his German background. His name was not generally well known like Trevor-Roper’s, but among professional historians he was respected as a careful scholar. In 1952 he had helped compile the US armed forces’ Guide to Captured German Documents. He was the author of a two-volume study of Hitler’s pre-war foreign policy that had taken him more than a decade to complete. He did not like to be hurried and he did not care for journalists – their sloppiness, their deadlines, their assumption that one was willing to drop everything ‘to jump to their tune’.

Weinberg’s first reaction to the alleged discovery of Hitler’s diaries was the same as Trevor-Roper’s: he thought it was improbable but was reluctant to dismiss it out of hand. It was true that there were no references to diaries in any of the reminiscences of Hitler’s subordinates. It was also well known that Hitler had a strong personal aversion to writing in his own hand. (Weinberg knew this well, having enjoyed a minor historical scoop himself in the 1950s when he discovered the Führer’s private testament of 1938 – the longest passage of Hitler’s handwriting in existence; after drafting the will, Hitler had told his associates that the task had demanded ‘a quite special effort on my part, since for years I’ve had the habit of writing directly on the machine or dictating what I have to say’.) However, Weinberg – professionally cautious – considered that ‘too many things turn up which are not supposed to exist’; if the entries were short enough, the discovery of a diary might not be too far fetched.

The fact that Murdoch had already had his expert over to Zurich put added pressure on Newsweek. Parker said he wanted Weinberg to fly to Switzerland to look at the diaries. How soon could he go? Weinberg replied that he was going to work as a visiting professor at Bonn University for three months over the summer. He was flying out to Germany on 22 April – what if he was to go early and inspect the diaries then? No use, said Parker: he wanted Weinberg in Zurich next week. The historian protested that he had classes in North Carolina on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Cancel them, said Parker. Weinberg refused. He consulted his diary. ‘I could go after my last class on Monday,’ he said, ‘as long as you can guarantee to get me back in time for my next one on Wednesday. Talk to your travel people.’

The morning of Monday, 11 April found Sorge back in Zurich, exhausted after having snatched only four hours sleep in the past two days. At the bank he met the television presenter Barbara Dickmann, Heidemann and the Stern film crew who had arrived to shoot the opening sequence of the documentary; Sorge’s attendance was required because he was the only person with keys to the safety deposit box.

The lights were set up outside the vault, the camera began turning, and Heidemann self-consciously walked into shot. He plodded woodenly over to the deposit box, opened it, pulled out one of the diaries and began reading.

By mid-afternoon, the filming was finished, and for the second or third time that day Heidemann took the opportunity to slip out to attend to some mysterious ‘business’ in Zurich. Barbara Dickmann asked him what he was doing. Heidemann replied that he was trying to make arrangements to drop in and see Martin Bormann who lived nearby.

Meanwhile, in Hamburg, London and New York, the negotiations to buy the diaries continued.

For Newsweek it was clear that to stay in the game they would have to match the News International offer. On Monday, back in the Gruner and Jahr headquarters, Hensmann received a telephone call from the United States informing him that the magazine was now prepared to offer $3 million for the American serialization rights. The deal was conditional on their being satisfied that the diaries were genuine. Broyles and Parker wanted to return to Zurich the following day and show the books to their nominated expert, Gerhard Weinberg. Hensmann agreed. This opened up the enticing prospect for Gruner and Jahr of pushing up the price by playing off Newsweek and News International against one another.

In London, Rupert Murdoch had already become suspicious that something was going on behind his back. Throughout the day, he made a number of attempts to ring Hensmann, without success. Each time he was told that Hensmann could not be reached. Finally, towards the end of the afternoon, the German rang him.

The deal was off, said Hensmann. Newsweek had made him a very attractive offer for the American rights. Murdoch could still have serial rights in the diaries in Britain and the Commonwealth for $750,000, but if he wanted the complete package, including United States rights, he would have to pay $3.75 million – $500,000 more than Murdoch had originally offered in Zurich on Saturday.

Murdoch was furious. He understood that the handshake had clinched the deal. He unleashed a torrent of invective down the telephone which a shaken Hensmann was later to describe as ‘bitter’.

Wilfried Sorge was at Zurich airport to catch the evening flight to Hamburg when he was paged over the public address system. It was Hensmann. ‘I don’t want you to come back. I want you to stay there,’ said the deputy managing director. ‘Newsweek are coming to see the diaries tomorrow.’

Wearily, Sorge returned to the Baur au Lac.

Across the Atlantic, Gerhard Weinberg’s last class at the University of North Carolina – a two-hour seminar on Nazi Germany – was coming to an end. At 4.15 p.m. Weinberg dismissed his students, drove twenty miles to the local airport, Raleigh-Durham, and caught a flight to New York. There was a limousine waiting at La Guardia airport to rush him through the heavy evening traffic to the inter-continental terminal at JFK. Maynard Parker and William Broyles were already there waiting for him. Half an hour later, the three men boarded the overnight Swissair flight to Zurich.

Settled into their seats in the first-class section, the Newsweek men handed Weinberg the reports of the three handwriting experts. He read them carefully. ‘It looks good,’ he said when he had finished. ‘If these people say the handwriting is correct, that’s fine by me.’ Only one thing puzzled him: nowhere in the report was there any mention of diaries. He told Broyles and Parker that before they bought the books, they ought to have a specific volume checked. He also raised the question of copyright.

‘We’ll buy that off Stern,’ replied Parker.

Weinberg shook his head. ‘Mr Parker, it’s not as easy as that.’

In the course of his work with original documents, Weinberg had acquired some understanding of the complexities of West German copyright law. As he understood it, literary rights in unpublished papers could not be confiscated. Although the State of Bavaria claimed ownership of Mein Kampf, it had no jurisdiction over Hitler’s private diaries.

‘I tell you what will happen,’ warned Weinberg. ‘Hitler’s heirs will wait until you’ve printed millions of copies – and then they’ll sue you.’

Weinberg, Broyles and Parker landed in Zurich shortly after 9 a.m. on Tuesday morning and went directly to the Handelsbank. They had no time to waste: the professor’s irritating insistence on being back in North Carolina in time to take his next class had forced Newsweek to book him on a 3 p.m. flight to New York out of Amsterdam. At the bank they were met by Sorge and also by Heidemann who had stayed overnight in Zurich after the previous day’s filming. The introductions were friendly. Heidemann especially struck Weinberg as charming and anxious to help.

The session began with Heidemann reading aloud extracts from the diaries for 1940 and 1945. Sorge then invited the Americans to help themselves to whatever volumes they wanted from the stack in front of them.

Weinberg had brought with him a copy of the diary of Hitler’s valet, Heinz Linge, covering the second part of 1943. Linge’s daily notes of Hitler’s activities were available for inspection in the National Archives in Washington but had never been published: if the Stern diaries were poor quality fakes, discrepancies with the Linge record would swiftly expose them. Unfortunately, the entries in the Stern diary covering the last three months of 1943 were so sketchy, Weinberg was unable to make an adequate comparison. He then asked to see the volumes covering the battle for Stalingrad. These were no use either. There was no typed transcript available and the handwriting was so bad that Weinberg was unable to decipher it. He pulled out a few other volumes at random. Nothing in them struck him as false. He noted that there was a page missing from the volume devoted to the Hess affair, and a statement witnessed by a notary indicating that it had been sent away for analysis. He looked up the entry for the Munich conference in 1938 and found a startling tribute from Hitler to the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain:

The entry impressed Weinberg, who nodded sagely as he read it. ‘This accords with my own theories,’ he announced.

Half-way through the examination, a third Newsweek journalist arrived. He was Milan Kubik, the magazine’s bureau chief in Jerusalem, flown in by the Americans to inspect the Jewish angle. Broyles and Parker introduced him and explained his presence on the grounds that the magazine expected there to be ‘enormous interest’ in the Hitler diaries in Israel. Throughout the meeting, the Newsweek editors kept probing the material for information which would appeal to their American readership. At one stage, Parker asked to see the volume covering the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944, but Heidemann told him it was one of the four books which had yet to be delivered from East Germany.

Two things, meanwhile, had struck Weinberg, who was carefully reading through the diaries. One was the fact that almost every page carried Hitler’s signature. No one in his right mind, he thought, would have risked forging hundreds of signatures; it seemed a strong argument in favour of authenticity.

He also pointed out to Broyles and Parker that most of the diaries began with a handwritten note stating that if anything happened to him, Hitler wanted the books to be given to his sister Paula. This could pose further copyright problems, said Weinberg, strengthening the case of any heirs of Hitler who cared to argue that the diaries were actually their property. Sorge and Heidemann, already aware of the problems over copyright, looked at one another in embarrassment: that had not occurred to them, they said.

Weinberg also wanted to know why no German scholar had been shown any of this material. Sorge replied that they were worried about leaks. He asked who Weinberg would recommend. Weinberg said he was thinking of a very reliable historian – Eberhard Jaeckel of Stuttgart. Had they heard of him? The Stern men replied that they had. ‘It was clear to me’, recalled Weinberg, ‘that they didn’t want to involve Jaeckel.’

At 2 p.m., Weinberg’s self-imposed deadline expired and the Newsweek party had to leave. In order to obtain Weinberg’s assessment, Broyles, Parker and Kubik had to fly with him to Amsterdam. The historian admitted he was ‘astonished’ by what he had seen. He had not been able to find fault with the diaries. On balance, he inclined to the view that they were authentic.

This was what Newsweek wanted to hear. At Amsterdam airport, Weinberg caught his flight to New York. The three Newsweek journalists boarded a flight to Hamburg to clinch the deal.

Stern’s London office was based in Peter Wickman’s house in Barnet, miles out of town in the northernmost fringe of the capital. On Tuesday morning, as the Newsweek contingent sifted through the diaries in Zurich, Wickman’s telex machine suddenly clattered into life with an urgent message from the Gruner and Jahr headquarters. It was a contract requiring Rupert Murdoch’s agreement, offering him the British and Commonwealth rights in the Hitler diaries for $750,000. It included a 25 per cent penalty clause should News International default on the deal.

Following Hensmann’s instructions, Wickman delivered the contract to Murdoch personally in his office in The Times building in Gray’s Inn Road. Murdoch scarcely glanced at it before handing Wickman his own version – roughly twenty pages long, drawn up by his lawyers, reiterating the terms he understood had been agreed in Switzerland on Saturday.

Wickman made his way back up to High Barnet and began feeding the pages into a telecopier, transmitting Murdoch’s counter offer back to Hamburg.

The next day, Wednesday 13 April, Heidemann and Barbara Dickmann continued their work on the Stern television film, driving to Herrsching, near Munich, to interview Hans Baur.

The Baur family detested the media, even when it came in the friendly and uncritical form of Gerd Heidemann. The eighty-five-year-old ex-Nazi hobbled over to them on his wooden leg and stared at the camera with undisguised hostility. Then a former Munich policeman arrived, ‘in a state of extreme agitation’, according to Dickmann, claiming he had been summoned by Baur to protect the family. On his advice, Frau Baur went round the house taking down photographs of her husband with Hitler and packing away various Nazi mementoes. Heidemann, the Baurs and the ex-policeman then disappeared into another room while Dickmann and the crew waited to hear whether they would be allowed to film.

After twenty minutes, the group reappeared. According to Baur, Heidemann had shown him one of the diaries: ‘a black book with a red cord and a red seal… I was of the opinion that it was Hitler’s writing.’ The camera was set up and Baur described the plane crash and Hitler’s distress.

When the interview was over, the atmosphere relaxed. The retired policeman, who came from Luxembourg, turned out to be a collector of Nazi relics. He told Heidemann, in Dickmann’s presence, that ‘his circle of friends was almost exclusively composed of prominent ex-Nazis’. He suggested that they should ‘set up an agency for Hitler relics in Munich’. Heidemann told him about the Blood Flag and offered to sell it to him. When the time came to leave, the two men made an appointment to have dinner together.

Listening to this coversation merely served to confirm Barbara Dickmann’s feelings about Heidemann. The man was ‘unable to distance himself professionally from the events of the Nazi era’. Although she had known him for little more than a week, she had already spent many hours with him, driving between locations. Being trapped in a car with Heidemann had not proved a pleasant experience. ‘I couldn’t avoid having to listen to his stories,’ she recalled.

Heidemann also indicated that he had original material belonging to Hitler supposedly containing the ‘ten theses’ of Hitler’s Final Solution.

He had told her during filming in Zurich on Monday that he was trying to arrange a meeting with Bormann. Later, he showed her his set of Polaroid pictures and confided to her that he was going to meet him on 20 April, Hitler’s birthday, when he would be given important documents. (Martin subsequently cancelled the meeting.) He showed her his collection of relics: ‘several glass cases in which he had helmets, uniforms, a brown shirt, a pair of trousers, a damaged watch, weapons, drawings allegedly by Hitler, a swastika flag, a Party book of Hitler’s, his passport and all sorts of other things’.

Dickmann was shocked by Heidemann’s behaviour. He seemed ‘euphoric’ about his access to senior Nazis, gripped by ‘sick fantasies’. Their relationship became ‘increasingly cool’. When the television team returned to Hamburg, she was worried enough to seek out Peter Koch and tell him what his reporter was up to. Koch reassured her: Heidemann always immersed himself in whatever he was researching – it was part of his technique for gaining access to circles which were normally impossible to penetrate. She could rely, said Koch, on the fact that Heidemann ‘was not a Nazi and that once he’d finished his researches he’d be normal again’.

Meanwhile, as Heidemann and Dickmann were leaving Hans Baur in Herrsching, Rupert Murdoch’s draft contract was arriving on Jan Hensmann’s desk in Hamburg. Stern’s chief negotiator regarded it as ‘completely unacceptable’. News International had refused to improve its offer in the face of Newsweek’s bid. Hensmann decided to sign a deal with the Americans.

Broyles, Parker and Kubik, who had arrived in Hamburg the previous night, were informed that their offer of $3 million for the American serial rights had been accepted. The Newsweek representatives were taken to the special suite of offices occupied by the diaries team. As a gesture of good faith, Peter Koch was authorized to give them the story of the find as it had been written by Wolf Thieme, together with the rough text for the first four instalments of the Stern serialization.

It was at this point that word came from the nearby Four Seasons Hotel that two emissaries from Rupert Murdoch – Richard Searby and Gerald Long – had arrived to discuss the News International offer. They wanted to come over to the Stern building straight away.

Confronted by this embarrassing situation, Hensmann dispatched Wilfried Sorge to the Four Seasons. He was to tell them to go home – the deal with Murdoch was off.

Sorge relayed the message.

He had often seen negotiators lose their tempers, but he had never before witnessed anything to compare with the reaction of the two Murdoch men. Searby was normally smooth and urbane; Long, beetle-browed and pugnacious, looked, even in his lighter moments, as if he would enjoy nothing more than a good Victorian eviction, preferably involving widows, orphans and a tied cottage. When Sorge told them that the diaries had been sold to Newsweek, both men blew up in anger. ‘They were beside themselves with rage,’ he recalled: as close as men could come to physical violence without actually resorting to it. But despite the threats and accusations of bad faith, Sorge refused to yield.

Later that night, after he had calmed down, Searby rang Sorge at home to ask him what the hell was going on. Privately, Sorge was beginning to have doubts himself about the way Hensmann was handling the negotiations, but in his conversation with Searby he remained loyal to his superior.

‘Murdoch’s people’, he recalled, ‘went away with nothing.’

In London, Peter Wickman received another urgent communication from Hamburg. Stern wanted to use three quotations from Trevor-Roper to launch the diaries. The quotes they had in mind were, first, that the discovery of the diaries ‘was the most important historical event of the last ten years’; secondly, that ‘it was a scoop to equal Watergate’; and thirdly, that it would ‘make it necessary, at least in part, to rewrite the history of the Third Reich’. All three lines were actually the work of Peter Koch, but he instructed Wickman to ask Trevor-Roper if he would allow them to be attributed to him.

For Wickman, this was the latest in a series of bizarre requests from Hamburg. Stern’s mania for secrecy was such that he now had to make any telephone calls connected with the diaries from a public call box in case MI6 had bugged his phone. He was also sick of having to shuttle back and forth between Hensmann and Murdoch. It was with some embarrassment that he rang Trevor-Roper and relayed Koch’s request.

Trevor-Roper was not enthusiastic. ‘I didn’t like any of the quotes,’ he recalled, ‘and said so to Wickman.’ Nevertheless, reluctantly, he agreed to put his name to the statements that the diaries represented the most important historical discovery of the decade and a scoop of Watergate proportions. He rejected the third one about the rewriting of history – he had yet to see the promised transcript of the diaries.

Wickman telexed Trevor-Roper’s reply to Germany.

On the morning of Thursday 14 April, Gerd Schulte-Hillen arrived back in Hamburg from his trip to the United States. He had barely walked through the front door of his house when the telephone rang.

It was Rupert Murdoch.

It is a measure of Murdoch’s tenacity as a businessman, and also of his determination to secure the Hitler diaries, that even after Long and Searby had been sent back empty-handed, he still believed he could salvage his deal with Gruner and Jahr. He subjected Schulte-Hillen to an harangue about the behaviour of Jan Hensmann. He complained that he had been double-crossed, his associates insulted. What was going to be done about it?

Schulte-Hillen apologized. He said he had only just returned from abroad.

Murdoch wanted to know whether the negotiations could be reopened. He was now willing, he said, to pay $3.75 million for the English language world rights, matching Newsweek’s latest offer.

Schulte-Hillen now made the first of what was to prove a succession of extremely costly mistakes. He noted Murdoch’s offer and promptly invited him to attend a new round of negotiations in Hamburg the following day. He then drove over to the Gruner and Jahr office and, overruling Hensmann’s objections, instructed him to issue a similar invitation to Newsweek.

Broyles and Parker had made two round trips to Europe in six days. They had assumed that an agreement had been reached. Hensmann’s call to New York to tell them that the deal was off and that they had to come back a third time produced an outraged response. ‘They were not pleased,’ said Sorge. But if Newsweek wanted the diaries they had no alternative. They agreed to come.

A few hundred yards away, in the headquarters of the diaries team, Thomas Walde was at last getting round to sending a fresh sample of the diaries for forensic analysis. Under the supervision of a Hamburg notary, blank pages had been cut out of two of the books – one was removed from the Hess volume, one from a volume covering 1933. The two sheets of paper, marked ‘Hess’ and ‘August 1933’, together with another of the Hitler documents accompanying the diaries – a draft telegram to Mussolini – were parcelled up and given to Walde’s secretary, Hannelore Schustermann, to take down to the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz. ‘It is urgent,’ wrote Walde in a covering letter to Dr Henke, ‘and a particular priority should be given to the two blank sheets. A thousand thanks and best wishes.’

Henke, still ignorant of the diaries’ existence, forwarded the material to a forensic chemist named Arnold Rentz who lived a few miles outside Koblenz. Rentz undertook to deliver his verdict within the next week.

Shortly before noon on Friday 15 April, representatives of Newsweek and News International arrived at the Gruner and Jahr headquarters. There was an immediate shock for the Germans. The two organizations – which Schulte-Hillen had eagerly expected to come ready to bid against one another, pushing the price still higher – arrived together. Rupert Murdoch headed the News International delegation; Mark Edmiston, President of Newsweek Inc., led the Americans. Tired of Stern’s sloppy and amateur tactics, the two men had decided to join forces. They would share the costs and split the diaries between them. The details had yet to be worked out, but considering there were supposed to be twenty-eight separate instalments, there was plenty of Hitler material to go around. Extracts of particular interest to the Americans could run in Newsweek, those relevant to Britain could go to Murdoch. The rest could be carved up between them at a later date. For now, the first priority was to end the uncertainty and reach a final agreement. Watching the supposed rivals conferring together, Sorge was deeply disappointed. They would be able to set their own price. There was no chance now that Stern would get the $3.75 million which up until yesterday had been on offer.

The negotiations took place around the large conference table in the managing director’s office, with its imposing view out over the Elbe. Schulte-Hillen, Murdoch and Edmiston did most of the talking, turning occasionally to their advisers for clarification on particular points. The number of men present at any one time varied between ten and twenty – lawyers, journalists, accountants and executives, neatly dressed in two and three-piece suits, briefcases full of circulation figures, memoranda, balance sheets and legal opinions. For the next eleven hours they haggled over simultaneous release dates and standard extracts as if Stern was offering nothing more unusual than franchises in a new kind of fast food.

The two biggest sources of contention were the order in which the diaries were to be serialized and the time scale over which they would be published. Edmiston maintained that the American public didn’t give a damn about Rudolf Hess and his peace mission to Britain. They wanted to know about the murder of the Jews. The whole series, as far as Newsweek was concerned, should begin with the Holocaust. Schulte-Hillen rejected that. Many of the diaries had not yet been transcribed. The only section which had been properly checked was that relating to Hess. With publication less than a month away, it was too late to change. To maximize revenue, Stern wanted to tease out the diaries for as long as possible: the only way to do that was to publish the books in chronological order. Again, Edmiston objected. As one of the Americans put it afterwards: ‘We were especially bothered by the idea that Stern was trying to drag this out for almost thirty instalments. If it were 500,000 words, that’s one thing, but it’s only 50,000 words. We thought they were trying to slice the salami very thin.’

Eventually, after some hours of discussion, the meeting began to grope towards a compromise. Perhaps the diaries could be published grouped under themes: ‘Hitler and the Jews’, ‘Hitler and his Women’, ‘Stalingrad’ and so on.

After dinner, the conference moved on to copyright. This was the most worrying area for Stern and the company fielded three lawyers to try to handle it. Schulte-Hillen and his colleagues were acutely aware of the fact that if anyone pirated the diaries, it might well prove impossible to stop them. Indeed, if a rival organization could somehow get hold of a descendant of Hitler, they might be able to sue Gruner and Jahr for the return of the diaries. Thankfully, Stern could at least fall back on the agreement between Heidemann and the Bundesarchiv – this, they claimed, would be enough to prevent any breaches of copyright.

Edmiston and Murdoch agreed to have their lawyers check over that aspect of the contract the following morning.

At 10.30 p.m. the main outstanding issue was the money. Schulte-Hillen suggested they should reconvene the following day. The News International and Newsweek people shook their heads. It was essential that this was finally straightened out tonight. Schulte-Hillen again suggested a postponement. Edmiston was sarcastic. Was Schulte-Hillen, he asked, planning to fix the price on his own?

There was an uneasy shifting around the table.

Very well, said Schulte-Hillen. How much would they offer?

Surprisingly, Murdoch and Edmiston had not planned to take advantage of their alliance to reduce the price. They were confident that the diaries would easily generate enough extra revenue to recoup the cost.

The original offer stayed on the table, announced Edmiston. ‘We’ll stick to $3.75 million.’

To Sorge, who had been expecting the worst, this was an enormous relief. He was therefore startled to hear Schulte-Hillen’s reply:

‘We no longer think that is enough. We want $4.25 million.’

There was a moment’s pause, and then an explosion of exasperation. Both Edmiston and Murdoch said that they had never encountered such bad faith in the course of negotiations. They stood up, and like courtiers to a pair of princes, all the lawyers, journalists, accountants and executives immediately followed suit. Jackets were taken off the backs of chairs, cigarettes were stubbed out, papers were shovelled into briefcases, and in a dramatic display of contempt, the Americans, British and Australians filed out of the room without another word.

The Stern team was left alone.

Hensmann had slipped out earlier in the evening. Only Schulte-Hillen, Sorge and the three lawyers were left. Beneath them, the eight floors of offices and corridors were dark and deserted. Schulte-Hillen began shuffling the documents in front of him. He suggested they prepare for the following day’s talks. The other four looked at him incredulously. It was obvious to all of them there were not going to be any more talks. After a week of intensive negotiations, ‘the deal’, as the Stern Report later put it, ‘which had once seemed so certain for $3.75 million, had burst like a bubble’.

TWENTY-FOUR

EARLY THE NEXT morning, Schulte-Hillen and Sorge tried ringing Murdoch and Edmiston in their hotel suites. It was, as Sorge had feared, hopeless. Edmiston said that he had no further interest in the diaries: Gruner and Jahr should pretend that he was no longer in Hamburg. Murdoch refused even to come to the telephone. A few hours later, the Newsweek and News International teams flew home.

It was a decisive turning point in the development of the diaries affair. The initiative had passed out of Stern’s hands. From self-confident salesmen they had, overnight, been reduced to anxious supplicants. There were no other potential clients to turn to who were in the same league as Murdoch and Newsweek. Time’s interest had always been lukewarm. The New York Times had turned down the Hess story within six hours of being told about it. Associated Newspapers had only offered £50,000 for Plan 3, and had made that conditional on the most stringent guarantees of authenticity. Even more worrying for the Stern men was the realization that Newsweek and Times Newspapers between them now knew an enormous amount about the diaries. Each organization had been allowed to send in an expert to read through the material; journalists from both groups had had extracts read out to them; and Newsweek had actually been handed the complete story of the find and the first four instalments of the Stern series.

It was the thought of what Newsweek might do, with its worldwide sales of more than three million copies, which most terrified the Germans. There was nothing to stop Broyles and Parker breaking the news of the diaries’ existence and running pirated extracts. They could have their story on the news stands by Tuesday 26 April – in less than ten days’ time.

Over the weekend, an emergency meeting of Stern’s editors and management reviewed the situation and concluded that they had only one option. Their next issue was due out on Thursday 21 April – there was no way they would be ready to run the diaries by then. The following week, 28 April, would be too late to beat Newsweek. Accordingly, they would have to change their publication date. Monday 25 April would give them the maximum amount of time, while still allowing them to head off the Americans. In the meantime, it was decided that Schulte-Hillen and Peter Koch should fly to New York to try to salvage some sort of agreement.

On Sunday, 17 April, Hugh Trevor-Roper came south from Scotland to Cambridge, ready for the start of the University’s summer term. On Monday he was telephoned at the Peterhouse Master’s Lodge by Colin Webb of The Times who told him of the collapse of the negotiations.

The news came as a surprise to Trevor-Roper. The Stern television people had asked him to give them an interview for their documentary. He had agreed. They had offered to come to Cambridge, but he had insisted on flying to Hamburg: he wanted to meet this ‘star reporter’ Heidemann and see what else he had in his collection. He was supposed to be going the next day. What should he do now?

Webb said that The Times would still like him to go. Murdoch, now in New York, was confident he would soon be in a position to buy the diaries – on his terms; the Germans had nowhere else to go.

Schulte-Hillen and Koch arrived in New York on Monday evening. They began telephoning around town, trying to speak to Newsweek and Murdoch. No one would return their calls.

In Zurich, the diaries were removed from the Handelsbank and locked in a safe in the Schweizer Bankgesellschaft, where security was much tighter. After Murdoch’s warning about the Israeli secret service, the Germans were determined not to take any chances.

On Tuesday, a conference of Stern’s senior editors and heads of department met to discuss their special Hitler edition. It would be the biggest in the magazine’s history: 356 pages thick, with a 48-page supplement devoted to the diaries – half in colour, half in black and white. The print run would be increased to 2.3 million copies. The expected boost in sales would cover the additional production costs, estimated at 720,000 marks. The meeting was secret. Only those staff who needed to know were to be told that Stern was about to publish Hitler’s diaries.

Trevor-Roper came through customs at Hamburg airport on Tuesday and was met by a fat, pale man in glasses. There was a brief period of pantomime thanks to Trevor-Roper’s assumption that he was merely the chauffeur sent by Stern to collect him. Eventually, Heidemann made himself understood: he was the Bloodhound, the German equivalent of Woodward and Bernstein, the man responsible, in Trevor-Roper’s reluctant words, for ‘the greatest scoop since Watergate’. The historian apologized and said he was very pleased to meet him.

It took fifteen minutes for Heidemann to drive Trevor-Roper from the airport to his archive in Milchstrasse. Before the television interview he wanted to show off his collection to the famous historian – it satisfied the same craving for recognition which Nannen and Schulte-Hillen had found it politic to feed. Trevor-Roper found himself conducted down a quaint, narrow street of small boutiques and art galleries, into a curiously arranged apartment. It consisted, he recalled, of four corridors laid out in the shape of a ‘hollow square’. There were no sleeping or washing facilities. Heidemann explained that he used it solely as a museum.

Trevor-Roper found the contents ‘staggering’. There were hundreds of folders full of documents and photographs from the Third Reich. Some had been sold to Heidemann by Karl Wolff and Heinrich Hoffmann and were unquestionably authentic. There was, for example, an SS file on an expedition to Tibet organized by Himmler, part of the Reichsführer’s crackpot research into ‘Aryan bloodlines’. The file contained carbon copies of the outgoing correspondence and originals of the incoming. Trevor-Roper was in no doubt that it was genuine.

At least two of the corridors were crammed with Nazi memorabilia. Then, turning the corner, came a section devoted to Mussolini. Finally, Heidemann conducted Trevor-Roper into an area with a few mementoes of Idi Amin. ‘Those’, he said, pointing to a pair of voluminous white cotton drawers, ‘are Idi Amin’s underpants.’

For the first time, the former Regius Professor of Modern History began to eye his host uneasily. Until now, he had assumed that Heidemann was simply a thorough journalist. Suddenly it occurred to him that the reporter was slightly odd. He seemed to have an obsession with dictators. Trevor-Roper started to dislike him. The more he talked, the more phoney he seemed. Like Koch and Nannen before him, Trevor-Roper found himself wondering how Heidemann could afford such an obviously expensive collection.

After this guided tour, Heidemann took his guest over to the Atlantic – one of the most imposing and luxurious hotels in Hamburg, looking out across the Alster to the Stern building. Stern had reserved Trevor-Roper a room for the night. In another part of the hotel, the film crew was waiting. Trevor-Roper took his place in front of the camera and recorded a brief interview. Despite his personal misgivings about Heidemann, he was still convinced that the diaries were genuine and he said so. Heidemann was delighted.

Trevor-Roper had been looking forward to a quiet meal alone with a book followed by an early night before his flight back to London. But Heidemann insisted that they dined together. He led the protesting historian into the bar.

Heidemann ordered meals for them both and began drinking heavily. He became loquacious. Trevor-Roper experienced the sequence of emotions familiar to those who had had the misfortune to be trapped in a conversation with Heidemann: bewilderment, disbelief, distaste and an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia.

He told Trevor-Roper that he had access to an important archive of Nazi documents which Martin Bormann had deposited in Madrid in 1938.

Trevor-Roper pointed out that such an action by Bormann was rather unlikely – Madrid was in Republican hands in 1938.

Perhaps it was somewhere outside Madrid, said Heidemann. Or perhaps it was 1939. Anyway, it was certainly true; he had been told the story personally – by Martin Bormann.

Trevor-Roper smiled, assuming that Heidemann was making a joke. But the reporter was serious. He pulled out his wallet and produced a photograph. ‘This is a picture of Martin, taken recently.’

The historian studied the photograph. It showed a man in his mid-sixties – an obvious impostor, considering that Bormann would by then have been eighty-three.

Heidemann would not be dissuaded. Martin, he insisted, was alive and living in Switzerland….

The evening crept by with more stories of Heidemann’s Nazi contacts, until Trevor-Roper at last felt able to make a polite excuse and escape to his bedroom.

In retrospect it is difficulty to understand why Trevor-Roper’s uneasiness and scepticism about Heidemann did not begin now to extend to the diaries he had seen in the Swiss bank. In fact, his reaction was almost exactly the opposite. He reasoned that if he, after half a day’s acquaintance, found Heidemann unreliable, Stern, after employing him for thirty years, must surely have known what he was like and been all the more careful about checking his stories. He was under the impression that this had been done. As far as he was concerned, the diaries had been authenticated by three handwriting experts and by forensic analysis; their provenance in the Boernersdorf air crash was entirely credible; their contents had been thoroughly investigated by Stern over a period of several years; and the magazine’s editor had assured him that the supplier of the diaries was known to them and had also been checked.

Heidemann reminded Trevor-Roper of the late Ladislas Farago, the American writer who claimed he had seen a decrepit Bormann propped up in a large bed in 1973 surrounded by Bolivian nuns. Farago had visited Trevor-Roper in Oxford and had exhibited a similar naïvety and readiness to believe whatever he was told, combined with a genuine talent for unearthing documents and information.

With these complacent thoughts, the historian retired to his bed, his belief in the Hitler diaries unshaken.

Murdoch’s handling of the negotiations had been masterful. By Tuesday, isolated in New York, Koch and Schulte-Hillen found themselves effectively reduced to begging the Australian to buy the syndication rights. When he finally consented to resume negotiations, he was able to dictate his own price. His original offer for the British and Commonwealth rights had been $750,000. Now, he picked them up for little more than half that sum – $400,000. The money was to be paid over the next two years. The first instalment of $200,000 was handed over on signature of the contract. (Shortly afterwards, Murdoch also acquired the American rights for a bargain price of $800,000.)

The continuing silence from Newsweek convinced the Germans that the magazine was indeed going to steal their story. Further negotiations were useless. The pair had the feeling that they were being deliberately kept waiting around in a New York hotel in order to hold up publication in Hamburg.

On Wednesday, Schulte-Hillen telephoned Reinhard Mohn and confessed to the Bertelsmann owner that he had made a mess of the negotiations – in his words, he had ‘over-pokered’ his hand. He also rang Hensmann and issued orders confirming that Stern would publish its scoop the following Monday. The discovery of the diaries would be announced in a statement on Friday.

Koch and Schulte-Hillen caught the next plane back to Germany.

In the offices of The Times and Sunday Times that Wednesday, very few people knew of the impending acquisition of the Hitler diaries. Those who did were mostly confused or apprehensive.

Phillip Knightley had arrived back at the Sunday Times on Tuesday after four months in Australia. That night he had gone out for a drink with Eric Jacobs, the editor responsible for commissioning the long articles on the front of the paper’s Review section. He wouldn’t be requiring anything for a while, he told Knightley. He understood he was going to be running the Hitler diaries in that space.

The next day, Knightley went in to see Magnus Linklater, the Features Editor. ‘These Hitler diaries,’ he asked, ‘they’re not the ones that David Irving put us on to in December, are they?’ Linklater said they weren’t – they’d been offered to the paper by Stern. A few minutes later, Knightley bumped into the Sunday Times editor, Frank Giles, in the lavatory. He told him he was worried about the rumours he was picking up regarding the diaries. It all sounded very suspicious.

‘You’re right to be cautious,’ replied Giles. ‘But don’t worry. It doesn’t concern us. Murdoch’s going to run them in The Times.’

Knightley was still anxious. He asked if he could submit a memorandum setting out his reservations.

By all means, said Giles, but keep it to one page. Murdoch’s attention span was notoriously short; there was no point in giving him anything longer than a few hundred words to read.

What was nagging away at the back of Knightley’s mind was the memory of another set of wartime documents which had been bought for the Sunday Times fifteen years earlier – the diaries of Benito Mussolini. These had been offered to the Thomson Organization, at that time the owners of the Sunday Times, for £250,000. A series of expert examinations had failed to find anything wrong with them, and £100,000 had been handed over as a down payment to a Polish-born arms dealer who was acting as middle man. Further large sums had been paid out in expenses – for example, Vittorio Mussolini, the dictator’s son, had been given £3500 in cash in a brown paper bag in order to buy himself a sports car in return for agreeing to renounce his claim on the diaries. In the end, the books had turned out to be the work of an Italian woman called Amalia Panvini and her eighty-four-year-old mother, Rosa. The affair had cost Thomsons a fortune and made the Sunday Times a temporary laughing-stock in Fleet Street. Knightley – one of the few reporters left on the paper who remembered the affair – had been cautious of so-called ‘finds’ of wartime papers ever since.

It took him the rest of Wednesday to write his memorandum. Point by point, he drew attention to the similarities between the forgery of 1968 and the ‘scoop’ of 1983. The Mussolini fiasco should have taught the Sunday Times some lessons:

Knightley’s intuition was subsequently proved correct in almost every detail: the authentication had been inadequate; the supposed involvement of East German officials and the fear that the copyright might not be secure had fostered a climate of secrecy, bordering on paranoia; no German historians had been allowed to see the diaries; no explanation had been given as to where the diaries had been kept for more than thirty years; and Times Newspapers had not carried out its own checks, apart from sending Trevor-Roper on his brief expedition into the Swiss bank.

Knightley sent his memorandum to Frank Giles to be forwarded to Murdoch. He never heard another word about it. It was too late. Murdoch had bought the diaries and now his priority, like Stern’s, was to beat Newsweek into print.

Trevor-Roper arrived home in Cambridge late on Wednesday night. He was talking to his wife in her sitting-room at about midnight when he received a transatlantic telephone call from Murdoch and Charles Douglas-Home in New York. Murdoch told him that Stern was bringing forward its publication date to Monday. News International had acquired syndication rights in the diaries. ‘I think we’ll put them in the Sunday Times,’ he said. The announcement of the discovery would be made on Friday morning, in less than thirty-six hours’ time. Douglas-Home cut in. ‘We want a piece from you for Saturday’s Times. Can you do it?’ Trevor-Roper said he thought he could, if he wrote ‘flat out’. It was agreed that the article would be picked up from Peterhouse by dispatch rider on Friday morning.

In Hamburg on Thursday, Sorge and Hensmann tied up the loose ends with Stern’s smaller, European syndication partners. Paris Match bought the diaries for $400,000. The Spanish company Grupo Zeta paid $150,000. Geillustreerde Pers of the Netherlands handed over $125,000 for serial rights in Belgium and Holland. Norshe Presse of Norway bought the diaries for $50,000. The Italian rights went to Mondadori, publishers of the magazine Panorama, although as a precaution they decided at this stage to buy only the first four instalments for $50,000. Added together with the $1.2 million paid by News International for the English language serialization, this meant that the Hitler diaries had so far realized $1.975 million – less than Stern had originally hoped for, but still one of the largest syndication deals in history. And, of course, there were still the world book rights to come.

The Peterhouse Master’s Lodge is a large and stately Queen Anne house on the eastern side of Trumpington Street, opposite the college. This spacious and well-proportioned home was regarded by Trevor-Roper as one of the more attractive aspects of being Master of Peterhouse. (‘The only drawback’, he remarked, ‘is that the college comes with it.’)

Throughout Thursday, 21 April, Trevor-Roper sat in his first-floor study, trying to write his article for The Times. Although justifiably renowned for his literary style (A. J. P. Taylor called him ‘an incomparable essayist’), he had always found writing ‘terribly painful’. Deadlines especially were a torture to him. He never used a typewriter, always a fountain pen, and liked to ‘write, sleep on it, and then rewrite’. Today he had no time for such luxuries. At length, having sorted through his notes and cleared his mind, he set to work.

‘A new document’ – he began – ‘or rather, a whole new archive of documents – has recently come to light in Germany. It is an archive of great historical significance. When it is available to historians, it will occupy them for some time. It may also disconcert them. It is Hitler’s private diary, kept by him, in his own hand, throughout almost the whole of his reign….’

On Thursday night in his laboratory in the small town of Bad Ems outside Koblenz, Dr Arnold Rentz completed his analysis of the three sheets of paper Stern had sent to the Bundesarchiv the previous week.

When he had commissioned him, Dr Josef Henke had told Rentz that the tests were a matter of the utmost urgency. The chemist therefore worked late in order to be able to give Henke the results the following day. He had some good news, and some bad.