Selling Hitler

TWENTY-FIVE

FRIDAY 22 APRIL.

At 9 a.m. a motorcycle dispatch-rider from The Times arrived at the Peterhouse Master’s Lodge.

Trevor-Roper was entitled to feel a certain professional pride as he handed over his article. It was long – over 3000 words – and had been difficult to write, but he had finished it in a day and submitted it on time. It was an impressive piece of journalism, if not of scholarship.

His career had always been marked by a curious dichotomy. There was Hugh Trevor-Roper, patient historian, author of learned works on such esoterica as the sixteenth-century European witch craze, the ancient Scottish constitution and the life of the fraudulent Sinologist, Edmund Backhouse, ‘the Hermit of Peking’. And then there was Lord Dacre, man of public affairs, newspaper director, pundit, MI5 officer and Hitler expert. His article for The Times represented the triumph of the intelligence officer over the scholar. His authentication of the Hitler diaries was not based on a careful analysis of their content – it could not be, he had scarcely bothered to read a single entry. It was based almost entirely on circumstantial evidence.

He confessed that to start with he had been sceptical (‘the very idea of Hitler as a methodical diarist is new’). But then he had ‘entered the back room in the Swiss bank, and turned the pages of those volumes, and learned the extraordinary story of their discovery’ and his doubts had ‘gradually dissolved’. What most impressed him, he wrote, were the other parts of the Hitler archive shown to him by Stern in Zurich and by Heidemann in Hamburg:

Trevor-Roper’s entire misjudgement was founded upon the non sequitur contained in that last, fatally confident sentence. The fact that the archive spanned thirty-five years and included paintings and other documents did not, except in the most superficial sense, provide ‘internal evidence of authenticity’. If such internal evidence existed, it was to be found in the detailed content of the diaries themselves. But no German scholar had even been allowed to see them, let alone check every entry; at least twenty volumes had not yet been transcribed into typescript; and Walde and Pesch, the only journalists apart from Heidemann who had access to the diaries, had thoroughly examined only one volume: that devoted to the flight of Rudolf Hess. (Ironically, the authenticity of the Hess book was the one feature of the diaries which still worried Trevor-Roper. ‘We must not jump to premature conclusions,’ he wrote. ‘There are many mysteries in the case of Hess.’)

The ‘external fact’ which impressed Trevor-Roper was the plane crash and Hitler’s reaction to it: ‘a clue which connects him, by a thin but direct line, with this archive’. The outburst in the bunker, together with the extent of the material accompanying the diaries, ‘seems to me to constitute clear proof of their authenticity’.

The world, he concluded, would have to revise its opinion of Hitler to take account of the fact that he was ‘a compulsive diarist’.

As this hasty compilation of donnish jokes and misunderstanding sped down the M11 to London, Felix Schmidt opened the regular Stern editorial conference in Hamburg. It was 11 a.m., German time.

He had a brief announcement to make, he said. His statement was simple and to the point. Over the past few days, colleagues had probably heard rumours of an impending scoop of great importance. He was now pleased to be able to let them in on a secret which had been kept by the magazine for the past two years. Stern had acquired the diaries of Adolf Hitler and would begin publishing them on Monday.

The news was met with gasps and whistles of astonishment.

Simultaneously, the magazine was issuing a public statement announcing its discovery to the world. ‘Following evaluation of the diaries,’ it claimed, ‘the biography of the dictator, and with it the history of the Nazi state, will have to be written in large part anew.’

At 11.15 a.m., Stern’s news department began sending out the telexed message – to the German press agency, DPA, to Associated Press, to Reuters, to United Press International, to West German radio and television….

It was at this point, with the juggernaut already beginning to roll, that Thomas Walde received a telephone call from Dr Josef Henke at the Bundesarchiv. Henke had received the results of Rentz’s forensic analysis. The two blank pages which had been cut from the diaries did not contain paper whitener and therefore could have been manufactured either before or during the Second World War. The Mussolini telegram, however, did contain whitener and Rentz was convinced the paper was made after 1945. Rentz’s findings supported those of the West German police in March: while the diaries might be genuine, much of the accompanying archive (whose existence had done so much to convince Trevor-Roper) was faked.

Walde thanked Rentz for his help and asked him to rush Rentz’s written report to Hamburg as quickly as possible.

At first sight, this news was not too disturbing for Stern: the diaries, after all, were what mattered, and Heidemann had already told Walde that, according to ‘Fischer’, the other material did not necessarily come from the Boernersdorf crash. But considered more carefully, the implications of the Rentz report were frightening. Three handwriting experts had concluded that the draft telegrams to Admiral Horthy and General Franco (similar to, and from the same source as, the Mussolini telegram) were written by the same person as the author of the page from the Hess special volume. If they were fakes, how much reliance could be placed on the handwriting authentication? And Rentz had been able to establish, by the apparent absence of whitener, only that the two diary pages might be from the right period: they could still be made of paper manufactured after 1945 by an old-fashioned process (as indeed eventually proved to be the case). Thus, at the very moment that news of Stern’s scoop was being flashed around the world, the magazine received indications about its authenticity which were, at best, ambiguous.

As soon as Walde had finished speaking to Henke, he went off to find Peter Koch to tell him the news. Koch, newly returned from America, was understandably alarmed. Walde tried to reassure him: according to Heidemann, he said, whitener was in use before the war; and even if the Mussolini telegram was a fake, it did not originate from the same source as the diaries.

Koch was still not happy. He told Walde that they must inform the management at once. They collected Felix Schmidt on the way, briefed him on what had happened, and together all three went up to the ninth floor to see Schulte-Hillen.

Koch explained the situation and made a short speech. At any moment, he declared, a wave of scepticism was going to descend upon them. They were going to be attacked by academics and newspapers all over the world. They had to be absolutely confident that the story was watertight. There was only one way they could be sure. Heidemann must be made to divulge the name of his source. Koch was worried. ‘I told Schulte-Hillen,’ he recalled, ‘“Heidemann has greater trust in you than in me. Please ask him to write down the exact course of events. You can then read the piece of paper and lock it away in a safe. You don’t even need to give it to me to read. Just tell me that the source is OK.”’

Schulte-Hillen agreed. He asked his secretary to get Gerd Heidemann on the telephone.

The reporter was not in Hamburg. He was eventually traced to the Bayerischer Hof, an expensive hotel in the centre of Munich.

Schulte-Hillen explained the problem and asked him to write down, in confidence, the complete story of how he had obtained the diaries. Heidemann refused. ‘I asked him again,’ recalled Schulte-Hillen, ‘emphatically.’ It was no use. According to the managing director:

When I tried to pressurize him further, he became quite irritated and said: ‘What is it that you want of me? I won’t tell you. I swear to you on the lives of my children that everything is in order. It has all been properly researched. The books are genuine. What more can you ask of me?’

Schulte-Hillen was once more struck by what seemed to him Heidemann’s obvious sincerity. ‘I too have children,’ he said afterwards. ‘Heidemann’s oath impressed me.’ He let the matter drop. In any case, under the terms of his contract, Heidemann had the right to keep the identity of his supplier secret. The managing director told the editors that there was nothing he could do. They would all have to trust Heidemann.

In London, Frank Giles, editor of the Sunday Times, summoned two of his senior colleagues, Hugo Young and Magnus Linklater, to his office. He was, recalled Linklater, ‘obviously very flustered’.

Giles was not a member of Murdoch’s inner circle. He had been only on the fringes of the group which negotiated to buy the diaries – vaguely aware of what was going on, unenthusiastic, yet comforted by his belief that they would be running in The Times. His sang froid had been shattered the previous day by a brisk, transatlantic announcement from Murdoch that the Hitler diaries were going to be serialized in the Sunday Times after all: now that Stern would be appearing on Monday, Sunday had become the perfect day to print the extracts. It would enable the paper to avoid the risk of rivals getting hold of advance copies of the German magazine and printing pirated extracts from the diaries twenty-four hours ahead of them.

Murdoch was not a proprietor who encouraged dissent. Even strong editors found it hard to stand up to him. Giles was not a strong editor. He was sixty-four years old, sleek and aristocratic, a lover of Glyndebourne, fine French wines and classical music which he listened to on his Sony Walkman. His relationship with Murdoch was akin to that between a rabbit and a stoat. The proprietor made no secret of his habit of ripping into Giles’s editorial decisions. He once announced jauntily to Harold Evans that he was ‘just going over to terrorize Frank’. Murdoch’s office on the sixth floor of The Times building looked directly across into Giles’s at the Sunday Times. Evans recalled how the Australian tycoon ‘would stand up with a big grin and with his fingers pointed like a pistol fire bang! bang!’ at Giles working with his back to the window. The subject of this imaginary target practice was in no position to stop Murdoch from doing what he wanted with his newspaper.

Giles told Young and Linklater that the Sunday Times would be serializing the Hitler diaries. They would prepare the ground on Sunday with extensive coverage of their discovery. The two men were ‘aghast’. How could Giles countenance something as irresponsible as running the diaries without allowing the paper’s own journalists to make independent checks? Had he not seen Knightley’s memorandum? Had he forgotten the Mussolini diaries?

Giles, according to Linklater, raised his hands to his ears.

‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want to hear about all that. The deal’s been signed and we’re going to have to do it.’

Minutes later, Arthur Brittenden, Times Newspapers’ Director of Corporate Relations (their press officer), announced that the Hitler diaries would be running in the Sunday Times. ‘It’s not been decided how many Sundays,’ he told the New York Times, ‘because the complete translation is not yet finished. But I think we’ll run it for two or three weeks, then there will be a gap and we’ll pick it up again.’

By coincidence, many of the leading characters in the British subplot of the affair came together for lunch on Friday at the Dorchester Hotel. The Dorchester was hosting the UK Press Awards, an annual ceremony at which Britain’s journalists present prizes to one another in recognition of their professional skill. Charles Douglas-Home was holding forth to a woman sitting next to him. ‘It’s just been announced,’ he told her. ‘It’s the greatest historical find of the century.’

Sitting at the table, Gitta Sereny of the Sunday Times asked what he was talking about.

‘The Hitler diaries,’ said Douglas-Home.

‘Are you running them?’ she asked.

‘No. You are.’

Sereny relayed the gist of this conversation to Phillip Knightley, sitting a few yards away. Knightley hurried back to the office and sought out Magnus Linklater. Linklater gloomily confirmed that the news was true. ‘The Times is running an article by Trevor-Roper tomorrow saying they’re genuine. Why don’t you talk to him?’

It was 3 p.m. In the Master’s Lodge, Trevor-Roper was preparing for a visit to the opera when Knightley called him. The historian’s tone was confident and reassuring.

‘The one thing that impressed me most’, he told Knightley, ‘was the volume of the material. I asked myself whether it all could have been constructed out of the imagination and incidental sources. I decided that it could not.’

Knightley reminded him that there had been thirty volumes of the purported Mussolini diaries. Trevor-Roper was unperturbed: ‘I know Hitler’s handwriting. I know his signature. I know the changes in it between 1908 and his death. It seemed to me that an operation of forgery on that scale was heroic and unnecessary.’ He pointed out that they were not dealing with some shady characters operating on the fringes of the law, but with one of the wealthiest and most widely read magazines in Europe: ‘The directors of Stern, one must assume, do not engage in forgery.’

By the time he hung up, Knightley – who recorded the call – felt much happier. Trevor-Roper’s reputation was impeccable. It was inconceivable that he could be so emphatic about the diaries’ authenticity without good cause. ‘I must say,’ Knightley recalled, ‘he went a long way to convincing me.’

Trevor-Roper and his wife left the Master’s Lodge shortly after 3.30 p.m. to join a party of Cambridge dons and their families on an excursion to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. The historian still felt fairly confident about his judgement of the diaries. But the conversation with Knightley had been vaguely disconcerting and as he settled down in his seat on the party’s private coach, somewhere in the recesses of his mind, something began to stir.

Three thousand miles away, America was waking up to the news of the diaries’ discovery. All the major US wire services were running the Stern announcement, and across New York, in the offices of publishers, agents and newspapers, telephones were ringing with demands for information.

At Bantam Books, Louis Wolfe confirmed to the New York Times that he had heard of the Hitler diaries. ‘An offer was made,’ he admitted, ‘but we were never sure exactly what was being offered, so it seemed much simpler to have our parent company handle it out of its group office in Munich. To the best of my knowledge no one in the United States has signed a contract to publish a book based on Hitler’s diaries.’ Wolfe’s Vice-President, Stuart Applebaum, was also fielding calls. ‘We have a great interest in the possibility of doing a book someday related to the diaries,’ he told the Washington Post, ‘but at this time we have no plans to publish one. Nor do we have any deal to do one.’

At ICM, Lynn Nesbit struggled to answer a deluge of questions. Yes, she had been hired to represent Stern. No, she was no longer their agent. Yes, she was paid a commission. No, she wouldn’t disclose the amount….

Almost every big American magazine found itself pressed to issue a statement. Time’s was terse (‘We have had an interest’); Life’s was baffled (‘We haven’t been involved at all; we just heard about it today’); the National Enquirer tried to pretend it was on the point of clinching a deal (‘right now we are involved in negotiations with Stern’). The longest came from Newsweek, read out by the magazine’s publicity director, Gary Gerard: ‘Newsweek does not have an agreement with Stern for publishing rights to the Adolf Hitler diaries. We are covering the story as news.’

Newsweek’s behaviour went much further than merely ‘covering the story as news’. At a morning editorial conference it was decided to ransack the material handed over in Hamburg. Hitler would go on the cover. Inside the magazine, thirteen pages would be devoted to the diaries (as opposed to four for the week’s main story, the bombing of the US embassy in Beirut which left forty-seven dead). The advertising department was instructed to prepare an extensive publicity campaign. Full-page advertisements were taken out in six major US newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post; these were to be backed up by thirty-second television commercials in twelve American cities.

As it happened, this was the day on which Newsweek’s nominated expert, Gerhard Weinberg, was due to fly to Germany to take up a temporary teaching post in Bonn. Maynard Parker was nevertheless determined to extract an article from him. Weinberg dismissed his last class on the campus at Chapel Hill at 11 a.m. He and his wife caught a flight to New York and at 3 p.m. were met at La Guardia airport by two Newsweek reporters and a photographer. The journalists steered the professor into a corner of the arrivals lounge and thrust a copy of Trevor-Roper’s Times article into his hands – the text had just been wired over from London. Weinberg skimmed through it: ‘doubts dissolved… satisfied documents authentic… standard accounts Hitler’s personality have to be revised… astonishing archive….’ Weinberg, who had always respected Trevor-Roper’s scholarship, was startled by the lack of equivocation. Such a ringing endorsement seemed to him ‘in itself to be a strong argument in favour of the diaries’ authenticity’. Trevor-Roper, he reasoned, must know something he didn’t. He told the Newsweek reporters that in view of the article, the diaries, in his opinion, were now more likely to be genuine than not.

The Newsweek men still needed more information to complete their coverage. Weinberg was equally determined to catch his flight to Germany. The only solution was for one of the journalists, Steven Strasser, to fly out with him, interview him on the plane, and file a piece by telephone from Germany. The photographer stood Professor Weinberg against a wall and took a few hasty pictures. Then Weinberg, his wife, and Mr Strasser left to catch the afternoon flight to Frankfurt.

Peter Koch’s prediction of the hostility the diaries would arouse was already coming true.

In Stuttgart, Eberhard Jaeckel – although, like Weinberg, ‘shaken by Trevor-Roper’s position’ – declared himself ‘extremely sceptical’. He had seen a so-called ‘Hitler diary’ some years before, he said, and decided it was forged.

‘I have not seen their evidence, but everything speaks against it,’ Werner Maser told Reuters. ‘It smacks of pure sensationalism.’

‘I am extraordinary sceptical,’ announced Karl-Dietrich Bracher of Bonn University. ‘It would be a total surprise and I consider it highly unlikely.’

A spokesman for the Federal Archives in Koblenz confirmed that they had arranged for the examination of ‘about ten pages’ of Hitler’s handwriting for Stern, but denied having authenticated any diaries.

The loudest condemnations of all were emanating from London.

David Irving reckoned he was due for some luck. For two years, everything had gone wrong for him. His marriage had ended in an acrimonious divorce. He was being pursued by the Inland Revenue. His political activities had collapsed due to lack of funds. He was on the point of being evicted from his flat. Most of the furniture had been taken by his wife and entire rooms were left stripped and abandoned while he was reduced to squatting in one corner. By the spring of 1983, he was in desperate need of money and a boost for his flagging career. And now, as if in answer to a prayer, Adolf Hitler came to his rescue.

Ever since 10 a.m., when a reporter from Der Spiegel had called to tell him of Stern’s impending announcement, he had been inundated with inquiries from around the world – Reuters, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Observer, the Sunday Mirror, Bild Zeitung, Independent Radio News, the BBC…. ‘As soon as I rang off, the phone rang again,’ he noted in his diary. ‘Quite extraordinary.’ His answer to all of them was the same: the Hitler diaries were fakes, and he had the evidence to prove it.

He was ‘shocked’ by Stern’s decision to publish. He was certain that the forgeries he had received from Priesack in December originated from the same source as Heidemann’s diaries. Thankfully, he still had photocopies of the material – letters, drawings, a few pages from the original volume for 1935 (the one Kujau had forged in 1978 and given to Fritz Stiefel). With the Hitler diaries fast becoming the hottest news story in the world, these worthless scraps had suddenly become a potential gold mine. Irving’s priority now was to make money as quickly as possible.

In between constant interruptions from the telephone, he wrote to the Sunday Times drawing their attention to the fact that he had given them an ‘exclusive lead to these documents’ before Christmas and demanding as commission a percentage of the price paid for the diaries. He then set about marketing his information. Der Spiegel offered to pay him for his photocopies. Bild Zeitung, a mass-circulation West German paper, promised to meet his expenses and provide a fee if he would fly out to Hamburg to confront Stern at its press conference on Monday. One of the Sunday Times’s main rivals, the Observer, paid him £1000 for his help in compiling an article which derided the diaries’ authenticity; another, the Mail on Sunday, gave him £5000 for his documents and a statement that the diaries were forged.

This was only the beginning of an extraordinary resurgence in Irving’s fortunes. No one now cared about his reputation as a right-wing maverick. Seeing their circulations threatened by the Hitler scoop, newspapers and magazines which would have treated him as a pariah twenty-four hours earlier queued up for quotes. By the end of the afternoon Irving had emerged as Stern’s most vociferous and dangerous assailant.

At 9.30 p.m., a BBC taxi picked him up and took him to Television Centre where he appeared in a live studio confrontation with Charles Douglas-Home. Irving waved his fakes at the camera. Douglas-Home was unperturbed. ‘I have smelt them,’ he said of the diaries. ‘I’m a minor historian and we know about the smell of old documents. They certainly smelt.’

At that moment, sitting in the audience at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Times Newspapers’ star witness was beginning to have second thoughts. Borne along by the momentum of deadlines, midnight phone calls and departure times, infected by the pervading atmosphere of excitement and secrecy, he had scarcely had time for an hour’s calm reflection all week. Now, as the other academics and their wives concentrated on the music of Verdi’s Don Carlos, Trevor-Roper’s thoughts were elsewhere, ranging back over his experiences in Hamburg and Zurich, with one incident in particular gnawing at his mind.

On Tuesday, Heidemann had shown him a letter, supposedly by Hitler. It was dated 1908 and addressed to a girl with whom Hitler was supposed to have been infatuated during his days in Vienna. The incident had been described by August Kubizek in The Young Hitler I Knew. In retrospect, this letter ‘disquieted’ Trevor-Roper. It fitted in ‘just a little too neatly’ with the known historical record. ‘Could this letter have been forged for this purpose?’ he wondered. And why was it with Hitler’s papers? Why wasn’t it with the girl’s? Until this moment he had taken the existence of such supplementary material, which helped to make up the sheer bulk of the archive, as an almost unanswerable argument in favour of the diaries’ authenticity. Suddenly he saw the flaw in this logic. For the first time since leaving the Swiss bank, he allowed his mind to approach the Stern find from a different angle.

Trevor-Roper had always had doubts about the Hess book: ‘That Hitler, with his political brain, should have sanctioned such a mission – it was insane.’ Now, these doubts and his reservations about the 1908 letter, began to set off a fearful chain reaction in his mind. Why hadn’t any German experts seen the material? And Heidemann – the memory of that awful evening at the Atlantic swam back into his memory – Heidemann could so easily have been deceived; ‘he was not a critical spirit’. Trevor-Roper’s confidence in his judgement began rapidly unravelling.

‘If at that moment,’ he said later, ‘I could have stopped the course of events, I would have done so.’

He briefly considered groping his way out of the dimly lit auditorium to find a telephone. He rejected the idea. He knew the workings of a modern newspaper sufficiently well to appreciate that there was no chance of stopping his article now. At that moment, less than a mile away, in the print-room of Times Newspapers, twelve hours after it had been picked up from his home, 400,000 copies of it were coming off the presses.

TWENTY-SIX

HUGH TREVOR-ROPER ARRIVED home in Cambridge in the early hours of Saturday morning. He went to bed but was soon up again. Shortly after 7 a.m. he went down to collect the morning’s edition of The Times. The story dominated the front page:

Trevor-Roper opened the paper. His own article was spread across an entire page:

‘When I had entered the back room in the Swiss bank, and turned the pages of those volumes, my doubts gradually dissolved. I am now satisfied they are authentic.’

Reading the article spurred Trevor-Roper into action. At 8 a.m. he began making a series of telephone calls.

He rang Charles Douglas-Home and told him he now had ‘some doubts’ about the authenticity of the diaries. ‘They were not doubts such that I could say I disbelieved in the diaries,’ he recalled – but they were serious reservations. Douglas-Home took the news with remarkable calmness. He told the historian that there had been a good deal of publicity on television the previous evening, with David Irving emerging as ‘prosecuting counsel’. He said that he, too, personally regretted the deal with Stern – the Germans were unpleasant to deal with, arrogant and paranoid. They still hadn’t supplied a complete transcript of the material. The conditions they had imposed were ‘insulting’. They would have to see what developed over the next few days.

Trevor-Roper also spoke of his doubts to Colin Webb. Next, he rang Peter Wickman. Stern wanted him to attend the press conference to launch the diaries on Monday. Trevor-Roper told Wickman he would take part only if he were given an opportunity to put some questions to Gerd Heidemann beforehand. In addition, he wanted to see a typed transcript of the Hess volume. Wickman promised to see what he could do.

One good reason for Douglas-Home’s stoicism in the face of Trevor-Roper’s sudden nervousness was the fact that he was no longer responsible for the diaries. That burden had passed on Thursday to Frank Giles at the Sunday Times. A fatal breakdown in communication now occurred. Douglas-Home believed that Trevor-Roper’s doubts were relatively minor; if they were serious, he assumed the historian would pass them on to the Sunday Times. But Trevor-Roper was relying on Douglas-Home to spread the word of his unease around Gray’s Inn Road. He did not think of calling them direct. ‘I had had no dealings with the Sunday Times myself,’ he explained. ‘I had been employed solely by The Times.’ He sat at home in Cambridge and waited for Knightley or Giles to ring him. He was ‘surprised that they didn’t call; it would seem the thing to do’.

Meanwhile, happily ignorant of Trevor-Roper’s change of heart, the staff of the Sunday Times were racing against the paper’s deadline to do justice to a story endorsed by the historian as the greatest scoop since Watergate. Professional instincts were now overriding natural scepticism. Magnus Linklater (co-author of Hoax, the story of the faked Howard Hughes autobiography) and Paul Eddy, the head of the paper’s Insight team, were responsible for putting together the coverage. Stern would not allow them to talk to Heidemann directly. Quotations from the diaries were having to be extracted from the Germans by Anthony Terry, the Sunday Times representative in Hamburg, who translated them and telexed them to London. Even as they worked, Linklater and Eddy were conscious of how phoney they sounded. According to the telexes, Hitler had written some peculiar entries.

The two journalists discussed what they should do. ‘We agreed,’ said Linklater afterwards, ‘that the honourable course would have been to have refused to touch it. But as Paul said, if we did that, we would have to resign. We both laughed about that, so we carried on – like a couple of hacks.’

Phillip Knightley was also searching his conscience. His task was to write an article setting out the reasons for the diaries’ authenticity and their importance as an historical source. ‘I agreed to do it on the understanding that my name wasn’t to be attached to it. Then someone pointed out that it would look odd if the article appeared anonymously and I was asked to reconsider.’ Knightley went off to consult John Whale, the Sunday Times’s religious correspondent, ‘a great moral force on the paper’. Knightley showed him what he had written and asked him what he should do. Whale advised him to agree to the request – he had been sufficiently detached in the piece to cover himself against the possibility that the material was fraudulent. (Only one sentence – the first – later returned to haunt Knightley: ‘Hitler’s diaries’, he wrote, ‘have been submitted to the most rigorous tests to establish their authenticity.’)

The edition of the paper which emerged after all this agonizing was extraordinary: a testament to the skill of the journalists and the old rule that anything about the Nazis, once embellished with swastikas and pictures of Hitler, has a quality of compulsion. ‘We did a hell of a good job on it,’ said Linklater. ‘It was gripping stuff. Professionally, we were all very pleased with it.’

Dominating the front page, spread over eight columns, headed ‘WORLD EXCLUSIVE’, was an article promising the reader ‘The secrets of Hitler’s War’. There was a superimposed picture of Gerd Heidemann holding the diaries; behind him, looking out over his shoulder, staring hypnotically at the potential purchaser, was an enormous close-up of Hitler’s face. The story spilled over on to page two and was backed up by articles on pages sixteen, seventeen and eighteen. The centre spread announced ‘HITLER’S SECRET DIARIES’ in letters almost two inches high. There were photographs of Hitler and Eva Braun, of extracts from the diaries, of Goebbels, Himmler and Bormann, of the graves in Boernersdorf and of Heidemann solemnly holding up the salvaged window from the crashed plane. ‘Look at that,’ said Brian MacArthur, the deputy editor, when the first proofs arrived in the newsroom. ‘You will never see another front page like that as long as you live. It is sensational.’

It is a tradition on the Sunday Times that, as the presses begin to turn, the senior members of the staff gather in the editor’s office for a drink. Shortly after 7 p.m., Linklater, Eddy, MacArthur, Knightley and their colleagues trooped in to see Giles. There was a mood of self-congratulation. The paper looked so good, it almost convinced the people who had written it. Over a glass of wine, the conversation turned to the following week’s paper: who would attend the Stern press conference, who would handle the serialization…. Giles suggested they should invite Trevor-Roper to write an article demolishing ‘all these carping criticisms’ about the diaries’ authenticity. This was considered a good idea. Giles picked up the telephone. What followed has entered the mythology of Fleet Street, a scene etched in the memory of the witnesses, ‘told and retold over the milk-bars of Fleet Street’, as Evelyn Waugh once wrote of a similar moment in Scoop, ‘perennially fresh in the jaded memories of a hundred editors….’

‘Hugh?… Frank Giles…. Very well, thank you….’

There had been a murmur of conversation in the room, but this gradually died away as more of the Sunday Times men began listening to one side of the telephone conversation.

‘…I think we’d like just a quiet, scholarly, detailed piece, rebutting….’

There was a pause. ‘Frank didn’t go white exactly,’ recalled Knightley, ‘but his tone suddenly changed.’

‘Well, naturally, Hugh, one has doubts. There are no certainties in this life. But these doubts aren’t strong enough to make you do a complete 180-degree turn on that?… Oh. I see. You are doing a 180-degree turn….’

The editorial conference froze into a tableau of despair: MacArthur who had slumped against the wall, now slid gently to the floor; Linklater sat with his head between his knees; Knightley silently pounded the table; nobody spoke.

After Giles had hung up there was, according to one participant, ‘a tense fifteen-minute conversation’. Should the presses be stopped? That would require Murdoch’s agreement. He was in New York. Someone went off to try to reach him. It was decided that Giles should ring Trevor-Roper back and insist that if he had doubts, he should not air them in public at Stern’s press conference but should reveal them exclusively in the following week’s Sunday Times. Everyone left to enable the editor to make the call in peace; as they did so, his ebullient wife, Lady Katherine Giles, burst through the door carrying her husband’s supper in a hamper. She stayed with him while he made the call and emerged a few minutes later to reassure everyone: ‘Frank was marvellous.’ Meanwhile, Brian MacArthur was speaking to Rupert Murdoch who had been tracked down in the United States. MacArthur outlined the problem caused by Lord Dacre’s change of heart. Should they stop the print run and remake the paper?

‘Fuck Dacre,’ replied Murdoch. ‘Publish.’

Sunday 24 April.

As 1.4 million copies of the Sunday Times were distributed across Great Britain, the assault on the diaries’ authenticity intensified. Lord Bullock, author of Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, made the same point as a number of critics of the scoop: how could Hitler have written about the attempt on his life in July 1944, when his right arm was known to have been damaged in the blast? Bullock called for an international commission of French, British, American and Jewish historians to be appointed to examine the diaries. The Sunday Times’s rivals, using the information bought from Irving, were having a field day. ‘Serious doubts cast on Hitler’s “secret diaries”,’ claimed the Observer. ‘THE DAMNING FLAWS IN THE HITLER DIARY,’ alleged the Mail on Sunday. ‘All too splendid, too neat, too pat to be anything but a gigantic hoax.’ In Germany, a succession of Hitler’s former aides, few of them under seventy, was wheeled out for comment. ‘We often used to eat at about three or four o’ clock in the morning,’ said Nicolaus von Below, the Führer’s air force adjutant, ‘and only after that did Hitler go to bed. He had no time to write anything. It’s all a complete lie.’ Richard Schulze-Kossens echoed von Below: Hitler ‘never had time’ to keep a diary. ‘The Führer never made notes by hand,’ insisted Christa Schroeder.

At 8.30 a.m., David Irving was picked up by a Mail on Sunday car and driven to the airport to catch the 10.35 a.m. flight to Hamburg. He was met at the other end by Jochen Kummer, a senior reporter on the mass-circulation Bild Zeitung. Irving was to be their ‘torpedo’ at the Stern press conference the following day. ‘We agreed a fee of £1000 plus expenses,’ noted Irving in his diary.

A couple of hours later, Trevor-Roper also arrived at Heathrow, accompanied by two minders from the Sunday Times, Paul Eddy and Brian MacArthur. At the airport he found himself ‘pursued by massed cameras’. ‘The whole story had been blown up into a sensation,’ recalled Trevor-Roper. Microphones were thrust at his face. ‘I do believe the diaries are genuine,’ he said, ‘but there are complications. I will not put a percentage figure on my belief. I admit there are problems….’

In Hamburg the three men met Anthony Terry, and Trevor-Roper once again checked into the Atlantic Hotel to await the arrival of Gerd Heidemann.

It was late afternoon by the time Heidemann arrived. He apologized for having kept Trevor-Roper waiting. He had just flown in from Munich, he said, where he had been talking to Frau Ilse Hess. Trevor-Roper told him there were certain points he wanted clarified before he was prepared to endorse the diaries at the press conference. Would Heidemann tell him, once again, how the diaries came into Stern’s possession?

This posed a problem for Heidemann. Since he had last spoken with Trevor-Roper, Stern had received the results of the Rentz forensic investigation. Heidemann was now aware that although the diaries might still be genuine, the accompanying archive was probably forged. Kujau had assured him that the two sets of material came from different sources. But how could Heidemann square that with his original assertion that there was one plane crash, one salvaged cargo, and one supplier? His solution was to add a new twist to his story. Heidemann now told Trevor-Roper that the diaries had been brought out of the East by a former Wehrmacht officer currently living in West Germany. The reporter said he had collected the first diaries from Switzerland. Other material had been delivered to him in Hamburg by the Boernersdorf peasants.

Trevor-Roper was immediately suspicious. This was the third version of the story he had heard, he said. Originally, in Zurich, he had been told by Peter Koch that the diaries’ supplier lived in East Germany: that was why his name could not be disclosed. Then, in Hamburg last week, Heidemann had told him that the so-called ‘Wehrmacht officer’ lived in Switzerland and could not be identified for tax reasons. Now he was supposed to live in West Germany and only to have supplied the diaries, not the additional material. Which version was correct?

Heidemann blustered. He was not responsible for anything Koch said. Koch knew nothing. Koch knew only as much as he, Heidemann, chose to tell him.

The historian was insistent. He would not authenticate the diaries unless Heidemann gave him the full story of their discovery. They should start again from the beginning. How had the diaries come into Stern’s possession?

‘In interrogation,’ Trevor-Roper once observed, ‘pressure must be uninterrupted.’ That afternoon in the Atlantic Hotel he drew on the skills he had learned in the prisoner of war cages of Germany in the autumn of 1945. Remorselessly, he battered away at Heidemann’s story in a way that no one had done since the diaries had first begun to emerge in Hamburg. Heidemann pulled out document after document from his briefcase. ‘I’ll produce anything if you just won’t put me through the mincing machine.’

Trevor-Roper read through the Hess special volume. It was ludicrously superficial. He had no doubts now. It was a forgery.

‘Can you give me’, he demanded, ‘any reason why I should believe in this Wehrmacht officer?’

‘No,’ said Heidemann. ‘Why should I?’

‘Well, then, why should I believe?’ retorted Trevor-Roper.

There was real anger in the exchanges; old resentments flared. ‘You are behaving exactly like an officer of the British secret service,’ shouted Heidemann. ‘We are no longer in 1945.’ After putting up a stubborn resistance for more than an hour, the reporter declared that he had had enough and stalked out of the room, refusing to attend a dinner that Stern was supposed to be giving in Trevor-Roper’s honour that evening.

Trevor-Roper, too, considered boycotting the meal. In the end he agreed to attend only in the hope of extracting the name of the diaries’ supplier from Peter Koch. But to the historian’s astonishment, Koch, when confronted with his earlier assertion that Stern knew the identity of the ‘Wehrmacht officer’, calmly denied ever having made such a claim. Trevor-Roper threatened to stay away from the following morning’s press conference. The Stern men were unmoved. The dinner ended, according to the subsequent Stern Report, with ‘an icy atmosphere around the table’.

After the meal, Trevor-Roper discussed his dilemma with Paul Eddy, Brian MacArthur and Anthony Terry. They urged him not to recant in public at the press conference. He should at least wait until he had returned to Britain. The three Sunday Times men were persuasive, and by the time they left him at midnight, the historian was half convinced. He was crossing the lobby of the hotel on his way up to bed when he unexpectedly ran into an old friend – Sir Nicholas Henderson, Britain’s former ambassador in Washington and Bonn. The two men retreated to the bar and drank beer until 2 a.m. Henderson’s advice was unequivocal. Trevor-Roper should state his reservations as quickly and publicly as possible. He would not have a better opportunity than the Stern press conference in a few hours’ time. Trevor-Roper decided ‘to sleep on the matter’.

Monday, 25 April.

‘The big day,’ wrote Irving in his diary.

The special issue of Stern was already piled up on the news-stands to greet the early morning commuters. More than two and a quarter million copies had been printed over the weekend. ‘Hitler’s Diary Discovered,’ proclaimed the cover, displaying a stack of black-bound volumes, topped by one bearing the Gothic initials ‘FH’ (the ‘F’ still assumed by Stern to be an ‘A’). Coverage of the diaries sprawled across more than forty pages, with extracts blown up to three or four times their original size. There was Hitler on Ernst Roehm:

Hitler on the Kristallnacht, the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ in 1938, when Jewish shops and synagogues were smashed and thousands of Jews sent to concentration camps:

Hitler on the Russian attack on Berlin in April 1945:

There were pictures of Hitler in the Reichschancellery in 1945, Hitler with Mussolini, Hitler writing at his desk, Hitler holding a bunch of flowers, Hitler with Hess; the only other person shown as often was Gerd Heidemann: Heidemann on Carin II, Heidemann with the diaries, Heidemann in Boernersdorf, Heidemann with Wolff, Heidemann with Guensche and Mohnke – the entire issue was a monument to one man’s obsession, a tasteless and hysterical trampling over thirty-eight years of post-war German sensitivity about the Nazis. Stern was already under attack for its handling of the diaries; this tactless treatment was to earn the magazine the odium of almost the entire West German press.

In the Four Seasons Hotel, Irving was up early. He prepared for the morning’s combat with a haircut in the hotel barber’s followed by a heavy German breakfast. The restaurant, he found, was ‘packed with journalists and television teams, poring over this morning’s Stern’.

Trevor-Roper woke at 8 a.m. to a telephone call from Charles Douglas-Home. How was he feeling? Trevor-Roper said that he had talked to Heidemann, that his doubts had not been assuaged, that they had, in fact, increased. Douglas-Home urged him not to ‘burn his boats’ at the press conference.

By 10.30 a.m., the Stern canteen was packed with journalists. More than two hundied had converged on Hamburg from all over the world. There were twenty-seven television crews. All the seats were taken and reporters and photographers squeezed into every corner, squatting, and in some cases lying full-length, beneath the platform at the far end of the room. Incongruous yet unnoticed, in the centre of it all, sat General Wilhelm Mohnke, attending by special invitation of Gerd Heidemann. Each of the journalists was issued with a press kit: twenty pages of information about the diaries and a set of seven photographs. Also included were copies of the Rentz forensic reports on the two diary pages; the Rentz finding on the Mussolini telegram was omitted, giving the impression that his tests had been a hundred per cent in favour of the authenticity of the Stern material.

At 11 a.m., the stars of the conference filed in to a battery of flashes from the photographers: Peter Koch, Felix Schmidt, Thomas Walde, Gerd Heidemann and Hugh Trevor-Roper. The professor was startled by the size of the audience, the hot and noisy atmosphere, the brilliance of the television lights. It looked, wrote one journalist afterwards, like ‘a Sadler’s Wells set for hell’.

Peter Koch’s introduction was aggressive. He denounced the attacks on the diaries’ authenticity. Eberhard Jaeckel was making assertions about material he had not even seen. ‘If we as journalists behaved in such a manner,’ said Koch, ‘we would be accused of superficiality.’ David Irving – sitting half-way down the room – he dismissed as an historian ‘with no reputation to lose’. ‘I am a hundred per cent convinced that Hitler wrote every single word in those books,’ insisted Koch. ‘We paid a lot of money for the diaries, but when it comes to informing the reader, nothing is too expensive.’

The press was then shown the Stern documentary film, The Find. Trevor-Roper watched his own endorsement of the diaries, recorded the previous week, with his head in his hand. When the programme finished, a young woman pushed her way through the cameras to the tables at the end of the canteen and tipped out the contents of two parcels: a dozen volumes of the Hitler diaries. It was a coup de théâtre – ‘as if,’ said Brian James of the Daily Mail, ‘Hitler had suddenly thrust an arm out of the grave’. The photographers scrambled for close-ups. The Stern men tried to shield the contents to prevent any premature disclosure. Koch thrust a handful of diaries at Gerd Heidemann who was persuaded to stand up, with great reluctance, and pose with them for the cameras. Koch invited questions. Almost all of them were directed at Trevor-Roper.

In his own mind, the historian had already concluded that the diaries could well be false. ‘Having once admitted it to myself,’ he said later, ‘I felt I must attend the press conference and admit it to others.’ With head tilted back, eyes focused on some indeterminate point in the middle distance, he began to recant. ‘The question of the authenticity of the diaries is inseparable from the history of the diaries. The question is: are these documents linked necessarily to that aeroplane? When I saw the documents in Zurich, I understood – or, er, misunderstood – that that link was absolutely established….’ The diaries ‘might’ be genuine, he said, but ‘the thing looks more shaky’ – there was, after all, ‘such a thing as a perfect forgery’. He ended with a swipe at Stern and Times Newspapers:

One of Trevor-Roper’s Oxford pupils, Timothy Garton Ash, covering the press conference for the New Republic, described the performance as ‘rather like watching a Victorian gentleman trying to back peddle on a penny farthing’.

Someone asked the historian about the damage the affair had done to his reputation. Trevor-Roper took a meditative sip from a glass of water. ‘I suppose my personal reputation is linked to anything I say. I am prepared to express my opinion, and if I am wrong I am wrong, and if I am right I am right. I don’t worry about these things.’

Until Trevor-Roper’s contribution, the press conference had been going well for the Stern men. Now they sat, stony-faced, with arms folded, as the proceedings began to disintegrate around them. David Irving leapt to the microphone in the centre of the hall, incensed at Koch’s description of him as a man without any reputation. ‘I decided to play hardball,’ he wrote in his diary afterwards. ‘I am the British historian David Irving,’ he declared. ‘1 May not have a doctorate, or a professorship, or even the title “Lord”, but I believe I have a reputation in Germany nevertheless.’ He demanded to know how Hitler could have written of the July bomb plot in his diary, when Stern’s own film had just shown the dictator meeting Mussolini a few hours after the explosion, and having to shake hands with him with his left hand. He brandished his photocopies. ‘I know the collection from which these diaries come. It is an old collection, full of forgeries. I have some here.’ The television cameras swung away from the Stern dignatories and on to the gesticulating figure in the middle of the room. ‘Reporters stormed towards me,’ recalled Irving, ‘lights blazing, and microphones were thrust at me.’ A Japanese film crew was trampled in the rush and a fist fight broke out. Chairs and lights were scattered as chaos rippled across the crowded floor. From the platform, Koch shouted that Irving should ask questions, not make speeches. Irving’s microphone was switched off. But it was too late. Irving challenged Stern to say whether the diaries’ ink had been tested for its age. There was no answer. ‘Ink! ink!’ shouted some of the reporters. ‘Torpedo running,’ whispered Irving to one of the journalists sitting next to him as he sat down. The local NBC correspondent approached and asked if he would leave immediately to take part in a live link-up with the Today show, now on the air in America. Irving agreed. ‘All most exhilarating,’ he noted, ‘and I left a trail of chaos behind me.’

As Irving was going out of the Stern building, Gerhard Weinberg was coming in. The American academic had been unpacking in Bonn on Saturday, finishing off his interview with Steven Strasser of Newsweek, when Peter Koch telephoned him. Koch had pleaded with him to attend the press conference. Weinberg had told him that it was impossible – he had his first class in Bonn at 10 a.m. on Monday; he wouldn’t cancel it. (‘It took him some time to realize I wasn’t being difficult,’ said Weinberg. ‘I was just being me.’) But Koch was persistent: he would fix the travel arrangements to ensure that the professor did not miss his class. Accordingly, the instant his lecture finished, at 11 a.m. on Monday, a Stern driver rushed Weinberg from the university campus to the airport. From Bonn he was flown in the company’s private plane to Hamburg, then driven straight to the Stern office. At 12.30 p.m. he took his place on the platform.

Weinberg repaid Stern for its trouble and expense by raising fresh doubts about its scoop. ‘All the handwriting authentication I have seen’, he told the world’s press, ‘pertains to documents other than the diaries, except one page said to have been cut out of one diary. In other words, the memorandum from the American handwriting expert and the German police handwriting expert refer to Hitler’s handwriting, but not to Hitler’s handwriting in the diaries. In fact, they probably didn’t know the diaries existed when shown this evidence.’ It was ‘inappropriate’ to cite the analysis of one set of documents and apply it to another.

Koch stared at Weinberg in horror, but the professor had not finished yet. In his careful, pedantic manner, he continued: ‘One question has troubled me from the outset – that no knowledgeable expert on the Third Reich has been allowed to study the whole text to see if there are any textual absurdities. I mean, we’re not living on a South Sea island here, they wouldn’t have had to have gone outside the Hamburg city limits to find experts who would know. It is vital now that a group-of experts from all over the world should be given the chance to test these manuscripts.’ Koch cut in to say that, of course, experts would be given the opportunity to study the diaries. There were shouts of ‘When?’ and ‘Set a date.’ ‘When the journalistic evaluation has been completed,’ replied Koch.

The news conference, which had begun so well for Stern, broke up after more than two hours in complete disarray. It was not merely a public relations disaster; the failure to produce convincing evidence for the diaries’ authenticity also had legal implications. One of Stern’s lawyers, Herr Hagen, had warned Schulte-Hillen on Friday in a confidential memorandum that the magazine’s coverage was such that the company risked prosecution for disseminating Nazi propaganda. Stern’s defence, obviously, would be that it was furthering historical research. But that argument could collapse if historians regarded the diaries as being of dubious value. The State of Bavaria could use the uncertainty as a pretext to withdraw the publishing rights it had conceded through the agreement with the Bundesarchiv. Watching as the press conference disintegrated, Hagen decided that ‘only a quick and definitive judgement on the diaries’ authenticity could save the situation’. With the consent of the Stern management, he arranged for three of the diaries – the Hess special volume and books from 1934 and 1943 – to be handed over immediately to Dr Henke of the Bundesarchiv, who had attended the conference. Henke promised to deliver a judgement to Hagen swiftly and privately. The lawyer was relieved. The prospect of a court battle to try to establish that Stern was not sympathetic to the Nazis, with Gerd Heidemann possibly called as a witness, did not bear contemplating.

Trevor-Roper felt a sense of relief as he left the Stern building. His action might have come as ‘a painful surprise’ to his hosts, but he had done as his conscience dictated. After a light lunch with the three Sunday Times journalists, he caught an afternoon flight back to London.

Trevor-Roper hoped he might now begin putting the whole affair behind him. He was over-optimistic. One of the first things he saw on his arrival at Heathrow was a placard advertising the London Standard. Its front-page banner headline was ‘HITLER DIARIES: DACRE DOUBTS’. ‘My heart sank,’ he recalled.

At home in Cambridge the telephone had scarcely stopped ringing since his departure for Germany on Sunday. He found his wife deeply upset. Reporters were camped on his doorstep. His first act was to instruct the Porter’s Lodge not to put through any more calls. It was impossible to stroll across the road to Peterhouse without running the gauntlet of journalists in the street outside. Instead, he had to leave through his garden, shin a back wall, cut through a car park and sneak into the college a few yards further up the street. He had to keep up this performance for the rest of the week.

Pictures of the Stern press conference were carried on all the evening news bulletins and dominated the following morning’s papers. The stories all focused on Trevor-Roper: ‘I’M NOT SURE NOW CONFESSES HITLER DIARY PROFESSOR’, ‘HITLER: THE GREAT RETREAT’, ‘BOFFINS’ BATTLE ON NAZI “DIARIES”’, ‘FISTS FLY IN HITLER UPROAR’, ‘I’M NOT QUITE SO SURE, SAYS DACRE’. The Guardian wanted to know why he had decided to ‘risk his reputation by pronouncing the diaries genuine after only the most cursory examination?’ His former colleague at Oxford, A. L. Rowse, wrote an article headed ‘The trial of Lord Dacre’ describing him, at the age of nearly seventy, as ‘a young man in a hurry’. ‘I have always had reservations about him,’ said Rowse, ‘since he started writing at Oxford as my protégé.’ A limerick did the rounds of Cambridge senior common rooms:

The final insult came in a solicitor’s letter sent on behalf of Rachel, Lady Dacre. She was a distant cousin who had arranged for the ancient Barony of Dacre to be called out of abeyance in her favour in 1970; she had strongly objected to Trevor-Roper’s decision to use the same name when he was awarded a life peerage in 1979. Now she had her lawyers warn him always to use his full title – Lord Dacre of Glanton – so as not to embarrass her side of the family in the light of his action over the Hitler diaries.

‘Life’, said Trevor-Roper, subsequently reflecting on the period, ‘was torture.’

TWENTY-SEVEN

BUT WHAT WAS torture to one historian was food and drink to another. After his triumph at the press conference, David Irving spent the rest of Monday writing articles and giving interviews. ‘Adolf Hitler is still big box office, from Hamburg to Harlem,’ he wrote in the Daily Mail. He described Heidemann as ‘a typical nice guy. He does not believe that villains exist in this world; he is the kind of man who believes the claims of tyre advertisements.’ For the readers of Bild Zeitung he outlined seven reasons why the diaries had to be forgeries. He was inexhaustible. At 3.30a.m. on Tuesday morning, he was roused in his hotel room in Hamburg and rushed to a local television studio for a live link-up with the ABC programme Nightline. ‘Twenty million viewers again,’ recorded Irving gleefully in his diary. ‘Paid 700 marks in cash as requested.’ From the studio he was taken back to his hotel. He grabbed another two hours’ sleep and after breakfast heard from Der Spiegel that they were willing to pay him 20,000 marks for his photocopies and his story. ‘Very satisfactory,’ he noted. ‘That brings the total up to about £15,000 in three days.’ In the afternoon, he flew to Frankfurt to take part in a West German television debate on the diaries’ authenticity.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the full extent of Newsweek’s alleged perfidy was at last apparent. Monday had seen the airing of the magazine’s television commercials, none of which made any mention of doubts about whether the diaries might be genuine. Casual readers of the accompanying newspaper advertisements would also have had the impression that Newsweek had bought the diaries and that there was no question surrounding their authenticity:

The patient reader had to wade through to the fifth paragraph before coming to the throwaway question ‘Are they real?’ Maynard Parker, responsible for putting together the Newsweek treatment, was subsequently unrepentant about this aggressive salesmanship: ‘The advertising department had earlier deadlines than ours, but I do not feel that the ads misrepresent what is in the magazine.’

This was true. Although Newsweek gave some space to the views of the sceptics, the overwhelming impression left by its extensive coverage was that the diaries were genuine. The magazine actually ran more extracts than Stern – seventeen individual quotations, culled during the course of the syndication negotiations. Here was an ‘awestruck’ Hitler on Josef Stalin (‘How on earth does Stalin manage it?’); Hitler on Mussolini (‘He does not have the courtesy to face me’); on the Wehrmacht High Command (‘These old officers let themselves be hung with titles, decorations and property, but they don’t obey my orders’); and a ‘tender and sentimental’ Hitler on Eva Braun (‘Eva had to endure much suffering’). The Germans were predictably outraged. ‘That was a nice dirty trick,’ Peter Koch complained in an interview with Time. ‘We would like to sue. We were cheated and I guarantee Newsweek will regret what they did.’ There was a separate article on the forensic and handwriting examinations commissioned by Stern, there was ‘A Scholar’s Appraisal’ by Gerhard Weinberg and a piece on ‘Hitler and the Holocaust’. The magazine concluded with a prediction that the discovery of the diaries would force the world ‘to deal, once again, with the fact of Hitler himself’.

Newsweek’s behaviour over the Hitler diaries was widely criticized in the United States. An editorial in the New York Times entitled ‘Heil History’ poured particular scorn on the magazine’s assertion that the question of whether or not the diaries were genuine ‘almost doesn’t matter’:

Newsweek gave enormous play to the diaries, but the magazine was not alone in seeing it as the most important story of the moment: the New York Times itself ran it on its front page on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday; the mass-circulation tabloids gave it even greater space. By the fifth day the Hitler diaries affair had turned into a kind of giant soap opera – an international entertainment playing on almost every radio and television network and newspaper front page in the world. And what a story it was – Hitler’s bunker, old Nazis, a wartime plane crash, a trail across the Iron Curtain, millions of dollars, Swiss bank vaults, secret documents, a punch-up in front of the cameras, dramatic changes of heart, the Rewriting of History, Lord Dacre, David Irving, Rupert Murdoch, Gerd Heidemann….

It seemed that every academic who had ever written about Hitler was at some stage called upon to comment. Professor Donald Watt, the editor of the most recent English language edition of Mein Kampf, thought the diaries ‘odd’. John Kenneth Galbraith called them ‘impossible’. William L. Shirer said they were ‘outlandish… a hoax’. ‘I don’t think serious historians will touch these things for a long time,’ said J. P. Stern, the author of The Führer and the People. Professor Gordon A. Craig called it ‘one of the most sensational finds of the century’. ‘The question is of little importance,’ was A. J. P. Taylor’s characteristic comment. ‘Who cares about Hitler nowadays?’

There was a section of opinion which held that the material, even if genuine, should not be published. What had caught the popular imagination was the fact that these were Hitler’s diaries. A diary was something intimate and human. How could a figure who had caused so much suffering be allowed to speak in ordinary language, to justify what he did? It directly touched the point George Steiner had made: ‘You will think him a man and no longer believe what he did.’ The Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Immanuel Jakobovits, put this argument in a letter to The Times which was extensively quoted around the world, especially in West Germany:

Nineteen eighty-three marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazis’ rise to power. But although more than a generation had passed since the end of the war, the reaction aroused by the diaries showed how potent a symbol Hitler remained. It was not simply fresh proof of the accuracy of the old cliché about the fascination of evil; the comments also revealed how little attitudes towards Hitler had changed. In the communist world, the Hitler portrayed in the diaries was denounced as an agent of capitalism. Similarly, some conservatives in the West, in their comments on Stern’s Hitler, were blinded to any other consideration by their overwhelming mistrust of the Soviet Union. Both responses were a curious echo of those of the 1930s.

On the day of the Stern press conference, Professor Karl-Dietrich Bracher of Bonn University dismissed the diaries as forgeries and speculated as to who might be responsible. He noted that this was a Hitler who was supposed to have expressed admiration for the shrewdness of the arch-appeaser, Neville Chamberlain; who had allowed the British Army to escape at Dunkirk; who had sanctioned Hess’s peace mission in 1941. Perversely, it was Hitler’s enemies in the West, Churchill and Roosevelt, who were portrayed as the warmongers. Bracher suggested that the diaries were ‘an attempt to manipulate German history at a politically sensitive moment’. Perhaps the diaries were the work of a foreign power? The 1980s, after all, were ‘a time of intense debate about the deployment of new NATO missiles in West Germany’ – at such a moment ‘there was a growing audience for history unfavourable to the United States and Britain’. Werner Maser alleged the diaries were the work of an official ‘forgery factory’ in Potsdam in East Germany ‘where Hitler letters and Hitler notes are produced to earn hard currency for the East Germans’. This theme was developed in Britain in a radio interview by George Young, a former deputy director of MI6 and a noted cold warrior. Without any evidence – without even having seen the diaries – he alleged the affair might be part of ‘an East German official disinformation effort’:

At a press luncheon in New York on Tuesday, the American Ambassador to the United Nations, Mrs Jeanne Kirkpatrick, also detected in the diaries the hand of an Eastern intelligence agency. ‘I have no doubt’, she claimed, ‘that there are those in central Europe today who would, and indeed do, attempt to sow distrust between the United States and its German friends.’

The communists nurtured suspicions of their own. The Soviet Union lost 20 million dead in Hitler’s war; the memory was still a decisive influence on Russia’s foreign policy. Moscow had not officially confirmed Hitler’s death until 1968 and remained acutely sensitive to what it saw as any attempt to rehabilitate the Nazis. On Monday, Professor Sergei Tikhvinski, a leading Russian historian and a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, denounced the Hitler diaries as ‘a most obvious act of political sabotage’. At 6.30 on Wednesday evening, Soviet television described the diaries’ publication as ‘an attempt to whitewash the chief fascist criminal’. Ninety minutes later, Radio Moscow International broadcast a similar opinion to its listeners in France, where Paris Match had just begun its serialization:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was the Observer.

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

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

TWENTY-EIGHT

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

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

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

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

Frank Giles presided over this rearguard action with his customary diffluence. When the Sunday Times journalists in London expressed their concern about the affair and asked him to address a union meeting, he turned them down. He told them he was going away on holiday to Corfu. ‘Even if I were here,’ he added, ‘I must tell you that I do not think that this matter is appropriate for the chapel.’ Publication of the diaries would go ahead in his absence, he informed the editorial conference, and would stop only if the diaries were conclusively proved to be forgeries.

On Sunday, the paper appeared with a somewhat more muted front page than it had presented the previous week:

The editor of the Sunday Times then left the country.

David Irving spent the day sending out invoices to newspapers and magazines, billing them for his work attacking the diaries’ authenticity. Shortly before noon, a reporter from the Daily Express rang to ask if it was true that he was suing the Sunday Times for failing to pay him his commission for putting them on to the Hitler diaries. ‘Not suing,’ replied Irving, ‘just asking.’ He then told him to ‘hold on to his hat’ and gave him what he modestly described as ‘the story of the day’: that he now believed the diaries were genuine.

The Express ran the story in its early editions, and at 11 p.m. a sub-editor from The Times rang to ask if the report in the Express was correct. Irving said it was.

The Times immediately put it on its front page.

The following morning, as The Times in Britain announced Irving’s belief that the diaries were genuine, Der Spiegel appeared in Germany carrying his assertion that they were fakes. ‘Hitler’s Diary: Find or Forgery?’ was the title on the magazine’s cover; the contents left little doubt of Der Spiegel’s opinion as to the correct answer. It was a devastating assault, attacking the Stern scoop for ‘bad German, bad punctuation and banality’. Der Spiegel’s reporters had tracked down the SS man who discovered the Boernersdorf crash and using his testimony they picked Heidemann’s research apart. The Junkers’ fuselage had been made of metal, not canvas, as Stern had claimed; the plane had ploughed straight into the ground, not ended up on its roof; gold bars, pistols and ammunition had been salvaged, but no papers. In contrast to the carefully cultivated image of ‘the Bloodhound’ which Stern’s public relations department had built up of Heidemann, the reporter was depicted as an obsessive friend of old Nazis, whose discovery had been inadequately checked and blown up into an international sensation. ‘If it all goes wrong,’ Peter Koch was quoted as saying, ‘the editors will charter Heidemann’s boat, sail it to Helgoland and pull out the plugs.’ Much of the information had been provided by Irving and the centrepiece of the attack was a reproduction of a page from his fake diary.

Der Spiegel’s attack was bad enough news for one day, but worse was to come when the company’s lawyer, Dr Hagen, arrived at the Bundesarchiv.

Josef Henke had handed the three diary volumes given to him after the Stern press conference to the Federal Institute for Forensic Investigation in Berlin. On Monday, he was able to give Hagen the scientists’ preliminary findings. All three volumes contained traces of polyamid 6, a synthetic textile invented in 1938 but not manufactured in bulk until 1943. The binding of the Hess special volume – supposedly written in 1941 – included polyester which had not been made until 1953. Ultraviolet light had also shown up fluorescent material in the paper. These results had yet to be confirmed in writing, said Henke, but Stern’s scoop was beginning to look extremely dubious. In addition, although the archive’s researchers had had time for only a brief check of the diaries’ written content, they had already found a couple of textual errors: two laws relating to agriculture and student organizations were not passed on the dates given in the diaries.

Hagen hurried back to Hamburg to pass on this information.

At about 6 p.m. Schulte-Hillen convened a crisis meeting in his office on the ninth floor of the Stern building. Wilfried Sorge did not attend (he was on holiday in Italy), nor did Koch, who was in the United States preparing his media campaign, but all the other leading figures in the affair were present: Jan Hensmann, Felix Schmidt, Rolf Gillhausen, Henri Nannen, Gerd Heidemann and Thomas Walde.

As Hagen reported the Bundesarchiv’s findings an atmosphere of barely suppressed panic spread through the room. Only Heidemann seemed unmoved, sitting wrapped in his own private world as the others began shouting at him. Felix Schmidt was enraged by his calmness. How could he sit there, he demanded, and act as if none of this concerned him? It was imperative that he reveal the name of his source; otherwise, publication of the diaries should be stopped. Heidemann remained silent. ‘You either belong in a madhouse or a prison,’ Nannen told him. He added that in his opinion, the magazine’s editors could not be allowed ‘to dangle like this any longer’.

Schulte-Hillen now spoke up, and for the first time he addressed Heidemann sharply: he wanted to speak to the reporter alone – immediately. The two men left the room.

Before the emergency meeting began, the managing director had been approached in private by Felix Schmidt who had suggested that Heidemann might be keeping the identity of his supplier secret because he had stolen some of the money. As far as Schmidt was concerned, that no longer mattered: the important thing was to find out whether the diaries were genuine. He had pleaded with Schulte-Hillen to try once more to persuade Heidemann to tell him the whole story, if necessary by promising him ‘that if he has pocketed some of the money, it will not be held against him’.

In another office, away from the others, Schulte-Hillen confronted Heidemann. ‘I asked him to tell me the whole story,’ he recalled, ‘leaving nothing out.’ Heidemann, reluctantly, agreed. According to Schulte-Hillen:

At last, Heidemann was telling Schulte-Hillen the truth – or, at least, the truth as he had been given it by Kujau. ‘General Fischer’ had been to see the old man and obtained the names of peasants in the Boernersdorf area who had hidden material salvaged from the plane crash. The documents turned out to be the Hitler diaries. The general had kept them hidden for some years, before offering them for sale through his brother in south Germany. Heidemann said that at least three other communist generals were involved in smuggling them out of the East, including one from the Ministry of State Security; he added that he knew their names. ‘I asked him to tell me them,’ recalled Schulte-Hillen. ‘He said he would have to check in his archive, then he could show me them in writing.’

Heidemann disappeared for two hours and returned at about 11 p.m. His ‘evidence’ turned out to be two letters addressed to an East German general, whose name had been blacked out. Schulte-Hillen was disappointed. ‘What am I supposed to make of this?’ he asked. The letters proved nothing. Heidemann said he was sorry, but ‘the originals were in a safe place to which he had no access’.

Schulte-Hillen reported back to the group assembled in his office. The story of the diaries’ discovery, as Heidemann had explained it, seemed plausible to him. But he still did not have a full account, and given Heidemann’s insistence that it was a matter of life and death for people in East Germany, he did not feel able to put any more pressure on the reporter.

What has frequently – and accurately – been described as a ‘bunker mentality’ now descended on the headquarters of Stern. Surrounded by enemies, cut off from reality, the leaders of the magazine began deploying phantom divisions in a frantic attempt to stave off the impending disaster.

Surely they could somehow prove that paper whitener had been in use before the war? Henri Nannen spent the night reading through chemistry books. In an old dictionary he came across a pre-war entry for a substance called ‘blankit’. Wolf Thieme spoke to a contact of his in the Bayer chemical company who told him that the paper whitener ‘blankophor’ might have been used on an experimental basis in the 1930s. Early on Tuesday morning, Hans Shuh, the head of Stern’s business section, was summoned to Nannen’s office and instructed to write a detailed article on the history of the paper industry. Meanwhile, a statement, resonant with hollow bravado, was issued to the news agencies, signed jointly by Nannen, Schmidt and Schulte-Hillen:

Heidemann and Schmidt promptly withdrew from a discussion programme on Austrian television which they were scheduled to take part in that night.

As a first step in this new process of verification, the Bundesarchiv was informed that more diaries would be made available for a full textual and chemical analysis. Only one condition was attached: if the diaries proved to be forgeries, Stern was to be informed well in advance of any public announcement – at least the magazine would be able to run the story of its own folly as an exclusive.

On Wednesday 4 May accompanied by a company manager and a lawyer, Leo Pesch arrived in Zurich and removed fifteen volumes of the Hitler diaries from the bank vault. The group split up. The manager went direct to Koblenz to hand over four books to the Bundesarchiv for a check on the contents. Pesch and the lawyer drove to the Swiss forensic laboratories in St Gallen and gave the scientists eleven diaries for microscopic examination.

On the same day, from Hamburg, Gerd Heidemann set off on a two-day trip to Bavaria. He planned to visit a former employee of the Berghof now living in an old people’s home near Berchtesgaden – she would swear, he was sure, to having seen Hitler write a diary. He told Walde that he would also stop off at an old printing works in Miesbach, south of Munich. The factory had at one time been run by the SS and he was certain he could obtain enough samples of pre-war paper to prove that whitener had been in use in the 1930s. And then there was Hitler’s chauffeur’s girlfriend – she would swear that Erich Kempka had told her before he died that Hitler used to write notes in the back of his Mercedes.

They must all trust him, said Heidemann. Everything would be fine.

In America, Peter Koch, supported by Wolf Hess, had embarked on what Newsweek described as a ‘media blitz’, with invitations to appear on Good Morning America, The CBS Morning News, The Today Show and Nightline. He gave a long interview to the Washington Post whose reporters were impressed by the confidence of this ‘balding, trim man, sunburned from an outing at Jones beach over the weekend’. He was in combative mood. ‘I expected the uproar,’ he told another group of journalists, ‘and expected that many incompetent people would denounce the diaries as fakes. This is because every other publishing house will envy our story and every historian will envy us.’

One man following Koch’s publicity tour with interest was Kenneth Rendell, a forty-year-old handwriting expert based in Boston. Rendell had been retained by Newsweek when the magazine was bidding for the diaries at the beginning of April. ‘Anticipating my imminent departure for Zurich,’ Rendell recalled, ‘I organized about a hundred samples of authentic Hitler writing, researched scientific tests that might date the material and prepared myself for a sizeable challenge.’ Then, to his disappointment, the deal with Newsweek had fallen through, and he had been forced to watch the affair unfold from America. Koch’s visit, bearing diaries from 1932 and 1945, gave him an opportunity to have a look at the material at first hand.

Rendell caught up with Koch at the Manhattan studios of CBS at breakfast time on Wednesday, as Koch was preparing for his appearance on the Morning News. Koch knew of Rendell’s reputation and had no objections to letting him look at the diaries. Repeatedly interrupted by technicians, Rendell began his examination on the studio floor. ‘Even at first glance,’ he wrote later, ‘everything looked wrong.’ The paper was of poor quality, the ink looked modern, none of the writing was blotted (‘a sloppiness I didn’t expect from Hitler’), and the signatures seemed to him to be ‘terrible renditions’. His immediate reaction was that both diaries were forged – the 1945 volume especially was a ‘fiasco’.

At the end of the broadcast, Koch invited the American expert to continue his analysis in Stern’s New York office that afternoon. Rendell arrived with an assistant, an 80-power microscope and a dossier of genuine Hitler writing. The microscope showed ‘no examples of tracing or other glaring technical errors’, so Rendell tried a different technique. At his request, the Stern staff photocopied the twenty-two pages of the 1932 diary. ‘We began,’ he recalled, ‘the tedious process of snipping out all of the capital letters and pasting them on sheets of paper. In all we assembled separate collections of twenty-one letters, and an additional assortment of numbers. We compared the diary characters with authentic characters we had pasted up earlier….’

At 9 p.m., Rendell broke off his examination for the night. ‘It doesn’t look good,’ he warned Koch.

Across the Atlantic, in Koblenz, the President of the Bundesarchiv, Hans Booms, had been given four of the diaries by the Stern lawyer. He took them home with him to read. He was shocked by the content, but not in the way he had expected: it was indescribably dull. At midnight he turned to his wife. ‘I don’t care whether they are real or forged,’ he told her. ‘They are so boring, so totally meaningless, it hardly makes any difference.’

TWENTY-NINE

THE NEXT MORNING, 5 May, Stern appeared carrying the second instalment of its serialization of the diaries. The magazine, which had reverted to its normal habit of publishing on Thursday, devoted its cover and thirty-four inside pages to the story of Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland. Hitler was quoted as describing the Duke of Windsor in an entry for 1937 as ‘a glowing National Socialist’; Winston Churchill was dismissed in 1939 as ‘the greatest poisoner in London’. The issue was also notable for a ranting editorial by Peter Koch, written before he left for America, entitled ‘the Falsifiers’, smearing Stern’s critics as part of an international conspiracy founded upon envy. Irving and Maser were historians without reputations to lose; so too, now, was Eberhard Jaeckel for daring to criticize the magazine’s scoop. As for Trevor-Roper, Koch hinted that he had changed his mind partly because of his wartime connection with British intelligence. They were all contemptible. Stern welcomed the abuse of such people. ‘More enemies,’ wrote Koch, ‘more honour.’

It was a masterpiece of mistiming, for at that moment, disaster was racing towards Stern from at least five different directions: from Koblenz, where Booms had handed over the diaries to a team of scholars to check for errors; from the forensic laboratories in Berlin which had taken samples of material from three of the diaries; from the police laboratories in Wiesbaden, whose scientists had now been handed those three volumes and were running their own tests; from the forensic institute in St Gallen; and from New York, where, at 10 a.m., Kenneth Rendell had resumed his handwriting investigation.

Within three hours, Rendell was in a position to prove what he had suspected the moment he saw the diaries. The capital letters E, H and K in the 1932. volume had striking dissimilarities to the same letters in authentic examples of Hitler’s writing. ‘Koch was stunned when he saw my evidence laid out on a conference table,’ recalled Rendell. ‘This type of systematic analysis was unimpeachable.’ He wanted to know how the American could have concluded they were fakes so quickly, when three other handwriting experts had been convinced the diaries were genuine. ‘He had the impression’, said Rendell, ‘that all of the comparison documents provided by his magazine had come from the German Federal Archives. But I showed him that a careful reading of the authentication reports indicated that most examples were from the dossier of Stern and its reporter Gerd Heidemann.’

Rendell – who was reportedly paid a retainer of $8000 by Newsweek – wanted to tell Maynard Parker of his findings at once. Koch pleaded with him to keep quiet for the time being; Stern would fly him to Europe and give him the opportunity to study the entire archive if he would deal with them exclusively. Rendell agreed.

At 1.30 p.m. New York time (7.30 p.m. in Hamburg), Koch telephoned Schulte-Hillen.

The managing director of Gruner and Jahr had taken to his bed with a fever. ‘Rendell thinks the diaries are forged,’ said Koch when he eventually tracked him down. Groggily, Schulte-Hillen agreed with his suggestion that they should invite Rendell to Hamburg to inspect the diaries. But he refused to panic: he would wait, he told Koch, for the Bundesarchiv’s verdict which Stern had been told would be given to them the next day. Besides, Rendell had spent only a few hours with the material; Frei-Sulzer, Hilton and Huebner had been allowed weeks and they had all been certain it was genuine.

Schulte-Hillen was still feeling confident when Manfred Fischer paid him a visit at home later that evening. Fischer had left Bertelsmann the previous November: despite Reinhard Mohn’s excitement at the purchase of the Hitler diaries, the relationship between the two men had not worked smoothly. Nevertheless, Fischer had continued to maintain an interest in the project he had started in 1981. But over the past week, his pride had turned to dismay. The Hitler diaries could turn out to be the ‘biggest deception of the century’, he warned his successor. ‘I fear we have allowed ourselves to be led by the nose.’

Schulte-Hillen shook his head. He was sure Fischer was being pessimistic. Anyway, they would both know for certain tomorrow.

The events which would eventually turn Friday 6 May 1983 into ‘Black Friday’ as far as the participants in the diaries affair were concerned began at 11 a.m. when the two Stern lawyers, Ruppert and Hagen, turned up at the Bundesarchiv to see Hans Booms.

Booms now had full reports from the scientists at Wiesbaden and Berlin. Reduced to its basic components, Stern’s great scoop had proved to be a shoddy forgery. The paper was a poor quality mixture of coniferous wood, grass and foliage, laced with a chemical paper whitener which had not existed before 1955. The binding of the books also contained whitener. The red threads attached to the seals on the covers contained viscose and polyester. The labels stuck on the front and supposedly signed by Bormann and Hess had all been typed on the same machine. The typewriter came from the correct period – it was an Adler Klein II, manufactured between 1925 and 1934 – but although an interval of seven years supposedly separated the labels attached to the 1934 diary and the Hess special volume of 1941, there was no evidence of wear in the typeface: the labels had been written in quick succession. The four different varieties of ink used in the books were of a type commonly found in West German artists’ shops; they did not match any of the inks known to have been widely used during the war. And by measuring the evaporation of chloride from the ink, the scientists established that the Hess volume had been written within the last two years, whilst the writing in the 1943 diary was less than twelve months’ old.

Booms told all this to Hagen and Ruppert. They were, he recalled, ‘deeply shocked’ and ‘shattered’: ‘I can still hear their arguments: “Heidemann is certain. He absolutely swears on it. As far as he’s concerned, it’s quite impossible that we could be dealing with a forgery….”’

But there could be no doubt. In addition to the forensic evidence, the Bundesarchiv had discovered a number of textual errors: for example, a law passed on 19 January 1933 was entered in the diary under 19 January 1934. It did not take the archivists long to discover the forger’s main source: the two-volume edition of Hitler’s Speeches and Proclamations, compiled by Max Domarus. ‘It became apparent to us’, said Booms later, ‘that if there was nothing in Domarus for a particular day, then Hitler didn’t write anything in his diary that night either. When Domarus did include something, then Hitler wrote it down. And when an occasional mistake crept into Domarus, Hitler repeated the same error.’ One such mistake was an entry by ‘Hitler’ recording that he had received a telegram from General Ritter von Epp congratulating him on the fiftieth anniversary of his joining the army; in reality, the telegram was from Hitler to von Epp. Kujau had copied the error word-for-word into the diary.

Throughout the half-hour conversation, Booms was repeatedly interrupted by telephone calls from Berlin, Wiesbaden and Bonn. Suddenly, Hagen realized what was happening: the two forensic laboratories, both official organizations, were reporting direct to the Federal Government. Booms confirmed that this was the case. But what about the guarantee of confidentiality? That no longer applied, answered Booms. The affair was now ‘a ministerial matter’. There would be a government news conference to announce that the diaries were fakes at noon.

The two Stern lawyers scrambled to a telephone to alert Hamburg to what was about to happen. They reached Jan Hensmann. Hardly anyone seemed to be around. Hensmann rang Schulte-Hillen who left his sick bed immediately to come in. Hensmann tried to find Nannen.

Nannen was at Hamburg airport, preparing to fly to Rome for a ceremony to open Stern’s new Italian office. A stewardess told him he was wanted urgently on the telephone.

‘It’s all a forgery,’ wailed Hensmann.

Nannen asked how he could be certain. The Bundesarchiv, said Hensmann. They were going to announce it in less than thirty minutes.

The sixty-nine-year-old publisher dropped the telephone, sprinted through the terminal, abandoned his luggage and his car, and jumped into a taxi. At the office, he dictated a statement acknowledging the Bundesarchiv’s findings and promising a full investigation. The message was rushed to a telex machine but it arrived just five minutes too late to beat the official announcement.

The news that the diaries were forgeries had been whispered to the West German Minister of the Interior, Friedrich Zimmermann, during a debate in the Federal parliament. Broad smiles appeared as the news spread along the Government bench. Zimmermann told the Chancellor, Helmut Kohl. ‘Now that is something,’ laughed Kohl. Stern was an old enemy of the Christian Democrats: the discomfiture of Nannen and the rest of ‘the Hamburg set’, as Kohl dismissively called them, was a pleasant prospect to brighten the Government’s day. Zimmermann hurried out of the Chamber to brief the press.

Zimmermann’s determination to announce the news immediately was not motivated solely by party considerations. The legacy of Adolf Hitler was too important to be bandied about as Stern had done. Any West German government would have been sensitive about the diaries; the fact that the scandal had blown up on the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler’s accession to power, at a time of intense interest in the Nazis, made the matter especially delicate. There was no question of the Interior Ministry permitting the Bundesarchiv to suppress the news that the diaries were forged while Stern tried to wriggle off the hook. The whole business was out of hand. It could no longer be left to a collection of scoop-happy journalists.

‘On the basis of an analysis of the contents and after a forensic examination, the Federal Archive is convinced that the documents do not come from Hitler’s hand but were produced after the war,’ Zimmermann told reporters. ‘I regret most deeply that this analysis was not undertaken by Stern before publication.’ A press conference giving more details would be held shortly by the Bundesarchiv.

A few minutes later, the German Press Agency put out a rush statement: ‘HITLER DIARIES ARE POST-WAR.’ It was two weeks, literally to the hour, since the same agency had issued the announcement of Stern’s scoop.

In the Sunday Times offices in London there had been, according to the paper’s own account, ‘an air of considerable elation’ all morning. Stern had finally agreed to lend the newspaper two volumes of the diaries to enable it to carry out its own forensic tests. A Stern courier had flown in from Hamburg and handed them personally to Rupert Murdoch. Someone suggested to Murdoch that they should have the books photocopied. Murdoch would not allow it. He had given his word, he said, that they would be used only for scientific evaluation.

The atmosphere of self-congratulation was punctured abruptly at noon. Peter Hess, the publishing director of Gruner and Jahr, rang through from Germany with the news that the diaries were forgeries. ‘It’s staggering, shattering,’ he said, stammering out his apologies. ‘We still just can’t believe it.’

Murdoch told his journalists to photocopy the diaries.

Arthur Brittenden issued a statement to Associated Press: ‘The Sunday Times accepts the report of the German archivists that the volumes they have examined contain materials that demonstrate the diaries are not authentic. In view of this, the Sunday Times will not go ahead with publication.’ News International announced it would be seeking an immediate repayment of the $200,000 it had paid as a first instalment for the diaries.

In Hamburg a debate was underway as to what Stern should do next. Astonishingly, Henri Nannen thought the magazine should cut out all the references drawn from the Hitler diaries and continue with its series about Rudolf Hess: it was still an interesting piece of journalism in his opinion. The others were horrified. The magazine would be torn apart by its critics if it tried to carry on as if nothing had happened. Nannen was forced to back down.

At the Itzehoe printing works, thirty miles north-east of Hamburg, the third issue of Stern to be built around the Hitler diaries was already being printed. By the time the arguments on the editorial floor had ended and the order had been given to stop the presses, 160,000 copies of the inside pages and 260,000 covers had already been printed. An additional 70,000 magazines were actually finished and in lorries on their way to the distributors; they were recalled only after frantic telephone calls. Every trace of the issue was pulped, losing Stern a quarter of a million marks in the process. The cover picture of Rudolf Hess was replaced by a photograph of a new-born baby.

At 2.30 p.m. Felix Schmidt addressed a hastily convened editorial conference. Everyone had to set to work to remake the next issue, he told them. He refused to answer detailed questions. Confused and angry, the Stern departmental chiefs drifted away. At 5 p.m. the entire staff held a meeting and elected a committee to negotiate a new code of conduct with the management.

In Cambridge, Hugh Trevor-Roper’s telephone was once again ringing incessantly. ‘I just don’t want to say anything about it,’ he told one reporter. ‘I think I should only comment to Times Newspapers.’

In America, Leslie Hinton, the associate editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Boston Globe, confirmed that the paper had been on the point of running extracts from the Hitler diaries. ‘We have suspended our plans to publish,’ he said in a statement to UPI, ‘in view of what the German archivists said today.’

David Irving was in Düsseldorf on another speaking tour for the DVU when he heard the news from his secretary in London. It was a disastrous turn of events. He hastily dictated a statement for the press accepting the Bundesarchiv’s ruling but drawing attention to the fact that he was the first person to declare the diaries fakes. (‘Yes,’ said a reporter from The Times when this was read out to him, ‘and the last person to declare them authentic.’) NBC sent a television crew to interview him after his speech to an audience of right-wing extremists in the nearby town of Neuss. ‘They questioned whom I was speaking to,’ Irving recorded in his diary, ‘but I ducked the issue. As I was sitting down for the interview the whole audience streamed past behind the cameraman, several of the nuttier of them wearing the uniform and badges of the Vikinger Jugend [a fanatical sect of young neo-Nazis]. Fortunately NBC did not observe them.’

For Konrad Kujau, the newsflash announcing that the diaries were forgeries was the signal to pack up and leave Stuttgart as quickly as possible. Things had already started becoming uncomfortable for him. Stefan Aust, the editor of Panorama, West German television’s leading current affairs programme, had managed to reconstruct the trail back from David Irving through August Priesack to Fritz Stiefel. Working from a clue dropped by Priesack that the supplier of the diaries was apparently a dealer in militaria named Fischer, Aust had begun trailing round every antiques shop in Stuttgart until someone remembered a Herr Fischer who had kept a shop in Aspergstrasse. Neighbours there told Aust that Fischer had moved to Schreiberstrasse. Aust had arrived on Thursday to find the shop deserted. He had driven straight round to see Fritz Stiefel to confront him with this information, and whilst there had actually spoken to Kujau on the telephone. ‘Tell me where you are,’ insisted Aust, ‘and I’ll come over.’ Kujau had managed to stall him. But now that the diaries had been exposed, it was obviously going to be only a matter of time before a dozen other journalists followed Aust’s path to Stuttgart.

According to Maria Modritsch, her lover turned up on her doorstep at 7 p.m. on Friday, accompanied by Edith Lieblang. ‘There was a conversation between us,’ recalled Maria. ‘Conny told Edith that I was cleaning for him.’ Kujau insisted that all three of them leave Stuttgart immediately. Both women knew too much for him to be able to leave them behind. ‘Conny wanted to go to the Black Forest,’ said Maria, ‘but then he took up my suggestion that we go to Austria.’

Shortly afterwards, the forger, his common-law wife and his mistress all clambered into a car, and this bizarre ménage à trois headed off to the Austrian border.

Gerd Heidemann had been incommunicado all day, driving around the countryside between Berchtesgaden and Munich trying to find evidence to shore up his crumbling scoop. The Stern executives were itching to get their hands on him. So too was Gina, who was having to field telephone calls from their apartment in the Elbchaussee. She refused to believe what the Bundesarchiv was saying. ‘I am not surprised,’ she told Gitta Sereny. ‘We expected something like this.’ Was she saying the diaries were genuine? ‘Yes.’ Those who said the diaries were fakes, she insisted to a reporter from the New York Times, were trying to ‘suppress the truth’. ‘It’s terrible, but no matter what happens, we will always believe in the diaries…. It would have been a joy to tell the world about the Führer. We have received letters and telegrams above all from young people who are overjoyed finally to learn the truth.’ Between conversations with journalists, Gina managed to reach the couple’s friend, Heinrich Hoffmann, the son of Hitler’s photographer, who was also in Bavaria, undergoing treatment in a private clinic. Did he know where her husband was? Hoffmann said he did not. It was an emergency, said Gina, Gerd must ring her immediately. ‘Shortly afterwards,’ recalled Hoffmann, ‘Heidemann rang.’

According to Heidemann’s own account, he had heard the news of Zimmermann’s announcement towards the end of the day on the car radio. He was ‘completely shattered’. At 8 p.m. he rang the Stern office, and was briskly informed that they had been trying to find him all day and that a private plane was waiting on the tarmac at Munich to bring him straight to Hamburg.

The plane touched down shortly after 11 p.m. A Stern representative was waiting for Heidemann at the airport with a car to take him to the office. Gina was also there. At first she had been told by Stern to keep away, but she was determined to meet her husband. Stern had relented, but its official had instructions to make sure the couple did not try to rehearse a story together. ‘All Gerd could say to me in the car’, recalled Gina, ‘was: “I know they are genuine. I know.” He looked shaken to the core.’

Heidemann faced a grim reception committee in the managing director’s office: Henri Nannen, Felix Schmidt, Rolf Gillhausen and Gerd Schulte-Hillen had been waiting for him all evening. ‘We are going to uncover the full story of this forgery and lay it before our readers,’ Nannen had promised in an interview on West German television that night. ‘We have reason to be ashamed.’ No one was in any mood to listen to excuses. ‘What do you have to say?’ demanded Schulte-Hillen.

Heidemann said he was sure that most of the diaries were genuine. He needed more time. He wanted to meet a contact in East Berlin.

Schmidt interrupted him. ‘Stop playing around. I’m sick of this performance. Let’s get down to the real issues.’

Very well, said Heidemann. He opened his briefcase and placed a cassette recorder on the table. He switched it on and played his interrogators a recording of a fifteen-minute telephone conversation he had had from Munich with Medard Klapper. Klapper promised the reporter that Martin Bormann was now willing to fly over from South America to authenticate the diaries – he was an old man, he no longer feared prosecution, he would come and help Heidemann out of his predicament. Heidemann switched off the tape. The four Stern officials looked at one another. After a while, Schulte-Hillen spoke. ‘How is Bormann proposing to get here?’ he inquired.

‘In a Lear jet,’ said Heidemann.

There were angry and frustrated shouts from around the table. Felix Schmidt pointed out that a Lear jet did not have the range to cross the Atlantic: it would fall into the sea in mid-flight.

The atmosphere became progressively more unpleasant as Heidemann still refused to name his source. ‘Lives are in danger,’ he insisted. ‘Nonsense,’ said Schmidt. ‘We’re the ones in danger.’ Heidemann replied that his supplier had returned to East Germany to try to obtain the original score of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, one of Adolf Hitler’s most treasured possessions which had also been on the Boernersdorf plane.

It was after midnight. Schulte-Hillen was unwell and Henri Nannen was beginning to fall asleep. The four senior Stern men decided to get some rest and Heidemann was taken downstairs to Felix Schmidt’s office to face a fresh set of examiners: Thomas Walde, Wolfe Thieme and another Stern journalist, Michael Seufert. This session lasted until dawn.

Meanwhile, in another office, Gina Heidemann was also being subjected to some detailed questioning. Heidemann had once described driving her car over to East Germany to carry out one of the dramatic exchanges of money for diaries on the Berlin autobahn; had she been with him? Gina said she had, an answer which did not help Heidemann’s credibility as at that moment he was denying that his wife had ever accompanied him. At 2.45 a.m., Gina telephoned Gitta Sereny at the Four Seasons Hotel. Sereny had flown over to cover the story of the forgery for the Sunday Times. ‘They’ve got Gerd upstairs,’ whispered Gina. ‘They are putting him through the mangle.’ By the time she emerged from the Stern building shortly after 3 a.m. she was in a pitiful state. She went to Sereny’s hotel. ‘Her hair’, wrote the reporter, ‘usually neat and attractive, was tangled, and she looked as if she was in an advanced state of shock. She was trembling and crying.’ Did she now believe the diaries were fakes? ‘I don’t know what to think,’ she replied. ‘Gerd always believed and swore they were genuine.’ Who was the supplier? ‘That’s what they want to know. That’s what they are asking him up there.’

As light began to break over Hamburg, Heidemann’s defiance at last started to wilt. He was forced to accept that journalists from rival organizations would soon be swarming over Stuttgart. ‘We simply cannot cling to the principle of protecting our informants any longer,’ said Walde. At 5 a.m., Heidemann handed over ‘Herr Fischer’s’ home telephone number. ‘He used to live in Ditzingen,’ said Heidemann, but he’d moved a year ago. ‘I said to him: “Give me your new address”, but he refused to give it to me so we always spoke on the telephone.’ This was the break Stern needed. At 5 a.m., Seufert called the head of the magazine’s Frankfurt office and told him to try to trace the owner of the number.

Was it possible, someone asked, that ‘Herr Fischer’ had forged everything?

‘He can’t have forged it,’ replied Heidemann. ‘He’s far too primitive.’

THIRTY

STERN WAS GIVEN a predictable savaging in the West German press the following day. One paper denounced the magazine for its ‘megalomania’ in claiming it would rewrite the history of the Nazi era, ‘as if this history had not already been written by the sixty million victims of the Second World War’. Another called the scoop ‘a stinking bubble from the brown swamp’. An editorial in Die Welt summed up what seemed to be the mood of the entire country:

It was clear that some heads from within Stern would have to be offered up to appease public opinion; the only question was – whose heads should they be?

Early on Saturday morning, Schulte-Hillen telephoned Reinhard Mohn and submitted his resignation. Mohn refused it. ‘You do not carry the main responsibility,’ he told him. Throughout the morning, members of the boards of Gruner and Jahr and Bertelsmann telephoned Schulte-Hillen to pledge their support. By lunchtime there was a clear consensus that the editors rather than management should face the consequences of the disaster. Koch arrived back from New York to find Nannen, Schulte-Hillen, Gillhausen and Schmidt locked in conference in Nannen’s office, passing the poisoned chalice from one to another. Schulte-Hillen had the backing of Mohn, therefore he was excused. Nannen was already in semi-retirement. Gillhausen was responsible only for the design of the magazine…. Koch quickly realized that it was he and Schmidt who were expected to drink. At z p.m., a lawyer was called in to represent them, as the meeting turned from a general discussion into a specific negotiation over severance pay.

It seems grossly unfair that Koch and Schmidt – who had never trusted Heidemann and who might, indeed, have dismissed him in 1981 – were made to carry the responsibility for the collapse of what had always been the management’s scoop. Certainly, the two editors felt this to be the case, and their threats to take the issue to an industrial tribunal brought each of them enormous financial compensation: 3.5 million marks (more than $1 million) each, pre-tax, according to the Stern Report, conditional on a pledge of secrecy that they would not reveal the story of how the diaries affair had been handled within the company.

In London, the two diary volumes handed over to the Sunday Times had quickly been confirmed as forgeries. Dr Julius Grant, the forensic scientist who had established that the Mussolini diaries were forgeries, took only five hours to locate traces of post-war whitener in the paper. Norman Stone, one of Hitler’s most recent biographers and one of the few scholars in Britain who could read the outdated German script, rapidly concluded that the diaries were fakes. There were inconsistencies and misspellings; above all, the diaries were full of trivia and absurd repetitions. On 30 January 1933, the day upon which Hitler assumed power, the diarist had recorded:

‘This reads almost like a “Charlie Chaplin” Hitler,’ wrote Stone. The Sunday Times itself admitted that nothing ‘had prepared us for such an anticlimax’.

In Frank Giles’s absence, it fell to his deputy, Brian MacArthur, somehow to frame an explanation for the behaviour of the newspaper, whose front page headlines had changed in two weeks from ‘World Exclusive: The secrets of Hitler’s war’ to ‘The Hitler Diaries: the hunt for the forger’. The statement which eventually appeared probably earned the paper more derision than anything else it had done in the past two weeks. ‘Serious journalism’, it began, ‘is a high-risk enterprise.’ It went on:

The statement ended:

This remarkable piece of self-justification masquerading as apology was subsequently attacked by a number of writers. The Hitler diaries affair was not an example of ‘serious journalism’, but of cheque-book journalism, pure and simple. And, as has become clear since, a ‘not-proven verdict’ would probably have led the Sunday Times to continue serialization: Murdoch’s 55–45 formula required the balance of probability to tilt decisively against authenticity. To add to the paper’s embarrassment, its colour supplement had already been distributed containing a twelve-page pictorial guide to Hitler’s career: it was too late to recall it.

‘What has happened to the Sunday Times?’ asked an article in the New York Times, commenting on this front page statement. ‘Rupert Murdoch has, for one thing, with his talent for turning what he touches into dross.’ Murdoch himself has been quoted as making three comments on the affair:

‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’

‘After all, we are in the entertainment business.’

‘Circulation went up and it stayed up. We didn’t lose money or anything like that.’

The last statement is certainly true. Stern returned to News International all the money it paid for the diaries, and the Sunday Times retained 20,000 of the 60,000 new readers it acquired when it began publishing the scoop.

When he had first heard that the diaries were forgeries, Gerd Heidemann had managed to cope with the news relatively calmly. The finality of the verdict had not sunk in. He still clung to the hope that the Bundesarchiv might be wrong. But by Sunday he was suffering from a bad case of delayed shock. His confidence had been shattered by his rough treatment overnight in the Stern building. And that, he realized, was only the beginning. Now that his three-year-old dream of bringing Hitler’s testament to the world was in ruins, it would simply be a matter of time before questions began to be asked about what had happened to the money.

He later testified that his depression was such that he had considered shooting himself: he did, after all, have Hitler’s so-called ‘suicide weapon’ and five bullets with which to do it. For part of the weekend he lay, in a state of collapse, in the lower of the family’s two apartments, refusing to move. Barbara Dickmann telephoned from Rome to find out what was happening and was shocked by Heidemann’s emotional state: ‘He was crying, emphasizing again and again that it would become clear that most of the diaries were genuine, that I had to trust him, that he hadn’t landed me in it.’

On Sunday morning, having not heard a word from Heidemann for more than twenty-four hours, Thomas Walde, Leo Pesch and Michael Seufert set out to try to find him. ‘We were worried that he might be suicidal,’ recalled Walde. They tried telephoning him, but there was no answer. They drove over to Carin II; the yacht was deserted. At about midday, they turned up outside the Heidemanns’ Elbchaussee home. ‘We rang the bell,’ said Pesch later. ‘His elder daughter appeared at the window. After much toing and froing, the door was finally opened and we were let into the flat by Frau Heidemann.’ The three men told her they needed to speak to her husband. Gina said that he was staying with friends somewhere in Hamburg; she would fetch him. The Stern reporters were left alone while she went downstairs, apparently to try to persuade her husband to come out of his hiding place in the apartment below. Ten minutes later, the doorbell rang.

‘I looked through the spyhole,’ related Pesch, ‘and I saw Heidemann, in his shirt sleeves, lying crumpled up on the floor by the steps. He was groaning, “Open up, open up.” His wife was next to him and was trying to get him to his feet. I opened the door and Heidemann – who didn’t seem able to stand – staggered to a chair and dropped into it. He was crying and choking. It was about ten minutes before he could speak.’

Heidemann presented a wretched spectacle, but his colleagues’ visit was not principally motivated by concern for his health. Stern had been working flat out since dawn on Saturday to piece together the story of the hoax. Using information and the telephone number supplied by Heidemann, the magazine’s reporters had located ‘Fischer’s’ home and shop and found them shuttered and deserted; neighbours said that Conny and Edith had gone away. Stern had soon established that ‘Fischer’s’ real name was Kujau and that his highly placed East German relatives – the museum keeper and the general – were, respectively, a municipal caretaker and a railway porter. Walde, Pesch and Seufert were under instructions to obtain more information and once Heidemann had regained his composure, they began asking him the same old questions all over again.

Seufert produced a photograph of Kujau which the magazine had already obtained from his family in East Germany. Was this ‘Fischer’? Heidemann replied immediately that it was. Seufert told him that the man’s real name was Kujau. According to Pesch: ‘Heidemann assured us – and I believed him – that this was the first time he’d heard the name Kujau.’ The questioning went on until seven o’clock in the evening and resumed again at midday on Monday.

In the interim, Heidemann received a telephone call from Kujau. The forger told him he was calling from a telephone box in Czechoslovakia where he was still trying to locate the score of Die Meistersinger. Heidemann taped the call. He was desperate. He told Kujau that the diaries were fakes. ‘Who could have forged so much?’ he demanded.

‘Oh my God,’ wailed Kujau, ‘oh my God.’

Heidemann told him that they would both probably end up in prison.

‘Shit,’ exclaimed Kujau. ‘You mean we’ve already been connected?’

‘Stern’s going to file charges against me for sure,’ said Heidemann. ‘The papers are saying that I did it.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘Come on,’ pleaded Heidemann. ‘Where did you get the books from?’

‘They’re from East Germany, man.’

Heidemann confronted him with Stern’s revelation that he had lied about his relatives in East Germany.

Kujau admitted it, but said that it hadn’t been his idea: ‘they’ had made him do it.

Heidemann later replayed this conversation with Kujau to Leo Pesch during his interrogation on Monday. ‘It wasn’t at all clear who “they” were supposed to be,’ Pesch recalled, ‘and Heidemann didn’t press him…. During the telephone conversation, Heidemann kept referring to the Wagner opera score. He still seemed to believe that Kujau had delivered him some genuine material.’

Reporters and photographers had been lurking around the Heidemanns’ home for several days. By Tuesday Heidemann had recovered sufficiently to invite them in for an impromptu press conference. Dozens of journalists jammed into his study, pinning Heidemann against a bookcase full of works on the Third Reich. Accompanied by his lawyer, he was described as looking ‘drained’ and ‘subdued’. He was asked why he was still refusing publicly to identify the diaries’ supplier. ‘Because this man was probably also deceived,’ replied Heidemann. ‘He is trying on his own to clear up where they came from and if they are forgeries. While he is investigating the affair for me and while I still have some faith in him, I cannot betray his name to the public.’ He would not comment on rumours that the man’s name was Fischer.

That same day, Stern announced that Heidemann had been ‘summarily fired’ and Henri Nannen disclosed that the company would be pressing charges with the Hamburg State Prosecutor for fraud. Nannen said that, in his opinion, Heidemann had always believed in the diaries, but had been blinded by ‘dollar signs in his eyes’ and had stolen at least some of the magazine’s money. ‘Heidemann has not just been deceived,’ he told reporters, ‘he too is a deceiver.’ Nannen also revealed that Stern had paid more than 9 million marks for the diaries.

A few hours later, the West German television programme Panorama, presented by Stefan Aust, scooped Stern by two days and named Heidemann’s source as Konrad Fischer, alias Konrad Kujau.

Needless to say, Kujau had not been in Czechoslovakia hunting for the score of Die Meistersinger when he rang Heidemann on Monday. He was in the Austrian industrial town of Dornbirn, close to the Bavarian border, holed up in the home of Maria Modritsch’s parents. Conditions were cramped and the atmosphere was understandably tense. ‘Conny and Edith slept together,’ said Maria, ‘and I slept in the living room.’

Kujau’s plan had been to stay away from Stuttgart until things cooled off. But it quickly became apparent that this was not going to happen – indeed, things were hotting up. Kujau was sitting watching the Modritschs’ television when his picture was flashed on the screen as the man who had allegedly supplied Heidemann with the Hitler diaries. When it was also announced that Stern had paid out 9 million marks for the material, Kujau shot out of his chair. Nine million marks? He had received only a quarter of that sum. The deceiver had been deceived. The forger was full of moral outrage at Heidemann’s dishonesty. ‘He was bitterly upset,’ recalled Edith. Kujau was certain that the reporter, believing him to be behind the Iron Curtain looking for the Wagner opera, had deliberately betrayed him: once his name was known, he would then never have been able to get back over the border; he would have conveniently disappeared into the clutches of the secret police, leaving Heidemann to enjoy the millions of marks which should rightfully have been Kujau’s – such, at least, was the forger’s conviction.

Kujau telephoned his lawyer in Stuttgart and learned that the Hamburg State Prosecutor was looking for him and proposed to raid his home and shop. It was clear that it was all over. On Friday 13 May Dietrich Klein of the Hamburg Prosecutor’s office, accompanied by a group of police, broke into Kujau’s premises and, watched by a crowd of reporters, began removing evidence: ten cartons and two plastic sacks full of books about Hitler, correspondence, newspaper cuttings, a signed copy of Mein Kampf and artists’ materials. There were also Nazi uniforms, military decorations, swastikas and photographs. Screwed to the wall above the entrance to Kujau’s collection was a coat of arms with the motto ‘Fearless and True’.

Klein was in Kujau’s house, sifting through his property, when the telephone rang. ‘This is Klein speaking,’ said the prosecutor. ‘This is Kujau speaking,’ came the reply. Kujau told the official that he understood he wanted to speak to him. He was willing to come forward voluntarily. He told Klein he would meet him at a border post on the Austrian frontier early the following morning.

At 8 a.m. on Saturday, Kujau said goodbye to Edith and Maria and made his way to the German border where Klein was waiting with a warrant for his arrest.

Kujau had agreed to give himself up. He had not agreed to tell the truth. During the long journey north to Hamburg he asked the prosecutor what would happen to him. According to Kujau, Klein told him that if he was not the man who wrote the diaries, he would be free in ten days; if he was: ‘It could take a long time.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Braumann asked about the two police raids.

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

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

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

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