Epilogue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

On Monday 8 July 1985 the media returned in force to Hamburg to record the verdict. After presiding over ninety-four sessions of testimony from thirty-seven different witnesses, the judge found all the defendants guilty. Heidemann was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison. Kujau received four years and six months. Edith Lieblang was given a suspended sentence of one year. The judge said he could detect no evidence of a wider conspiracy. Stern, he announced, had acted with such recklessness that it was virtually an accomplice in the hoax.

More than two years had passed since the diaries were declared forgeries. More than 5 million marks of Stern’s money remained – and, at the time of writing, remains – unaccounted for.


The Hitler diaries affair had a traumatic effect upon Stern. Its offices were occupied by journalists protesting at the management’s appointment of two new conservative editors. There were hundreds of abusive letters and phone calls. The overwhelmingly left-wing staff found themselves being greeted on the telephone by shouts of ‘Heil Hitler!’ Politicians treated them as a laughing stock; prominent West Germans pulled out of interviews; young East German pacifists refused to cooperate with a planned Stern feature article on the grounds that the magazine was ‘a Hitler sheet’. Circulation slumped. Before the scandal, the magazine reckoned to sell around 1.7 million copies. This figure climbed to a record 2.1 million in the week in which the diaries’ discovery was announced. After the revelation that they were forgeries, circulation fell back to less than 1.5 million. Apart from the loss of advertising and sales revenue, the cost to the magazine was estimated by the Stern Report as 19 million marks: 9.34 million for the diaries; 1.5 million for Heidemann; 7 million (before tax) as compensation to the two sacked editors; and miscellaneous costs, including agents’ fees, publicity and the expense of destroying thousands of copies containing the second instalment of the Hess serialization.

Gradually, most of the main participants in the story left the magazine. Dr Jan Hensmann departed at the end of 1983 to become a visiting professor at the University of Munster. Wilfried Sorge resigned in the spring of 1984 to run a small publishing company. Thomas Walde left Hamburg to work in another outpost of the Bertelsmann empire. Leo Pesch went to Munich to work for Vogue. Manfred Fischer, who initiated the purchase of the diaries, is currently the chief executive of the Dornier aircraft corporation. Felix Schmidt is now editing the main West German television guide. Peter Koch, at the time of writing, has not re-entered full-time employment. Gerd Schulte-Hillen, however, is still the managing director of Gruner and Jahr: he must be a very good manager indeed.

In Britain, Frank Giles returned from his holiday to find himself the target of a vicious whispering campaign. In June 1983, ‘after discussions with Mr Rupert Murdoch’, it was announced that he was to retire prematurely as editor and assume the honorific title of editor emeritus. According to a story which did the rounds at the time, Giles asked what the title meant. ‘It’s Latin, Frank,’ Murdoch is said to have replied. ‘The “e” means you’re out, and the “meritus” means you deserve it.’

Newsweek, which ran the Hitler diaries on its front cover for three successive weeks, was widely criticized for its behaviour. ‘The impression created with the aid of provocative newspaper and television advertising’, said Robert J. McCloskey, the ombudsman of the Washington Post, ‘was that the entire story was authentic.’ The morality of selling Hitler ‘bothered us’, confessed Mrs Katherine Graham. William Broyles appeared to disagree: ‘We feel very, very good about how we handled this,’ he told the New York Times. Seven months later, he resigned as Newsweek’s editor. Maynard Parker who had been expected to succeed him, was passed over. Insiders blamed the Hitler diaries. ‘That episode killed Parker,’ said one. ‘There were expressions of high-echelon support, but it was poor judgement and everyone knew it.’

In the aftermath of the Hitler diaries affair, David Irving’s American publishers tripled the print run of his edition of the Führer’s medical diaries. Excerpts were published in Murdoch’s New York Post and in the National Enquirer. But all publicity is not necessarily good publicity: not long afterwards Irving was arrested by the Austrian police in Vienna on suspicion of neo-Nazi activity and deported from the country; he is still banned from entry.

In 1985, Hugh Trevor-Roper published a collection of his work entitled Renaissance Essays. It was hailed by most critics as ‘brilliant’. The Hitler diaries, tactfully, were not mentioned.

Fritz Stiefel, Kujau’s best customer until Heidemann appeared, announced that he would not be suing the forger for damages. ‘I have one of the biggest collections of fakes in the world,’ he said, ‘and that, too, is worth something.’

Adolf Hitler as Painter and Draughtsman by Billy F. Price and August Priesack was banned in West Germany, but appeared in the United States at the end of 1984 as Adolf Hitler: The Unknown Artist. A large section of it was the work of Konrad Kujau, but it would have cost a fortune to rip out the fakes and reprint the book. The Kujaus therefore were left sprinkled amongst the Hitlers, and nobody, apparently, cared: ‘Even the suspect pictures’, claimed a limp note of explanation in the book’s introduction, ‘generally reflect Hitler’s known style.’ The remark echoes that made by Newsweek about the Hitler diaries: ‘Genuine or not, it almost doesn’t matter in the end’.

Perhaps it doesn’t. Certainly, the trade in Nazi relics has not been depressed by the revelations of wholesale forgery thrown up in the aftermath of the diaries affair. Shortly before Christmas 1983, Christies of New York auctioned seven pages of notes made by Hitler in 1930 for which the purchasers, Neville Rare Books, paid $22,000. In London, Phillips, Son & Neale, fine art auctioneers since 1796, held a sale entitled ‘Third Reich Memorabilia’ which netted over £100,000. Four small Hitler paintings, at least one of which had the look of a genuine Kujau about it, raised £11,500. Also up for sale were such curiosities as Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler’s vanity case, removed from his body after his suicide and described in the catalogue as ‘a small leather vanity wallet with fitted compartments containing comb, metal mirror, penknife by Chiral with gilt niello-work to sides, the wallet embossed in gold “RF-SS”’. Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, operating from his garage in Maryland, Mr Charles Snyder continued to sell locks of Eva Braun’s hair, allegedly scraped from her comb by an American officer who looted her apartment in Munich.

Here, rather than in any grand conspiracy, lies the origin of the Hitler diaries affair. Why would anyone pay $3500 for a few strands of human hair of dubious authenticity? Because, presumably, he might have touched them, as he might have touched the odd scrap of paper, or painting, or piece of uniform – talismans which have been handed down and sold and hoarded, to be brought out and touched occasionally, as if the essence of the man somehow lived on in them. The Hitler diaries, shabby forgeries, composed for the most part of worthless banalities, were no different. ‘It was a very special thing to hold such a thing in your hand,’ said Manfred Fischer, trying to explain the fascination which he and his colleagues felt when the first volume arrived. ‘To think that this diary was written by him – and now I have it in my grasp….’ After millions of dollars, two years, and a great deal more stroking and sniffing in offices and bank vaults, the diaries appeared, and have now taken their place as one of the most extraordinary frauds in history – a phenomenon which Chaucer’s Pardoner, six centuries ago, with his pillow cases and pig’s bones, would have recognized at once.

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