Hitler Diaries

Background

Operation Seraglio

On 20 April 1945—Adolf Hitler's 56th birthday—Soviet troops were on the verge of taking Berlin and the Western Allies had already taken several German cities. Hitler's private secretary, Martin Bormann, initiated Operation Seraglio, a plan to evacuate the key and favoured members of Hitler's entourage from the Berlin bunker where they were based, the Führerbunker, to an Alpine command centre near Berchtesgaden—Hitler's retreat in southern Germany. Ten aeroplanes flew out from Gatow airfield under the overall command of General Hans Baur, Hitler's personal pilot. The final flight out was a Junkers Ju 352 transport plane, piloted by Major Friedrich Gundlfinger—on board were ten heavy chests under the supervision of Hitler's personal valet, Sergeant Wilhelm Arndt. The aeroplane crashed into the Heidenholz Forest, near the Czechoslovak border.

Some of the more useful parts of Gundlfinger's aeroplane were appropriated by locals before the police and SS cordoned off the crash site. When Baur told Hitler what had happened, the German leader expressed grief at the loss of Arndt, one of his most favoured servants, and added: "I entrusted him with extremely valuable documents which would show posterity the truth of my actions!" Apart from this quoted sentence, there is no indication of what was in the boxes. The last of the crash's two survivors died in April 1980, and Bormann had died after leaving the Berlin bunker following Hitler's suicide on 30 April 1945. In the decades following the war, the possibility of a hidden cache of private papers belonging to Hitler became, according to the journalist Robert Harris, a "tantalizing state of affairs [that] was to provide the perfect scenario for forgery".

Konrad Kujau

Konrad Kujau was born in 1938 in Löbau, near Dresden, in what would become East Germany. His parents, a shoemaker and his wife, had both joined the Nazi Party in 1933. The boy grew up believing in the Nazi ideals and idolising Hitler; Germany's defeat and Hitler's suicide in 1945 did not temper his enthusiasm for the Nazi cause. He held a series of menial jobs until 1957, when a warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with the theft of a microphone from the Löbau Youth Club. He fled to Stuttgart, West Germany, and soon drifted into temporary work and petty crime. After running a dance bar during the early 1960s with his girlfriend, Edith Lieblang—whom he later married—Kujau began to create a fictional background for himself. He told people that his real name was Peter Fischer, changed his date of birth by two years, and altered the story of his time in East Germany. By 1963 the bar had begun to suffer financial difficulties, and Kujau started his career as a counterfeiter, forging 27 Deutsche Marks' (DM) worth of luncheon vouchers; he was caught and sentenced to five days in prison. On his release he and his wife formed the Lieblang Cleaning Company, although it provided little income for them. In March 1968, at a routine check at Kujau's lodgings, the police established he was living under a false identity and he was sent to Stuttgart's Stammheim Prison.

In 1970 Kujau visited his family in East Germany and discovered that many of the locals had Nazi memorabilia, contrary to the laws of the communist government. He saw an opportunity to buy the material cheaply on the black market, and make a profit in the West, where the increasing demand among Stuttgart collectors was raising memorabilia prices up to ten times the amount he would pay. The trade was illegal in East Germany, and the export of what were deemed items of cultural heritage was banned. Among the items smuggled out of East Germany were weapons.

In 1974 Kujau rented a shop into which he placed his Nazi memorabilia; the outlet also became the venue for late-night drinking sessions with friends and fellow collectors, including Wolfgang Schulze, who lived in the US and became Kujau's agent there. Kujau inflated the value of items in his shop by forging additional authentication details—for example a genuine First World War helmet, worth a few marks, became considerably more valuable after Kujau forged a note indicating that Hitler had worn it at Ypres in late October 1914. In addition to notes by Hitler, he produced documents supposedly handwritten by Bormann, Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels. He forged passable imitations of his subjects' genuine handwriting, but the rest of the work was crude: Kujau used modern stationery such as Letraset to create letterheads, and he tried to make his products look suitably old by pouring tea over them. Mistakes in spelling or grammar were relatively common, particularly when he forged in English; a supposed copy of the 1938 Munich Agreement between Hitler and Neville Chamberlain read, in part:

Gerd Heidemann

Gerd Heidemann was born in Hamburg in 1931. During the rise of Hitler his parents remained apolitical, but Heidemann, like many other young boys, joined the Hitler Youth. After the war he trained as an electrician, and pursued an interest in photography. He began working in a photographic laboratory and became a freelance photographer for the Deutsche Presse-Agentur and Keystone news agencies, as well as some local Hamburg newspapers. He had his first work published in Stern in 1951 and four years later joined the paper as a full-time member of staff. From 1961 he covered wars and hostilities across Africa and the Middle East; he became obsessed with these conflicts and other stories on which he worked, such as the search for the identity of the German writer B. Traven. Although he was an excellent researcher—his colleagues called him der Spürhund, the Bloodhound—he would not know when to stop investigating, which led to other writers having to finish the stories from large quantities of notes.

In January 1973, on behalf of Stern, Heidemann photographed the Carin II, a yacht that formerly belonged to Göring. The boat was in a poor state of repair and expensive to maintain, but Heidemann took a mortgage on his Hamburg flat and purchased it. While researching the history of the yacht, Heidemann interviewed Göring's daughter, Edda, after which the couple began an affair. Through this relationship and his ownership of the boat he was introduced to a circle of former Nazis. He began to hold parties on the Carin II, with the former SS generals Karl Wolff and Wilhelm Mohnke as the guests of honour. Wolff and Mohnke were witnesses at Heidemann's wedding to his third wife in 1979; the couple went on honeymoon to South America accompanied by Wolff, where they met more ex-Nazis, including Walter Rauff and Klaus Barbie, who were both wanted in the West for war crimes.

The purchase of the yacht caused Heidemann financial problems, and in 1976 he agreed terms with Gruner + Jahr, Stern's parent company, to produce a book based on the conversations he was having with the former soldiers and SS men. When the book went unwritten—the material provided by the former SS officers was not sufficiently interesting or verifiable for publication—Heidemann borrowed increasingly large sums from his employers to pay for the boat's upkeep. In June 1978 he advertised the boat for sale, asking 1.1 million DMs; he received no offers. Mohnke recommended that Heidemann speak to Jakob Tiefenthaeler, a Nazi memorabilia collector and a former member of the SS. Tiefenthaeler was not in a position to buy the yacht, but was happy to act as an agent; his endeavours did not produce a sale. Realising Heidemann's financial circumstances, Tiefenthaeler provided him with names of other collectors in the Stuttgart area. The journalist made a trip to the south of Germany and met Stiefel, who purchased some of Göring's effects.

Stern, The Sunday Times and Newsweek

Stern (German for "Star"), a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg, was formed by the journalist and businessman Henri Nannen in 1948 to offer scandal, gossip and human interest stories. It was, according to the German media experts Frank Esser and Uwe Hartung, known for its investigative journalism and was politically left-of-centre. In 1981 Nannen resigned from his position of editor of the magazine, and moved to take the role of "publisher". In his place Stern had three editors: Peter Koch, Rolf Gillhausen and Felix Schmidt, who were aided by others including the journal's head of contemporary history, Thomas Walde. Manfred Fischer was CEO of Gruner + Jahr until 1981 when he was promoted to the board of Bertelsmann, their parent company; he was replaced by Gerd Schulte-Hillen. Wilfried Sorge was one of the Gruner + Jahr managers responsible for international sales.

The Sunday Times is a British national broadsheet newspaper, the Sunday sister paper of The Times. In 1968, under the ownership of Lord Thomson, The Sunday Times had been involved in a deal to purchase the Mussolini diaries for an agreed final purchase price of £250,000, although they had only paid out an initial amount of £60,000. These turned out to be forgeries undertaken by an Italian mother and daughter, Amalia and Rosa Panvini. In 1981 Rupert Murdoch, who owned several other papers in Australia, New Zealand and the UK, purchased Times Newspapers Ltd, which owned both The Times and its Sunday sister. Murdoch appointed Frank Giles to be the editor of The Sunday Times. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper became an independent national director of The Times in 1974. Trevor-Roper—who was created Baron Dacre of Glanton in 1979—was a specialist on Nazi Germany, who had worked for the British Intelligence Services during and after the Second World War. At the war's end he had undertaken an official investigation of Hitler's death, interviewing eyewitnesses to the Führer's last movements. In addition to the official report he filed, Trevor-Roper also published The Last Days of Hitler (1947) on the subject. He subsequently wrote about the Nazis in Hitler's War Directives (1964) and Hitler's Place in History (1965).

Newsweek, an American weekly news magazine, was founded in 1933. In 1982 the journalist William Broyles was appointed editor-in-chief, while the editor was Maynard Parker; that year the company had circulation figures of three million readers.

Production and sale of the diaries

Production

It is unclear when Kujau produced his first Hitler diary. Stiefel says Kujau gave him a diary on loan in 1975. Schulze puts the date as 1976, while Kujau says he began in 1978, after a month's practice writing in the old German gothic script Hitler had used. Kujau used one of a pile of notebooks he had bought cheaply in East Berlin, and attempted to put the letters "AH" in gold on the front—purchasing plastic, Hong Kong-made letters from a department store, he inadvertently used "FH" rather than "AH". He took the black ribbon from a genuine SS document and attached it to the cover using a German army wax seal. For the ink, he bought two bottles of Pelikan ink—one black, one blue—and mixed them with water so it would flow more easily from the cheap modern pen he used. Finally he sprinkled tea over the pages and bashed the diaries against his desk to give them an aged look. Kujau showed the first volume to Stiefel, who was impressed and thought it a genuine Hitler diary; Stiefel wanted to buy it, but when the forger refused, the pair agreed that the collector could have it on loan.

In June 1979 Stiefel asked a former Nazi Party archivist, August Priesack, to verify the authenticity of the diary, which he subsequently did. Priesack showed the diary to Eberhard Jäckel of the University of Stuttgart, who also thought the diary to be genuine, and wanted to edit it for publication. News of the diary's existence soon began to filter through to collectors of Hitler memorabilia. At the end of 1979 Tiefenthaeler contacted Heidemann to say that Stiefel had shown him around his collection, which included a Hitler diary—the only one Kujau had forged to that point. According to Hamilton "the discovery inflamed Heidemann almost to madness", and he aggressively pressed for what would be a journalistic scoop.

Stiefel showed Heidemann the diary in Stuttgart in January 1980, telling him it was from a plane crash in East Germany, although he refused to tell the journalist the name of his source. The collector spoke to Kujau to see if he would meet Heidemann, but the forger repeatedly refused Heidemann's requests for nearly a year. Heidemann returned to the Stern offices and spoke to his editor, but both Koch and Nannen refused to discuss the potential story with him, telling him to work on other features. The only person who was interested was Walde, who worked with Heidemann to find the source of the diaries. Their searches for Kujau proved fruitless, so they looked into the crash. Heidemann, who had read Baur's autobiography, knew of Gundlfinger's flight, and made a connection between Operation Seraglio and the diary; in November 1980 the two journalists travelled to Dresden and located the graves of the flight's crew.

Acquisition

At that first meeting on 28 January 1981, which lasted over seven hours, Heidemann offered Kujau a deposit of only 100,000 DMs to agree the deal, which Kujau did not accept. At a second meeting the following day, the reporter revealed an additional lure he had brought with him: a uniform which he said was Göring's. Kujau tentatively agreed to provide the diaries and told Heidemann that he would call him as soon as he could arrange to receive them from East Germany. As a sign of good faith Heidemann lent the uniform to the forger, to show alongside his collection of other uniforms from the top Nazis; for his part, Kujau gave the journalist a painting purportedly by Hitler. Both the painting and uniform were fakes.

A week later Kujau met Jäckel and Alex Kuhn in connection with the poems he had forged and sold to Stiefel. These had been published by Jäckel and Kuhn in 1980, but one historian pointed out that one of the poems could not have been produced by Hitler as it had been written by the poet Herybert Menzel. Jäckel was concerned that the poem in question had been accompanied by a letter on Nazi party stationery guaranteeing it as a genuine work by Hitler. Many of the other pieces in Stiefel's collection were similarly verified, so doubts began to surface over these, too. Kujau claimed ignorance, saying he was only the middleman, but told them that Heidemann, a reputed journalist, had seen the crash site from which the papers originated; Jäckel advised Stiefel to have his collection forensically examined, and passed 26 suspect poems to the Hamburg district attorney for investigation. Gruner + Jahr also knew about the problems with the poems, and that the source had been Kujau, but he assured them that this source had been elsewhere in East Germany, unconnected to the diaries, and they continued with their deal.

Ten days after the meeting with Jäckel and Kuhn, Kujau had prepared three further diaries. The contents were copied from a range of books, newspapers and magazines covering Hitler's life. Primary among them was the two-volume work by the historian Max Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 1932–45 (Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, 1932–45), which presents Hitler's day-to-day activities. Many of the diary's entries were lists of Nazi party promotions and official engagements. Although Kujau created some personal information about Hitler in the diaries, this was, in the opinion of both Harris and Hamilton, trivia. He began working to a schedule of producing three diaries a month. He later stated that he managed to produce one of the volumes in three hours; on a separate occasion he wrote three diaries in three days.

Initial testing and verification; steps towards publication

In April 1982 Walde and Heidemann contacted Josef Henke and Klaus Oldenhage of the Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives) and Max Frei-Sulzer, the former head of the forensic department of the Zürich police, for assistance in authenticating the diaries. They did not specifically mention the diaries, but referred generally to new material. They also did not give the forensic specialists an entire diary, but removed one page only. For comparison purposes they also provided the experts with other samples of Hitler's writing, a handwritten draft for a telegram: this was from Heidemann's own collection and had also been forged by Kujau. Within days Walde provided further documents for comparison—all Kujau forgeries. Walde then flew to the US and commissioned Ordway Hilton, another forensic expert. None of those involved were experts in examining Nazi documents, and Hilton could not read German. Stern's management were too bound up in a secretive approach to be open about their source, or to provide the experts with a complete diary, which would have led to a more thorough examination of wider material. From the samples provided, the experts concluded that the handwriting was genuine. Hilton subsequently reported that "there was just no question" that both documents he had were written by the same person, whom he assumed to be Hitler.

The purchase of the diaries continued, and by June 1982 Gruner + Jahr possessed 35 volumes. In early 1983 the company took the decision to work towards a publication date for the diaries. To ensure wide readership and to maximise their returns, Stern issued a prospectus to potentially interested parties, Newsweek, Time, Paris Match and a syndicate of papers owned by Murdoch. Stern rented a large vault in a Swiss bank. They filled the space with Nazi memorabilia and displayed various letters and manuscripts.

The first historian to examine the diaries was Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was cautious, but impressed with the volume of documentation in front of him. As the background to the acquisition was explained to him he became less doubtful; he was falsely informed that the paper had been chemically tested and been shown to be pre-war, and he was told that Stern knew the identity of the Wehrmacht officer who had rescued the documents from the plane and had stored them ever since. By the end of the meeting he was convinced that the diaries were genuine, and later said "who, I asked myself, would forge sixty volumes when six would have served his purpose?" In an article in The Times on 23 April 1983 he wrote:

Released to the news media; the Stern press conference

On 22 April 1983 a press release from Stern announced the existence of the diaries and their forthcoming publication; a press conference was announced for 25 April. On hearing the news from Stern, Jäckel stated that he was "extremely sceptical" about the diaries, while his fellow historian, Karl Dietrich Bracher of the University of Bonn also thought their legitimacy unlikely. Irving was receiving calls from international news companies—the BBC, The Observer, Newsweek, Bild Zeitung—and he was informing them all that the diaries were fakes. The former German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, also said that he could not believe the diaries were genuine. The following day The Times published the news that their Sunday sister paper had the serialisation rights for the UK; the edition also carried an extensive piece by Trevor-Roper with his opinion on the authenticity and importance of the discovery. By this stage the historian had growing doubts over the diaries, which he passed on to the editor of The Times, Charles Douglas-Home. The Times editor presumed that Trevor-Roper would also contact Giles at The Sunday Times, while Trevor-Roper thought that Douglas-Home would do so; neither did. The Sunday paper thus remained oblivious to the growing concerns that the diaries might not be genuine.

On the evening of 23 April the presses began rolling for the following day's edition of The Sunday Times. After an evening meeting of the editorial staff, Giles phoned Trevor-Roper to ask him to write a piece rebutting the criticism of the diaries. He found that the historian had made "a 180-degree turn" regarding the diaries' authenticity, and was now far from sure that they were real. The paper's deputy editor, Brian MacArthur, rang Murdoch to see if they should stop the print run and re-write the affected pages. Murdoch's reply was "Fuck Dacre. Publish."

On the afternoon of 24 April, in Hamburg for the press conference the following day, Trevor-Roper asked Heidemann for the name of his source: the journalist refused, and gave a different story of how the diaries had been acquired. Trevor-Roper was suspicious and questioned the reporter closely for over an hour. Heidemann accused the historian of acting "exactly like an officer of the British army" in 1945. At a subsequent dinner the historian was evasive when asked by Stern executives what he was going to say at the announcement the following day.

At the press conference both Trevor-Roper and Weinberg expressed their doubts at the authenticity, and stated that German experts needed to examine the diaries to confirm whether the works were genuine. Trevor-Roper went on to say that his doubts sprung from the lack of proof that these books were the same ones as had been on the crashed plane in 1945. He finished his statement by saying that "I regret that the normal method of historical verification has been sacrificed to the perhaps necessary requirements of a journalistic scoop." The leading article in The Guardian described his public reversal as showing "moral courage". Irving, who had been described in the introductory statement by Koch as a historian "with no reputation to lose", stood at the microphone for questions, and asked how Hitler could have written his diary in the days following the 20 July plot, when his arm had been damaged. He denounced the diaries as forgeries, and held aloft the photocopied pages he had been given from Priesack. He asked if the ink in the diaries had been tested, but there was no response from the managers of Stern. Photographers and film crews jostled to get a better picture of Irving, and some punches were thrown by journalists while security guards moved in and forcibly removed Irving from the room, while he shouted "Ink! Ink!"

Forensic analysis and the uncovering of the frauds

With grave doubts now expressed about the authenticity of the diaries, Stern faced the possibility of legal action for disseminating Nazi propaganda. To ensure a definitive judgment on the diaries, Hagen, one of the company's lawyers, passed three complete diaries to Henke at the Bundesarchiv for a more complete forensic examination. While the debate on the diaries' authenticity continued, Stern published its special edition on 28 April, which provided Hitler's purported views on the flight of Hess to Scotland, Kristallnacht and the Holocaust. The following day Heidemann again met with Kujau, and bought the last four diaries from him.

On the following Sunday, 1 May 1983, The Sunday Times published further stories providing the background to the diaries, linking them more closely to the plane crash in 1945, and providing a profile of Heidemann. That day, when The Daily Express rang Irving for a further comment on the diaries, he informed them that he now believed the diaries to be genuine; The Times ran the story of Irving's U-turn the following day. Irving explained that Stern had shown him a diary from April 1945 in which the writing sloped downwards from left to right, and the script of which got smaller along the line. At a subsequent press conference Irving explained that he had been examining the diaries of Dr Theodor Morell, Hitler's personal doctor, in which Morell diagnosed the Führer as having Parkinson's disease, a symptom of which was to write in the way the text appeared in the diaries. Harris posits that further motives may also have played a part—the lack of reference to the Holocaust in the diaries may have been perceived by Irving as supporting evidence for his thesis, put forward in his book Hitler's War, that the Holocaust took place without Hitler's knowledge.

The same day Hagen visited the Bundesarchiv and was told of their findings: ultraviolet light had shown a fluorescent element to the paper, which should not have been present in an old document, and that the bindings of one of the diaries included polyester which had not been made before 1953. Research in the archives also showed errors. The findings were partial only, and not conclusive; more volumes were provided to aid the analysis.

When Hagen reported back to the Stern management, an emergency meeting was called and Schulte-Hillen demanded the identity of Heidemann's source. The journalist relented, and provided the provenance of the diaries as Kujau had given it to him. Harris describes how a bunker mentality descended on the Stern management as, instead of accepting the truth of the Bundesarchiv's findings, they searched for alternative explanations as to how post-war whitening agents could have been used in the wartime paper. The paper then released a statement defending their position which Harris judges was "resonant with hollow bravado".

Arrests and trial

Once the government announcement appeared on television, Kujau took his wife and mistress to Austria; he introduced the latter to Edith as his cleaner. After he saw a news report a few days later, naming him as the forger, and also hearing that Stern had paid nine million DMs, he first phoned his lawyer and then the Hamburg State prosecutor, before agreeing to hand himself in at the border between Austria and West Germany the following day. When police raided his house, they found several notebooks identical to those used in the fraud. Kujau continued to use a variation of the story he had told Heidemann—that of obtaining the diaries from the East—but he was bitter that the journalist was still at liberty, and had withheld so much of Stern's money from him. After thirteen days, on 26 May, he wrote a full confession, stating that Heidemann knew all along that the diaries were forgeries. Heidemann was arrested that evening.

Following a police investigation that lasted over a year, on 21 August 1984 the trial against Heidemann and Kujau opened in Hamburg. Both men were charged with defrauding Stern of 9.3 million DMs. Despite the seriousness of the charges facing the two men, Hamilton considers that "it also appeared clear that the trial was going to be a farce, a real slapstick affair that would enrage the judge and amuse the entire world." The proceedings lasted until July 1985, when both men were sent to prison: four years and eight months for Heidemann, four years and six months for Kujau. In September one of the supporting magistrates overseeing the case was replaced after he fell asleep; three days later the court were "amused" to see pictures of Idi Amin's underpants, which Heidemann had framed on his wall. At times the case "denigrated into a slanging match" between Kujau and Heidemann. In his summing up Judge Hans-Ulrich Schroeder said that "the negligence of Stern has persuaded me to soften the sentences against the two main co-conspirators." Heidemann was found guilty of stealing 1.7 million DMs from Stern, and Kujau was found guilty of receiving 1.5 million DMs for his role in the forgeries. Despite the lengthy investigation and trial, at least five million DMs remained unaccounted for.

Aftermath

When Kujau was released from prison in 1987 he was suffering from throat cancer. He opened a gallery in Stuttgart and sold "forgeries" of Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró, all signed with his own name. Although he prospered, Kujau was later arrested for forging driving licences; he was fined the equivalent of £2,000. He died of cancer in Stuttgart in September 2000.

Heidemann was also released from prison in 1987. Five years later it was reported in the German newspaper Der Spiegel that in the 1950s he had been recruited by the Stasi, the East German secret police, to monitor the arrival of American nuclear weapons into West Germany. In 2008 he had debts exceeding €700,000, and was living on social security; his situation had not changed by 2013, and he remained bitter about his treatment. He died in Hamburg in December 2024.

Two of Stern's editors, Koch and Schmidt, lost their jobs because of the scandal. Both complained strongly when told that their resignations were expected, pointing out that they had both wanted to sack Heidemann in 1981. A settlement of 3.5 million DMs was provided to each of them as part of the severance package. The staff at the magazine were angry at the approach taken by their managers, and held sit-ins to protest at the "management's bypassing traditional editorial channels and safeguards". The scandal caused a major crisis for Stern and, according to Esser and Hartung, the magazine "once known for its investigative reporting, became a prime example of sensation-seeking checkbook journalism". Stern's credibility was severely damaged and it took the magazine ten years to regain its pre-scandal status and reputation. According to the German Historical Institute, the scandal was also "instrumental in discrediting the tendency toward an 'unprejudiced' and euphemistic assessment of the Third Reich in West German popular culture".

At The Sunday Times, Murdoch moved Giles to the new position of "editor emeritus". When Giles asked what the title meant, Murdoch informed him that "It's Latin, Frank; the e means you're out and the meritus means you deserved it." Murdoch later said that "circulation went up and it stayed up. We didn't lose money or anything like that", referring to the 20,000 new readers the paper retained after the scandal broke, and the fact that Stern returned all the money paid to it by the Sunday Times. In April 2012, during the Leveson Inquiry, he acknowledged his role in publishing the diaries, and took the blame for making the decision, saying "It was a massive mistake I made and I will have to live with it for the rest of my life." Trevor-Roper died in 2003. Despite a long and respected career as a historian, according to Richard Davenport-Hines, his biographer, Trevor-Roper's role in the scandal left his reputation "permanently besmirched". In January 1984 Broyles resigned as editor of Newsweek, to "pursue new entrepreneurial ventures".