Hamburg
The man who helped sell the fake Hitler diaries that caused a scandal in the mid-1980s was an East German spy, the weekly Der Spiegel reported this week. Gerd Heidemann, the reporter who bought the fakes for the weekly Stern for $5 million, was working for the Stasi secret police in 1983, when the sale occurred. The revelation has prompted some German commentators to speculate that the East Germans manufactured the hoax to embarrass West Germany. The scam was a huge humiliation for Stern, as well as for the Hitler historians who believed the writings to be authentic. Konrad Kujau, the forger, cobbled the diaries together from Hitler’s published speeches, embellishing them with such made-up entries as “Must get Olympics tickets for Eva.”
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