The journalist at the centre of the 'Hitler's Diaries' fiasco
At a press conference in April 1983, a reporter for the German magazine Stern announced what was billed as the scoop of the century: the discovery of Adolf Hitler's personal diaries. There was no record of any such diaries existing, but Gerd Heidemann, who has died aged 93, explained that they'd been retrieved from the wreckage of a plane that had crashed near Dresden in April 1945 – and which had been carrying boxes removed from Hitler's bunker in Berlin. Newspapers around the world had paid vast sums for the right to publish them; in Britain, Rupert Murdoch himself had negotiated a deal for The Sunday Times. But in a major embarrassment for all concerned – not least Hugh Trevor-Roper, the historian who had authenticated the documents for The Sunday Times – the diaries were swiftly proved to be clumsy fakes, written on a type of paper that was not produced until the 1950s.
If this fiasco was a "humiliation" for The Sunday Times, it was a disaster for Stern, said The Telegraph. Not only had it paid £2.3 million for the diaries, it had apparently been deceived by one of its own journalists. A former member of the Hitler Youth, Heidemann was obsessed with all things related to the Third Reich. It's not clear whether he'd assisted in the deception. The diaries were forged by Konrad Kujau, a dealer in Nazi memorabilia who had taken to inflating the value of his artefacts by forging letters associating them with prominent Nazis. However, Heidemann did skim off a large amount of the money Stern had given him to retrieve them, and he was sentenced to four years in jail for embezzlement.
Heidemann was born in Hamburg in 1931 and, like many, joined the Hitler Youth in his teens. Having left school at 17, he became a photographer, then drifted into journalism, joining Stern in 1955. He'd long been interested in the Nazis, and in 1973 he bought a yacht, the Carin II, that had been owned by Hermann Göring. He had a long affair with Göring's daughter and started hosting former SS officers on the boat. In 1979, he spent his honeymoon in South America, where he called in on Klaus Barbie. He said he was researching a book, but it failed to materialise. The boat was costly to maintain and he fell into debt. It was through his Nazi connections that he got wind of Hitler's Diaries. Eventually, he tracked them to Kujau, who told him that they were in East Germany, and that he had a contact who could smuggle them out. Heidemann checked the basics of Kujau's tale about the plane crash, then persuaded his bosses at Stern to give him the money to buy the diaries, which he collected in batches. He insisted on shrouding the negotiations in secrecy, saying that if his contact got spooked, the deal would fall through. A senior editor at Stern later admitted that a collective insanity had taken hold of them.
In Stuttgart, meanwhile, Kujau was busy churning out the diaries in old exercise books, using a steel pen and staining the pages with tea; they proved so lucrative, he produced 60 volumes. His entries revealed that Hitler had halitosis ("Eva says I have bad breath"), and that he thought Himmler was deranged. Trevor-Roper – who changed his mind about their authenticity just before The Sunday Times published its front-page exclusive – said that he'd not been given enough time to look at them, in a bank vault in Zurich; nor had he been able to make full enquiries, owing to Stern's obsession with secrecy. It was unfortunate that the historians who'd verified Hitler's handwriting had done so by comparing the diaries to letters that were also forgeries. Heidemann, who was fired by Stern, and subsequently accused of working for the Stasi, insisted that he had believed the diaries were real, and that he was a victim in the case. "I don't want to be remembered," he said, "as the man responsible for the greatest flop in newspaper history."
