Press: Judging the Hoax That Failed

“Everything money can buy” was the unofficial rule at Stern, the punchy West German photo weekly that would unhesitatingly pay cash for a juicy exclusive. This freewheeling policy backfired disastrously in April 1983, shortly after Stern proudly announced “the journalistic scoop of the post- World War II era”: the discovery of 62 volumes of Adolf Hitler’s diaries. It soon became clear that Stern itself had been caught in a $3.8 million swindle involving Documents Dealer Konrad Kujau, 46, and Stern’s veteran investigative reporter Gerd (“the Detective”) Heidemann, 53. The trial of the two men has been under way in Hamburg for six months. Even so, more questions than answers about the case remain as the proceedings move toward a close.

During the trial, Stern editors have testified to Heidemann’s cloak-and- dagger methods: how he described clandestine meetings with former Nazi officers, payoffs to East German generals, and encounters on highways near Berlin where satchels of cash were tossed from one moving car to another in exchange for the books. Piled high behind Judge HansUlrich Schroeder are mounds of dog-eared folders stuffed with exhibits and testimony. But nowhere in them are the answers to two key questions: why Stern’s normally tough- minded managers fell for the forgery without taking precautions to authenticate their find, and whether Heidemann was a party to the hoax or a victim of it.

Thus far, Stern and its publisher, Gruner & Jahr, have emerged in the testimony as all-too-willing victims of the scam. Testimony has established that normal journalistic safeguards were disregarded shortly after Heidemann told his immediate editor in 1981 that he was on the trail of 27 volumes of the Nazi Fuhrer’s diaries, written between 1932 and 1945. The diaries, Heidemann said, were rescued by farmers after a plane carrying Hitler’s personal effects crashed near Dresden in the last days of World War II. Although the flamboyant Heidemann was known to be excessively preoccupied with Nazi memorabilia, his superior, Thomas Walde, took Heidemann’s supposed find very seriously. Presumably in order to minimize the risk of a leak, Walde bypassed Stern’s top editors and took the information upstairs to Wilfried Sorge, assistant director of Gruner & Jahr, and Jan Hensmann, a member of the board. In the months that followed, the small group privy to the secret gathered for “reading hours” as each shipment of the black, imitation leather-bound diaries arrived. As their excitement grew, Heidemann’s estimate of the number of extant volumes more than doubled. Meanwhile, in a small room near Stuttgart, Forger Kujau was laboring furiously, filling ordinary classroom notebooks purchased in East Germany with facts cobbled together from history texts and his own imagination. “Must not forget to get tickets for the Olympic Games for Eva Braun,” read one 1936 entry. “On my feet all day long,” complained the Fuhrer in another. One of the final notations, in April 1945, lapses into an almost girlish “Dear Diary” style: “Must close now. Bormann wants all my documents to be sent away.”

According to witnesses, the publishers overlooked the unlikely comments as well as several glaring historical inaccuracies. In one instance, Hitler recalled receiving congratulations from a general on his 50th anniversary of military service. Hitler was 48 at the time; it was the general who was celebrating the anniversary. Concluded an internal Stern report in the aftermath of the hoax: “The catastrophe could only happen because all safety switches had been blocked in the attempt to keep the scoop secret.”

As publication drew near, Gruner & Jahr sold syndication rights to Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times in London, Paris Match and Italy’s weekly Panorama. In the U.S., Newsweek decided not to buy serialization rights after extensive negotiations, but devoted a cover story to the diaries and advertised their contents.

Some historians were skeptical when Stern announced its find, pointing out that Hitler had always preferred dictating to writing. Others noted that Hitler suffered from progressive palsy, which made his right hand tremble acutely with the passage of time, but that the handwriting in the purported diaries did not reflect this wavering. When polyester fibers and other postwar materials turned up in a chemical analysis of the booklets immediately after the Stern announcement, there was no doubt of the hoax. In short order, Heidemann, four Stern editors and three Gruner & Jahr executives left the company or were dismissed.

While Heidemann insists that he was duped by Kujau, the forger says Heidemann knew the diaries were bogus and even dictated some of the details. Kujau maintains that Heidemann demanded “I should write something nice about Bormann, or I should mention Hitler’s photographer, Hoffmann, whose son worked at the Stern picture archive and would be pleased.”

The trial is expected to end by mid-April. Kujau and Heidemann face up to ten years imprisonment if convicted, but Kujau is outwardly unconcerned about his fate. To pass the time, he has been whipping up Hitler paintings for his jailers. Even when he confessed at the time of his arrest in May 1983, he added a whimsical touch. The final paragraph of his written confession was executed in perfect Hitlerian script. “I admit having written the Hitler diaries,” Kujau concluded. “It took me two years to perfect my handwriting. (Signed) Adolf Hitler.”