Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

The effects of the Hitler Wave were felt across the world. In America more than twenty new books about Hitler were published. Two film producers, Sandy Lieberson and David Puttnam, released a documentary, Swastika, which included the Eva Braun home movies seized by the CIC in 1945: the cans were discovered by a researcher in the archives of the US Marine and Signal Corps. In February, Frank Finlay starred in The Death of Adolf Hitler. Three months later, Sir Alec Guinness appeared in Hitler: The Last Ten Days . The film was banned by the Jewish management of the ABC–EMI cinema chain. The Israelis denied it a licence. ‘The figure of the assassin’, complained the Israeli Censorship Board, ‘is represented in a human light without giving expression to the terrible murders for which he is responsible.’

Guinness confessed that in playing the part he had found it ‘difficult not to succumb to Hitler’s charm. He had a sweet smile and a very sentimental Austrian charm.’ The BBC, despite protests, showed Leni Riefenstahi’s Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will . To Hutchinson’s commercial pleasure but editorial embarrassment, the reissued Mein Kampf , despite an artificially high price to discourage mass sales, had to be reprinted twice. A delegation from the British Board of Deputies tried to dissuade the company from bringing out a paperback edition. They failed, and Hutchinson’s sold a further 10,000 copies. Foreign language editions appeared in Denmark, Sweden and Italy. The Sunday Telegraph wrote of ‘the astonishing resurgence of the Hitler cult’. Time reported a ‘worldwide revival’ of interest in the Nazi leader: ‘Adolf Hitler’s presence never vanishes. His career is still the fundamental trauma of the century.’

The 1970s also witnessed a corresponding boom in sales of Hitler memorabilia. In the immediate aftermath of the war this activity, too, had been discouraged by the German authorities. In 1948 a ruling by a denazification court that ‘Hitler was an active Nazi’ enabled the State of Bavaria to seize his personal property – principally his private apartment in Munich, some money owed to him by a Nazi publishing company, and a few valuable paintings. (Eva Braun’s home, bought for her by Hitler in 1935, was also confiscated and donated to a restitution fund for the victims of Nazism.) Three years later, the Bavarian government made use of its powers to prevent Hitler’s former Munich housekeeper, Frau Anni Winter, from selling a trunkful of the Führer’s private property. Under the terms of Hitler’s will, she was entitled to ‘personal mementoes’ sufficient ‘for the maintenance of a modest middle-class standard of living’. She inherited such relics as Hitler’s gun licence, his Nazi Party membership card, some of his watercolours, a copy of Mein Kampf and the original letter from President Hindenburg inviting Hitler to become Chancellor in 1933. For these and other treasures, Frau Winter was offered $250,000 by an American collector. The authorities promptly intervened and impounded the bulk of the collection, leaving her, bitterly resentful, with what they imagined to be a handful of valueless scraps.

But following Frau Winter’s death, in 1972, these supposedly worthless items were put on sale at an auction in Munich. Telephone bids were taken from all over the world for lots which included family photographs, an eleven-word note for a speech and a War Loans savings card. Prices were reported to have ‘exceeded all expectations’. The average price simply for a signed Hitler photograph was £450.

In the succeeding years the Nazi memorabilia market took off spectacularly. Hitler’s 1940 Mercedes touring car – five tons of armoured steel and glass, twenty feet long with a 230 horsepower engine and a 56-gallon fuel tank – was sold in Arizona in 1973 for $153,000. A rug from the Reich Chancellery fetched $100,000. A millionaire in Nevada paid $60,000 for the crateful of Hitler’s personal property rescued from the basement of the Führerbau. The Marquess of Bath acquired Himmler’s spectacles, removed from his body after his suicide. He also bought a tablecloth which had belonged to the Commandant of Belsen concentration camp. A military dealer in Maryland, Charles Snyder, sold locks of Eva Braun’s hair for $3500, and – following a deal with the official American executioner – strands from the ropes which hanged the Nuremberg war criminals.

It was against this background, in 1973, with the Hitler Wave at its height, that Mr Billy F. Price of Houston, Texas, heard of a new prize about to come on the market. Mr Price – owner of Hitler’s napkins and cutlery and on his way to possessing one of the world’s largest collections of Hitler paintings – discovered through contacts in Germany that Hermann Goering’s old yacht was for sale. Price expressed an interest. But before he had time to put in a bid, the boat was sold. The purchaser, he learned later, was a figure hitherto unknown in the close-knit memorabilia market: a German journalist named Gerd Heidemann.

THE BOAT WAS lying low against the harbour jetty when he first saw her, ageing and dilapidated, with the freezing waters of the River Rhine seeping into her hold. She had been built in 1937 and presented as a gift by the German motor industry to Hermann Goering, architect of Hitler’s rearmament programme and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe. The sumptuously finished motor yacht took its place amongst the other trappings of the Reichsmarschall’s grandiose lifestyle: his luxurious private train, his 100,000 acre hunting estate, his enormous hoard of looted art treasures. In honour of his first wife, who had died prematurely in 1931, Goering named her Carin II . The yacht survived the wartime air raids guarded by three soldiers in a private anchorage in Berlin. She also survived the death of her owner in Nuremberg in 1946. During the Allied occupation she was impounded by Field Marshal Montgomery and presented to the British Royal Family who rechristened her the Royal Albert . Following the birth of the Prince of Wales, she was renamed the Prince Charles . In 1960, after more than a decade in the service of the British Rhine Flotilla, the Queen returned the yacht to Goering’s widow, his second wife, Emmy.

It was on a bleak day in January 1973, thirteen years later, that Gerd Heidemann found her moored on the waterfront in the West German capital, Bonn. She now belonged to the owner of a local printing works. More than eighty feet long, expensive to maintain and in need of extensive repairs, the yacht had become a financial liability. The owner told Heidemann he wanted to sell her.

Heidemann subsequently maintained that at that time he had no particular interest in the Nazis. He was a photographer and reporter on Stern and had simply been commissioned to take pictures of the boat for a feature article. He was forty-one years old, his third marriage had recently collapsed, and he was looking for an opportunity to make some money. He concluded that the yacht, once renovated, could be sold for a large profit. A few weeks later, in March, he bought her for 160,000 marks. It was a huge sum of money for an ordinary journalist to find. He had to mortgage his house, a bungalow in the Hamburg suburb of Flottbeck, to raise it.