Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

But if I am asked today whether I knew him well – how he thought as a politician and statesman, what kind of man he was – then I’m bound to confess that I know only very little about him; in fact nothing at all. The fact is that although I went through so much together with him, in all the years of working with him I never came closer to him than on the first day we met, either personally or otherwise.

‘When a decision has to be taken,’ Hermann Goering told one diplomat before the war, ‘none of us count more than the stones on which we are standing. It is the Führer alone who decides.’ And General Jodl, at Hitler’s side throughout six years of war, was equally baffled. ‘To this very day,’ he wrote in 1946, ‘I do not know what he thought or knew or really wanted.’ He was utterly self-contained, mysterious, unpredictable, secretive, awesome. He was, as Hugh Trevor-Roper put it, ‘the Rousseau, the Mirabeau, the Robespierre and the Napoleon of his revolution; he was its Marx, its Lenin, its Trotsky and its Stalin.’ What a sensation it would cause if it were now discovered that such a man had left behind a diary ….

On Friday, 8 April 1983, exactly one week after his initial conversation with The Times , Hugh Trevor-Roper presented himself at Terminal 2 of London’s Heathrow Airport. There he was met by Stern ’s London representative, Peter Wickman, and at 11.15 a.m. they took off for Zurich.

Wickman, plump and garrulous, proved an amiable companion and the sixty-nine-year-old historian was soon launched into one of his favourite topics of conversation: the inordinate superiority of Oxford over Cambridge. (He once said that leaving an Oxford professorship for a Cambridge mastership was rather like becoming a colonial governor.) It was not until the stewardess had served lunch that the two men settled down to business.

Wickman gave Trevor-Roper a twenty-page, typewritten document, bound in a clear plastic cover and entitled Plan 3. Based on the so-called diaries, it told the story of how Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, had undertaken his abortive peace mission to Britain in May 1941. The accepted view among historians was that Hess had made his dramatic flight on his own initiative. But according to the diary entries quoted in Plan 3, Hitler knew of Hess’s intention in advance.

On 25 June 1939, Hitler was alleged to have written in his diary:

Hess sends me a personal note about the England problem. Would not have thought that this Hess is so sharp-witted. This note is very, very interesting.

Other entries followed:

28 June : Read the Hess note again. Simply fantastic and yet so simple.

6 July : Hess should work over his thoughts which he has informed me about in his note and I anticipate seeing him for a one-to-one meeting.

13 July : Have also talked to Hess again. As soon as he has thought everything over properly, he will call me back. I would not have thought Hess capable of this. Not Hess.

22 July : Have Goering with me once more. I carefully inquire what range our best planes have. Hess said that one would have to build a special plane and that he was already working on the plans. What a man. He does not want any more said to Goering about his plan.

Finally, Hitler was supposed to have outlined three contingency plans:

1. Should the mission go well and Hess be successful, he acted in agreement with me.

2. If Hess is arrested in England as a spy, then he informed me some time ago of his plan, but I rejected it.

3. Should his mission fail completely, I declare Hess acted in a fit of delusion.

When it became clear that Hess’s mission had failed, ‘Plan 3’ had duly been adopted. This, according to Stern , was the solution to one of the great mysteries of the Second World War, proof that six weeks before the invasion of Russia, Hitler had made a genuine attempt to negotiate peace with Britain.

Even as he took detailed notes from the document, suspicions began to accumulate in Trevor-Roper’s mind. Stern ’s version of the Hess story was in conflict with all the available evidence. Albert Speer, for example, had been outside Hitler’s study door at the precise moment that the Führer had learned of Hess’s flight to Britain. ‘I suddenly heard’, Speer recalled, ‘an inarticulate, almost animal outcry.’ Trevor-Roper had been told the story by Speer in person. He had subsequently described in his own book, The Last Days of Hitler, how the Nazi leadership had been hastily summoned to the Berghof to discuss the damage Hess had done: hardly the behaviour one would have expected if Hitler had known of Hess’s intention in advance. He told Wickman immediately that he thought the Stern story was rubbish and Wickman, who had long nursed his own private doubts, agreed.

By the time the plane landed in Zurich, Trevor-Roper was finding it difficult to keep an open mind about the diaries. He was almost certain it was a wasted journey, but having come so far he thought he might as well at least see them. The two men took a taxi into town, dropped off their luggage at the Hotel Baur au Lac, and while Trevor-Roper waited, Wickman telephoned ahead to the bank where the diaries were being kept. The Stern people were already waiting. Wickman told them that he and the historian were on their way over.

Shortly after 3 p.m., Trevor-Roper was ushered into a ground floor room of Zurich’s Handelsbank. At the end of a long table, three men rose to meet him. One was Wilfried Sorge, the salesman who had flown round the world alerting newspapers in America, Japan, Italy, Spain and Britain to the existence of the diaries. Another was Dr Jan Hensmann, the financial director of Stern ’s parent company, Gruner and Jahr. The third German was Stern ’s bullet-headed editor-in-chief, Peter Koch.

When the introductions had been completed, Koch gestured towards a side table. On it were fifty-eight volumes of diaries, carefully piled up in a stack more than two feet high. Another set of documents was in a metal safety deposit box. There was a bound volume of original drawings and paintings. There was even a First World War helmet, allegedly Hitler’s. This was no mere handful of notes. It was, as Trevor-Roper later described it, ‘a whole coherent archive covering 35 years’. He was staggered by its scale.

He picked up a couple of the books. They were A4-sized, with stiff black covers. Some bore red wax seals in the form of a German eagle. Others were decorated with initials in gothic script. Most carried typewritten labels declaring them to be the property of the Führer and signed by Martin Bormann. The pages inside were lined, some densely filled with old Germanic script, some bearing only a couple of sentences, some completely blank. At the foot of each page was Hitler’s signature – a jagged oscillation in black ink, like a seismographic record of some distant earthquake.

The Stern men met Trevor-Roper’s queries point by point. They produced three separate reports from handwriting experts authenticating the documents. They described how the diaries had come into their hands. They confirmed that the magazine knew the identity of the supplier. It was enough.

When I entered the back room in the Swiss bank [wrote Trevor-Roper in The Times ], and turned the pages of those volumes, my doubts gradually dissolved. I am now satisfied that the documents are authentic; that the history of their wanderings since 1945 is true; and that the standard accounts of Hitler’s writing habits, of his personality, and even, perhaps, some public events may, in consequence, have to be revised.

Twenty-four hours later Rupert Murdoch was sitting in the same bank vault leafing through the diaries with the former head of Reuters at his side translating their contents. By mid-afternoon on 9 April he had offered the delighted Germans $3 million for the world rights.