Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

Comrade Fischer,

I inform you that the text of the document ‘ Der Kamerad ’ was originally written, in a slightly different form, by Xaver Kern in the year 1871. This verse was published repeatedly under different titles until 1942, always with slight textual variations. It was also published in 1956 in Volk und Wissen (East Germany, volume nine). I will send you a photocopy of the original in the next couple of days.

If Heidemann had bothered to check with Jaeckel, or if Jaeckel had troubled himself to speak to Stern about the forged poems, Kujau’s activities would almost certainly have been exposed. As it was, his victims once again played into his hands and Kujau was allowed to carry on his lucrative business for another two years.

ON 13 MAY 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot and wounded in an assassination attempt in St Peter’s Square in Rome. When the news came through in the Stern building in Hamburg, there was an immediate editorial conference. This dramatic story had all the ingredients the magazine specialized in: violence, personal tragedy, conspiracy, espionage, international crisis, vivid pictures – Stern threw all its resources into reporting the evept. Someone with experience of foreign investigations should go to Turkey, home of the would-be assassin. The ideal choice was Heidemann. Had anyone seen him? Where was Heidemann these days?

Henri Nannen had stepped down from the day-to-day editing of Stern at the beginning of the year to become the magazine’s publisher. A triumvirate of editors-in-chief had replaced him: Peter Koch, responsible for politics, economics and foreign affairs; Felix Schmidt, in charge of the arts, entertainment and leisure sections; and a design expert, Rolf Gillhausen. Koch had already spent several fruitless sessions with Heidemann trying to force him to do some normal journalism for a change. Now, Schmidt undertook to track him down. He rang Thomas Walde, Heidemann’s departmental head. Walde said the reporter was not available. ‘I don’t care where he is,’ shouted Schmidt. ‘Get him into my office.’ In exasperation, he went to consult Nannen. ‘Who is Heidemann working for?’ he demanded. ‘The editors or the publishing company?’ Nannen said that obviously he worked for the editors and advised Schmidt and Koch to complain to the management.

Meanwhile, three floors above them, uncertain as to what he should do, Walde was speaking to Wilfried Sorge. Because Manfred Fischer was away the two men approached his deputy, Jan Hensmann, and explained the problem. Hensmann’s objective was a quiet life. His advice was that Heidemann should feign illness; Walde could then lie to the editors and tell them that Heidemann was on sick leave. Neither of the journalists was enthusiastic about this idea. With great reluctance, Hensmann finally accepted that the time had come to inform the lucky editors of the scoop the management was acquiring for them. The diaries were fetched from the safe and arranged in a pile on a small table in the corner of his office. Hensmann then rang Koch, the most senior of the editors, and asked him to come upstairs.

Koch’s first reaction on being shown the diaries was one of anger at having been deceived by the management. He rang down to Schmidt and Gillhausen in the Stern offices below and told them to come up and join him. Schmidt arrived a few minutes later to find his colleague ‘bent over a pile of A4-sized books. Koch said to me that they were the diaries of Adolf Hitler and that Heidemann had got them.’ Like almost everyone else in the company, they were unable to read the antiquated script. They could only concentrate on the diaries’ external features. Gillhausen noted that most of the books had a ‘black cover’, ‘a red cord and a red seal’, and a note pasted on the front ‘on which either Hess or Bormann had written that these books were the property of the Führer’. Hensmann said that Heidemann was not available for normal journalistic work because he was acquiring the books on the management’s behalf. Large sums of money had been paid. Absolute secrecy was necessary.

The editors retreated to Koch’s office to digest this information. Their reactions were mixed. There was unanimous resentment at the way they had been treated: five months into their new jobs it did not augur well for the future. On the other hand, the editors did not have the slightest doubt that the books were genuine. They had to be. Over half a million marks had already been spent. It was impossible to conceive of the shrewd, conservative, financially cautious managers of Gruner and Jahr investing in anything unless they were absolutely certain of its value. The three had to accept that if they rejected the diaries, they risked going down in history as the editors who threw away one of the biggest scoops since the war.

That point was made with brutal frankness a couple of days later, when Manfred Fischer returned and chaired a joint meeting of journalists and businessmen to review the whole project. Koch, Schmidt and Gillhausen faced Heidemann, Walde, Sorge and Hensmann. Fischer was not in the least apologetic for having circumvented the editors. As far as he was concerned their inept handling of Heidemann had almost lost the company this tremendous coup. He had no doubts about the authenticity of the diaries. ‘Do you think,’ he inquired, ‘that I would have committed so much money if I were not convinced?’ If Stern did not want the diaries, they could be marketed elsewhere: Bertelsmann could exploit the world rights; Bantam Books could handle the American publication. Heidemann scarcely opened his mouth. It was Fischer who explained the story of the East German general and his brother in the West whose identity could not be revealed. The three editors listened without enthusiasm. Humiliated and offended by the management’s behaviour, their attitude to Heidemann’s great scoop was, and would remain for many months, one of sullen acquiescence.

On 27 May, Heidemann crossed the border into East Germany and returned to Boernersdorf. This time he was on his own. He wanted to discover more about the crashed transport plane. He found some eyewitnesses to the disaster. Helda Fries, wife of a local hotel owner, described how the plane fell out of the sky, clipping the tops of the trees in the nearby Heidenholz forest. One of its three engines was wrenched off before it hit the ground. Richard Elbe, a local farmer who had been in the fields in charge of some Russian and French slave labourers, was the first to reach the burning wreck. Bullets were exploding, people trapped inside were screaming and hammering to get out. In front of them, one survivor, Franz Westermeier, crawled out of the chaos. ‘Come here you cowardly dogs,’ Elbe recalled him shouting. ‘Come here. You are just too scared.’ But the heat was too intense for the rescuers to get close. A farmworker, said Elbe, called Eduard Grimme later pulled the corpses from the wreckage. ‘They didn’t look like people any more. The arms were gone and the legs and everything else was charred.’ The remains were examined in the local morgue by a German medical officer. On one body was a cigarette case embossed with the symbol of Lufthansa and the words: ‘In memory of 500,000 kilometres flying.’ It had belonged to Gundlfinger. The remains of the plane were cordoned off by German police and SS men. But according to Erwin Goebel, son of the mayor at that time, ‘many people managed to salvage parts from the aircraft and got richer for it, soldiers included.’ Debris and pieces of luggage were scattered all over the forest. Richard Elbe had carried off two cockpit windows and used them to build part of a shed.

It was all very insubstantial – fragments of gossip, hazily recalled thirty-six years after the event. Nevertheless, it was something for Heidemann to grasp at. He bought the two old windows off Elbe and carted them back with him to Hamburg where he showed them off as further proof of the story.