Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

On 1 June he received a further 225,000 marks. Shortly afterwards he returned from Stuttgart with more books. There were now twelve Hitler diaries in the management safe.

In May, Manfred Fischer had let another member of the publishing company’s management into the secret of the diaries’ existence. He was Dr Andreas Ruppert, Gruner and Jahr’s legal adviser. Fischer wanted his opinion of the legality of the whole project. Would Stern be able to publish the diaries? Who owned the copyright?

Ruppert reported back that determining ownership of Hitler’s estate was complex, indeed almost impossible. Hitler’s property, together with 5 million marks owed to him by the publishers of Mein Kampf , was confiscated, after a court case, by the State of Bavaria in 1948. Hitler’s will was declared invalid and in 1951, the Bavarian authorities seized personal objects bequeathed by Hitler to his housekeeper to prevent her selling them. But the following year they had been unable to prevent the appearance of Hitler’s Table Talk : the state apparently owned rights in Hitler’s literary estate only as far as published material was concerned; previously unpublished material fell outside their control. It was impossible to predict how the Bavarians or the Federal Government would react to news of the diaries’ existence. The situation was further complicated by the fact that various private deals had been arranged with Hitler’s descendants. François Genoud, the Swiss lawyer and ex-Nazi, had signed an agreement with Paula, Hitler’s sister, shortly after the war. But Paula was long since dead. Meanwhile, the West German historian, Werner Maser, had a separate contract to act as a trustee for the Hitler family. It was decided, as a first step towards securing ownership of the diaries, to make a deal with Maser.

Maser was a controversial figure. Ten years previously he had written a bestselling biography of Hitler, translated into twenty languages, which was regarded as having dwelt, at suspicious length, on the positive aspects of Hitler’s character and achievements. In 1977 he had written a book attacking the Allied handling of the Nuremberg Trials, stating that, in many instances, the hanged war criminals were victims of a miscarriage of justice. His relations with the left-wing Stern were strained. The magazine therefore approached him through his former assistant, Michael Hepp. According to Maser:

[Hepp] rang me in the summer of 1981 and asked me if I was interested in talking to a journalist from Stern . I told him of my basic objection to newspapers like Stern …. Herr Hepp said that this journalist was a very sensible man who also had a large collection of Hitler memorabilia. We agreed a date and shortly afterwards Hepp and Heidemann came to see me.

Heidemann arrived at Maser’s home in Speyer, near Heidelberg, on 11 June. Without mentioning the diaries, he asked the historian to sell him the rights to any original Hitler material which he had already discovered or might discover in the future. After a week’s haggling over terms, a handwritten contract was drawn up and signed on 18 June:

Professor Dr Werner Maser receives, as the administrator of Hitler’s will on behalf of Hitler’s descendants, a fee of 20,000 marks, paid in cash. For this sum he allows Gerd Heidemann the rights to all the discovered or purchased documents or notes in the hand of Adolf Hitler, including transcribed telephone conversations and other conversations which have so far not been published and which could be used for publication. Professor Dr Werner Maser gives to Gerd Heidemann all the rights necessary for this, including personal rights and copyrights. Dr Maser affirms that he is empowered to do this on behalf of the family. This document is completed in the legal department in Hamburg and is valid in German law.

Heidemann then opened a suitcase and pulled out a bundle of money. He counted out twenty-two 1000-mark notes and handed them to Maser.

After delivering the twelfth diary, Heidemann suddenly announced a price increase. Instead of costing 85,000 marks each, the books would now cost 100,000 marks. The East German general, he told the Stern management, was insisting on more money: to continue supplying the books, he was having to bribe an increasing number of corrupt communist officials. This news was a disappointment to the company. They had originally expected to have all the books in Hamburg by mid-May; instead, by mid-June, they had less than half. But they certainly did not want to jeopardize the project at such a late stage. They had no alternative but to agree to pay. Not once did they suspect where the additional cash was really going.

After years of living in debt, Heidemann was now awash with money. Over the following months he and Gina went on a spending spree impressive even by Hamburg’s wealthy standards. In one of the city’s department stores he bought 37,000 marks’ worth of furnishings to renovate their flat; he produced the money from his jacket pocket with the bank’s seal still on the bundles. At the Luehrs travel agency he put down 27,000 marks in cash on the counter and booked firstclass cabins for himself and his family on the maiden voyage of the luxury liner Astor. The staff had no difficulty in describing the event to the police in 1983 – years later they could still remember the difficulty they had trying to stuff all Heidemann’s money into the till. Gina got two cars – a convertible BMW 318 for 32,000 marks and a Porsche 911 for 26,000. The Heidemanns eventually moved into larger accommodation on the Elbchaussee, Hamburg’s most exclusive street: not content with one, they rented two apartments. A fortune went on jewellery and carpets.

Inflated by Stern ’s money, Heidemann’s compulsion to collect Nazi memorabilia ballooned out of control. Some of it was presumably genuine, like Karl Wolff’s SS honour dagger, for which Heidemann paid the old general 30,000 marks. Most of it, however, came from Konrad Kujau. It included a swastika banner which Kujau passed off as the ‘Blood Flag’, the famous symbol of Hitler’s abortive beer hall putsch of 1923, preserved on Hitler’s orders like a holy relic in honour of the sixteen Nazi ‘martyrs’ killed that day. In reality, Heidemann’s ‘Blood Flag’ was simply an ordinary swastika banner – of which there are thousands in existence – to which Kujau had added his usual forged authentication. The swastika was in an old glass case upon which was glued a note: ‘As the condition of the flag has suffered greatly in the years of confiscation it is shown in the flag hall of the Brownhouse behind glass. According to the wishes of the Führer.’

Heidemann also received from Kujau three hundred oil paintings, sketches and watercolours supposedly by Hitler; Nazi Party uniforms, flags and postcards; and 120 so-called Hitler documents. In addition, he acquired what he believed to be the actual revolver which Hitler had used to shoot himself. Attached to it was a label in Martin Bormann’s handwriting stating that ‘with this pistol, the Führer took his own life’. Heidemann proudly showed it to Wilhelm Mohnke and Otto Guensche. The gun was one of the most palpable fakes in his collection: it was a Belgian FN, whereas Hitler was known to have used a much heavier weapon, a 7.65 millimetre Walther. Both men said as much to Heidemann. Guensche, in particular, was in a position to know. He had helped carry the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun out of the bunker. Indeed he had actually picked up the suicide weapon from the bunker floor where it had slipped from Hitler’s fingers. But as with the diaries, Heidemann could not be swayed from his belief in its authenticity. He seemed to read great significance into the fact that only one of the revolver’s bullets had been fired.