Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

Schulte-Hillen was hopelessly out of his depth. Every so often, Heidemann would come into his office, escorted by Sorge, and read extracts from the latest diaries out loud to him. The banality of the content meant nothing to the technically minded managing director. ‘I didn’t concern myself with the question of whether they were sensational or not. That wasn’t my affair.’ For Schulte-Hillen, struggling to read himself into his new job, the diaries were an exotic project bequeathed to him by his predecessor. ‘I didn’t really worry about the details,’ he confessed. ‘Sorge and Walde were Heidemann’s principal points of reference.’

Heidemann now began fantasizing about his role as middleman between Stern and the diaries’ supplier. Simply flying down to Stuttgart, handing over the money and picking up the diaries did not accord with his vision of himself as a sleuth reporter. He decided to glamorize the story. ‘I remember a very hot day in the summer,’ said Walde later. ‘Gerd Heidemann arrived in the office in a blue suit looking unusually worked-up.’ According to Heidemann, the lorry driver who used to bring the diaries out of East Germany had been replaced. Heidemann said he was now having to drive into the East himself and smuggle the documents illegally over the border. ‘The whole thing seemed very dangerous to him,’ said Walde. ‘He didn’t know what to do when he got to the frontier. He just put the envelope containing the diary under the car’s mat.’

For the benefit of Schulte-Hillen, Heidemann further elaborated on the story. He told the managing director that he would drive down the autobahn to Berlin. At an agreed point on the journey, another car would draw alongside him with its passenger window open. With both cars travelling at the same speed, Heidemann would toss the packet of money through the open window. The vehicles would then exchange positions and the driver of the other car would throw him the diaries. The managing director had never heard anything like it. He told Heidemann he was ‘crazy’: ‘I said he shouldn’t do it, especially in view of his family responsibilities.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ Schulte-Hillen remembers Heidemann telling him, ‘I’ll do it.’

Despite his misgivings for Heidemann’s safety, Schulte-Hillen was impressed, and now treated the reporter with even greater respect. He would not hear a word said against him. He would rebuke anyone who expressed doubts about Heidemann’s heroism: ‘When a colleague puts himself in personal danger in order to obtain things,’ he used to say, ‘he should be entitled to the trust of others.’ When Heidemann complained to Sorge that his own car was too dilapidated for this kind of work and that he was having to use Gina’s, Schulte-Hillen arranged for him to be given a brand new company Mercedes.

In fact, Gruner and Jahr had a strong motive for believing Heidemann’s story. If they could swear on oath that the money for the diaries had been paid outside West Germany, they would enjoy substantial tax concessions. In November, there was a month-long series of negotiations to provide Heidemann with a special life insurance policy at Gruner and Jahr’s expense. Heidemann insisted on a clause providing for the payment of ransom money in case they should have to buy him out of an East German jail. In the event of his death, his share in the profits from Hitler’s diaries was to be given to his heirs. Heidemann joked that this generous policy might induce his wife to ‘separation, Italian style’. This farce carried on until the first week of December, when Heidemann announced that the piano shipments had resumed.

Around this time Heidemann also complained to Schulte-Hillen that he had not received a salary increase for several years. He hinted that he might be forced to leave the company unless something was done. The managing director immediately called in Peter Koch, Felix Schmidt and Rolf Gillhausen and instructed them, in Koch’s words, ‘to take better care of Heidemann, to motivate him more’. The editors had not recommended Heidemann for a rise because they had not thought his work merited one. Now, under pressure, they once again started paying him regular annual increments. Schmidt was also told by Schulte-Hillen to give Heidemann a special bonus payment of 20,000 marks. ‘The man needs recognition,’ Schulte-Hillen told him, ‘and he needs to be treated with special care.’ Schmidt gritted his teeth and arranged this reward for the reporter who had spent a whole year deceiving his editors. ‘ Recognition… special care ….’ ‘These words of the management’, said Schmidt two years later, ‘still ring in my ears.’

Heidemann’s fiftieth birthday coincided with a call from Kujau to tell him that more diaries were ready for collection. Heidemann decided to take Gina down to Stuttgart with him and the couple spent the evening of 3 December having a celebration dinner with Kujau and Edith in the local Holiday Inn, close to the Munich motorway exit. It was the first time all four of them had been together. They got on well; Gina particularly liked Edith – ‘a very nice lady,’ she called her, ‘very bourgeois’. There was champagne, and at midnight the gregarious ‘Dr Fischer’ led them in the singing of ‘Happy Birthday’. Amid warm embraces, Gina presented her husband with a solid gold Rolex watch.

It had been a good year for the couple. Heidemann had at last found the recognition he craved so desperately. Soon he would be able to present the world with his magnificent story and he and Gina would be wealthy for life. The Heidemanns beamed at Kujau, the source of their good fortune. ‘We owe you so much,’ said Gina. Kujau grinned.

THE NEW YEAR of 1982 witnessed further large withdrawals of cash from the Adolphsplatz bank by Gerd Heidemann: 400,000 marks on 14 January; 200,000 on 27 January; 200,000 on 17 February. On 1 March, after picking up another 400,000 marks, he and Walde were taken out to dine at Hamburg’s Coelln Oyster Restaurant by Gerd Schulte-Hillen.

According to Walde, the purpose of the meal was for Schulte-Hillen ‘to show some recognition to Heidemann and to get to know me better’. Between mouthfuls of oysters, the three men discussed the Hitler diaries. There were already more than two dozen volumes in the management safe. There seemed no sign of an end to the stream of books emanating from behind the Iron Curtain. Even so, the time was approaching when decisions would have to be taken about the form of publication. Obviously there would be those who would seek to denigrate Stern ’s scoop. Some form of independent authentication would have to be obtained – not because there were any doubts about the material in the management’s mind, merely to ensure there was a weapon available with which critics could be silenced.

Walde had already made contact with West Germany’s two main police organizations, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) and the Zollkriminalinstitut. Without mentioning the Hitler diaries specifically, he asked them in general terms what sort of tests had to be done to determine the age of documents and the authenticity of handwriting; who could do such tests; how much they might cost; what materials the experts would require for testing. ‘Because neither of these two authorities does work for private individuals, I tried to arrange for people who work there to do tests for us in a private capacity.’ He had then rung the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and the Federal Archives – the Bundesarchiv – in Koblenz, to make arrangements to collect copies of Hitler’s handwriting; this could then be sent to the experts for comparison with Stern ’s material. It should be possible to organize such tests within the next few weeks.