Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

If Stern had been properly sceptical, the magazine would have commissioned a thorough forensic examination of a complete diary volume. Instead, they concentrated on securing the bare minimum of authentication felt necessary to satisfy the rest of the world. The process, consequently, was flawed from the start.

‘The security precautions surrounding the authentication had to be very tight,’ recalled Walde. ‘We had to prevent word leaking out and jeopardizing the life of “Fischer’s” brother in East Germany.’ It was considered too risky to part with an entire book. A single page was cut out of the special volume devoted to the flight of Rudolf Hess which had been delivered to Stern the previous November. The page consisted of a draft, supposedly in Hitler’s hand, of the Nazi Party’s official announcement of Hess’s flight to Scotland. This tiny sample was considered sufficient to determine the authenticity of the entire hoard of diaries. The text of the Hess statement was selected for analysis because it was already well known; the diary page on which it was copied out was to be passed off simply as a hitherto undiscovered Hitler document, part of a larger find which the magazine wanted checked. None of the experts was told that what they were actually authenticating were Hitler’s diaries. This duplicity on Stern ’s part, the product of its anxiety to safeguard its scoop, was to lead it to disaster.

On Monday, 5 April, Heidemann and Walde visited the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz to meet two of the archive’s senior officials, Dr Josef Henke and Dr Klaus Oldenhage. They gave them what purported to be a handwritten draft by Hitler of a New Year greetings telegram, dated i January 1940, addressed to General Franco: this was one of the documents Kujau had supplied to Heidemann along with the diaries. The two journalists told the archivists that it was one of a set of documents which Stern believed it could obtain from sources outside the Federal Republic. In return for an assurance that after Stern had finished with it the material would eventually be donated to the Bundesarchiv, Dr Henke agreed to submit the telegram to the West German police for an official handwriting and forensic analysis. The following day, Walde sent the archivists two further original documents: a speech draft dated 29 December 1934 and a letter to Hermann Goering dated 17 October 1940. These too were drawn from the archive accompanying the diaries. In a covering note, Walde stressed the need for secrecy:

Once again we ask you to treat the enclosed documents with absolute discretion and not to reveal the source. Your report should be completed as soon as possible in order to enable us to secure the other material should it prove genuine. Otherwise, we must assume that the documents which are still abroad will be sold to collectors in the United States.

Only on 7 April, in a postscript to his letter, did Walde announce that ‘Herr Heidemann and I have decided to give you a copy of a further document’. This was the Hess statement, slipped in casually among the other papers, with no suggestion that it had been cut out of a diary. Two weeks later, on 21 April, the Bundesarchiv sent all the Stern documents (three originals and one photocopy) to the regional police headquarters in Rhineland-Pfalz for a handwriting analysis. For comparison purposes, they enclosed five authentic examples of Hitler writing from their own archives. They would have to wait a month for the results.

Walde, meanwhile, had embarked on a 7000-mile round trip to commission additional experts to give their opinions. On Tuesday 13 April, accompanied by Wilfried Sorge, he flew to Switzerland to see Dr Max Frei-Sulzer, former head of the forensic department of the Zurich police. Frei-Sulzer was living in retirement in the small lakeside town of Thalwil, but was always willing to undertake freelance work. According to Walde, he advised them not to bother with a paper test: ‘With today’s technology it is possible to make paper look any age you choose.’ He agreed to conduct a handwriting analysis. Walde, swearing him to secrecy, provided him with two photocopies of documents from the Stern hoard: the Hess statement and a draft telegram to the Hungarian ruler, Admiral Horthy. As comparison material, Frei-Sulzer was supplied with the same copies of authentic Hitler writing that the Bundesarchiv had given to the Rhineland-Pfalz police. A third set of documents for comparison was provided by Gerd Heidemann from his private collection: a paper from 1943 recording the promotion of General Ewald von Kleist to the rank of Field Marshal, along with three signed Hitler photographs. Unfortunately for Frei-Sulzer, these supposedly genuine examples of the Führer’s writings were also the work of Konrad Kujau, a confusion which meant that the scientist in some instances would be comparing Kujau’s hand with Kujau’s, rather than with Hitler’s.

The following day, leaving Frei-Sulzer to begin his examination, Walde and Sorge flew from Switzerland to the United States to see a second freelance expert. They spent the night of 15 April in the Hyatt Hotel in Greenville, South Carolina, and early the following morning headed off to their final destination: the town of Landrum, an hour’s drive to the north.

Ordway Hilton, like Max Frei-Sulzer, was an elderly man, living in retirement, happy to undertake freelance work. He had been employed by the New York Police Department for almost thirty years and was a distinguished member of his own particular fraternity – a contributor to the proceedings of the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners, the American Academy of Forensic Science and the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners. Hilton now operated from his house in Landrum to which, at 10 a.m. on Friday i6 April, he welcomed his two visitors from Germany.

The American was handed the originals of the two documents copied for Frei-Sulzer: the page from the Hess volume and the telegram for Horthy, together with an accompanying folder of ‘authentic’ Hitler writing for comparison, part of which was genuine and part from Heidemann’s collection of forgeries. ‘Some bore signatures that were his or that they told me were his,’ he later recalled. ‘Some were photocopies they said came from their archives.’ Hilton promised to keep their visit secret and to deliver his verdict as quickly as possible.

Walde and Sorge began the long journey back to Hamburg unaware that the only result of their four-day mission was to botch one of Stern ’s last chances of avoiding catastrophe. If only they had taken the Hess page to a practising forensic expert – for example, Dr Julius Grant, a freelance consultant based in London – they would have discovered within five hours that it contained chemicals of postwar origin and therefore had to be forged. But in their ignorance they chose to depend on the much less reliable and slower process of handwriting analysis. They compounded this error by selecting as experts two men unsuited to the task. True, Frei-Sulzer and Hilton both had international reputations – they were chosen because it was felt their approval would be an advantage in syndication negotiations in Europe and America. But Frei-Sulzer’s speciality was investigating biological microtraces, not handwriting; and Ordway Hilton was handicapped by the fact that he could not even understand the language in which the diaries were written. Neither man was a specialist in Nazi documents. In 1983, an expert who was – Charles Hamilton, a New York autograph dealer – estimated that on the American market only Abraham Lincoln’s signature commands a greater price than Hitler’s. A page of the Führer’s writing might fetch $15,000 and no man’s autograph is more commonly forged: Hamilton reckoned to see a dozen forgeries a year. If Hilton and Frei-Sulzer had been aware of the extent of the market in Hitler fakes they might have been more suspicious of the gentlemen from Hamburg. And as if all this were not enough, Walde and Sorge had crowned the confusion by unwittingly introducing forgeries from Heidemann’s collection into the process of authentication.