Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

What happened next is described in detail later in this book: how Murdoch and the Newsweek company fell into an ill-tempered auction which at one stage pushed the price of the diaries up to $3.75 million, until Stern ’s greed and Newsweek ’s alleged unscrupulousness punctured the whole deal; how Stern nevertheless managed to sell subsidiary rights in the diaries to newspapers and magazines in America, Britain, Australia, France, Italy, Spain, Norway, Holland and Belgium – a contract carefully calculated to squeeze the last marketable drop out of Adolf Hitler, dividing the diaries into twenty-eight separate extracts whose publication would have spanned more than eighteen months; how news of the diaries’ discovery was rushed into print despite growing evidence that some of the material was of post-war origin; and finally how this elaborate but increasingly shaky pyramid of subsidiary deals and serial rights was sent crashing two weeks later by a short laboratory report from the Federal police.

The diaries, announced the West German state archives on 6 May, were not merely fakes: they were ‘eine plumpe Fdlschung’, a crude forgery, the grotesquely superficial (‘ grotesk oberflächlich ’) concoction of a copyist endowed with a ‘limited intellectual capacity’. The paper, the binding, the glue, the thread were all found to be of post-war manufacture. By the time this was disclosed, the management of Stern, in the course of more than two years, had handed over twenty-seven suitcases full of money to enable their star reporter, Gerd Heidemann, to obtain the diaries. $4 million had disappeared, making the Hitler diaries the most expensive and far-reaching fraud in publishing history, easily dwarfing the $650,000 handed over by McGraw-Hill for the faked autobiography of Howard Hughes. Scores of reputations apart from Trevor-Roper’s were damaged by the diaries fiasco. At least four editors in three different countries lost their jobs as a result.

The affair was a reminder of Adolf Hitler’s continuing hold on the world’s imagination. News of the discovery of the diaries made headlines in every nation; it ran on the front page of the New York Times for five consecutive days. Shrewd businessmen showed themselves willing to pay enormous sums for material of which they had read only a fraction. It did not matter that the diaries’ content was perfunctory and tedious: it was sufficient that it had been written by him. The diaries briefly put Hitler back in the arena of international diplomacy, a weapon in the Cold War which his career had done so much to create. Radio Moscow alleged that ‘the affair of the Hitler diaries clearly reveals the CIA style’. America’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, suspected the communists of producing the diaries ‘to sow distrust between the United States and its German friends’. In the middle of the furore, the East German leader, Erich Hoenecker, cancelled his planned trip to Bonn complaining of a hostile Western press campaign: repeated allegations that the diaries originated in an East German ‘forgery factory’ were bitterly resented in Berlin. When the real forger, Konrad Kujau, confessed to the police on 26 May, it was difficult to believe that so much international confusion could have resulted from the work of this jaunty and farcical figure.

How did it happen? How did a hard-headed German publishing company come to spend so much money on such palpable fakes, and persuade almost a dozen foreign partners to invest in the project? To answer that question, we have to go back more than forty years: back through the expanding market in Hitler memorabilia, back through the activities of the surviving members of the Führer’s inner circle, right back to the figure of Hitler himself, malevolent to the last, but no longer confident of his destiny, preparing for death in his bunker in the spring of 1945.

ON 20 APRIL 1945, Adolf Hitler celebrated his fifty-sixth and final birthday. Russian artillery shells were falling on the centre of Berlin and 6000 Soviet tanks were moving into the outskirts of the capital. Bremen and Hamburg in the north were about to fall to the British; Stuttgart, in the south, to the French. The Americans had captured Nuremberg and the Stars and Stripes was being unfurled over the podium from which Hitler had once addressed the annual Nazi Party rally. To escape the constant Allied air attacks, the Führer and his staff were now forced to live cooped-up in a bunker fifty-five feet beneath the Reich Chancellery. ‘It was not’, observed Martin Bormann in his diary, ‘exactly a birthday situation.’

At 2 p.m. Hitler shuffled out of his bedroom exhausted from lack of sleep. His doctors gave him three injections, including one of glucose. His valet administered eyedrops. He wrapped himself in a heavy grey overcoat, turned up the collar, and slowly climbed the spiral staircase out of the bunker and into the Chancellery garden to inspect a waiting contingent of Hitler Youth. Their leader, Arthur Axmann, was shocked by his appearance: ‘He walked with a stoop. His hands trembled.’ He passed along the short line of boys and patted a couple of them on the cheek. He uttered a few hoarse and scarcely audible words about his faith in an ultimate victory, turned, and retreated back underground to preside over the day’s main war conference.

That same afternoon, while Hitler and his generals were surveying what remained of the German armed forces, Sergeant Rochus Misch, the bunker’s switchboard operator, took the opportunity to slip upstairs into the fresh air for a cigarette. He was standing smoking amid the rubble of the Ehrenhof, the Chancellery’s Court of Honour, when two men appeared. One was Sergeant Wilhelm Arndt, a wounded veteran of twenty, who acted as one of Hitler’s personal servants. The other was a young soldier-valet named Fehrs. Between them they were dragging a large metal trunk. Misch offered to help.

There were approximately ten trunks which had to be loaded on to the back of an antiquated, three-wheeled delivery truck parked in the courtyard. It was heavy work. Misch reckoned that each of the metal containers weighed over one hundred pounds. To heave one on to the back of the truck took two men. Misch did not ask what was in them and Arndt did not tell him. ‘It was only’, he recalled, ‘when Arndt, now in full field uniform and armed with a machine pistol, clambered on top of the chests, that I realized it must be a mission with a one-man escort.’ The truck drove out of the courtyard. Misch watched it disappear. ‘Poor Arndt,’ he reflected years afterwards. ‘At the time we all thought he was the lucky one, escaping embattled Berlin and heading for the mountains.’

Arndt was taking part in a mission known as Operation Seraglio: the evacuation from the Berlin bunker of about eighty members of Hitler’s entourage, together with a mass of official government papers, personal property and valuables. Their destination was the so-called ‘Alpine Redoubt’ in the south of Germany, near Berchtesgaden, where the Nazis had a half-formulated plan to establish a new centre of command in the event of the capture of Berlin. The evacuation was being conducted by air. General Hans Baur, Hitler’s personal pilot, who was responsible for the provision of aircraft, had managed to muster ten planes for the operation, dispersed between four different Berlin airstrips. The lorry carrying Arndt and the metal trunks was directed towards a grass runway at Schoenwalde, about ten miles north of the city. Two planes were waiting there. One was to be piloted by a Luftwaffe flying officer named Schultze; the other by a veteran of the Russian front, Major Friedrich Gundlfinger.