Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

Problem is that the Bavarian state might try to seize this hoard if they knew where in the Federal Republic it is now located, as they have laid claim to all Hitler’s properties by means of a spurious postwar ruling setting aside the personal testament signed and witnessed in the Berlin bunker. Therefore nobody on our side is saying where this Stuttgart man is, or who.

Irving was always interested in documents. Documents were the lifeblood of his career. Probably no other historian in the world had spent as long as he had trawling through the wartime archives in Europe and America. He had tried to track down Eva Braun’s diary in New Mexico. He had spent weeks fruitlessly searching an East German forest with a protonmagnetometer, trying to find the glass jar containing the final entries in Goebbels’s diaries. Over the past twenty years, like the Zero Mostel character in The Producers with his constant trips into ‘little old lady land’, Irving had visited countless lonely old widows in small German towns, perched on countless sofas drinking cups of tea, made hours of polite conversation, waiting for the moment when they would invite him to look at ‘a few pieces of paper my husband left behind’. In this way he obtained a mass of new material, including the diaries of Walther Hewel, Ribbentrop’s liaison officer on Hitler’s staff, and the unpublished memoirs of Field Marshal Richthofen. Priesack’s story of the ‘mystery man in Stuttgart’ naturally intrigued him, and when he returned home to Duke Street that night he made a careful note of the conversation. He decided that when he was next in Germany he would make a few inquiries about these ‘Hitler diaries’.

SPREAD BEFORE HIM in his office in South Carolina, Ordway Hilton had nine samples of writing for analysis. His task was to determine whether two of them – the Hess document and the Horthy telegram – were genuine. The other seven pieces of material were supposedly authentic ‘standards’ which he understood had been ‘identified as being in the handwriting of Adolf Hitler’. There were three photocopies from the Bundesarchiv: a short postscript signed ‘Adolf H’ at the end of a typewritten letter dated 1933; a handwritten letter to a party official dated 1936; and copies of eleven Hitler signatures, also from 1936. The other four samples were originals from Heidemann’s collection: a handwritten note recording the promotion of General von Kleist dated February 1943 (‘In the name of the German people as Reichs Chancellor and Supreme Commander, I award Colonel-General Ewald von Kleist the rank, dignity and protection of a Field Marshal of the German Reich…’); and three signed photographs showing, respectively, Hitler with Goering, Schaub and Bormann, Hitler with Konstantin Hierl, leader of the Reich Labour Service, in May 1940, and Hitler standing with a group in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris after the fall of France.

Hilton quickly noticed a puzzling discrepancy in this comparison material. Using a binocular microscope he could see that in the photocopies, Hitler signed the ‘A’ in Adolf with a cross-stroke ‘slanting downward’. In the originals, this stroke was horizontal. Unfortunately for him and for Stern , he did not pay much attention to this seemingly trivial detail: signatures, after all, often vary over the years and the original documents were all dated at least four years after the photocopies.

Three and a half weeks after Walde’s and Sorge’s visit, on Tuesday, 11 May, Hilton completed what he described as ‘an extensive examination’ of the documents he had been given. His findings were exactly what Stern had hoped and expected. The Hess document, he wrote in his report, ‘reveals a free, natural form of writing’:

Letters which should have looped enclosures below the line are more commonly a simple long curving stroke. The legibility and details of the single space letters are poor due to the compression of their vertical height. Variable forms are present such as the ‘t’ with a separate cross stroke and with the closing made by a triangular movement at the letter base to connect the cross stroke to the body of the letter.

These same habits are found in the known Hitler writing…. The lack of lower loop, the flattened single space letters, the variable use of letter forms, and the interruptions in the words especially at points when the letter forms are connected in other instances are all common to both the known and this page of writing under investigation. The combination of all these factors establishes in my opinion adequate proof that this document was written by the same person who prepared all of the known writings. Further there is no evidence within this writing which suggests in any way that this page was prepared by another person in imitation of the writing of Adolf Hitler, and consequently I must conclude that he prepared the document.

After studying the Horthy telegram he reached a similar conclusion. He was particularly impressed by the signature. ‘The name Adolf has been condensed to a capital “A” followed by a straight crossed downstroke’; whilst in the signature of the surname:

The H-form is rotated to the right so that it lies almost horizontal, and the balance of the signature projects downward at a steep angle. This form is typical of the 1940 signatures as can be seen on the photographs and on the von Kleist appointment. Thus all the elements of the signature to the Horthy telegram are consistent with Adolf Hitler’s signature and must have been signed by him.

Hilton’s report, couched in five pages of professional gobbledegook, was conclusive. But, based as it was on the assumption that all the documents he had been given for comparison were authentic, it was also completely wrong. It was scarcely surprising that the signatures in the Kleist document, the Horthy telegram and the photographs proved ‘consistent’: they were all forged by Kujau.

At first sight, this mingling of genuine and false material would seem to suggest that Hilton was deliberately misled by the Stern men. In fact, neither the police nor Stern ’s own subsequent internal inquiry found this to be the case. According to the Stern Report : ‘Heidemann cannot be accused of imposing material on [the experts]. Walde and Sorge asked him for it.’ Walde confirmed this. ‘Heidemann’, he told the police, ‘left the organization of the authentication tests completely to me and Sorge. I have no reason to believe that he wanted to obstruct or twist the authentication of the documents.’ The bungling of the tests was the result of straightforward incompetence, typical of the negligence with which the whole diaries affair was handled. Walde and Sorge, in commissioning Hilton, failed to differentiate between documents from the Bundesarchiv and material from Heidemann’s collection. And Hilton, working in isolation 3000 miles away, unfamiliar with the script in which the documents were written, did not bother to check.

The American could at least plead in mitigation that his mistake was based on an initial error by Stern . The police department of Rhineland-Pfalz had no such excuse.

The police were busy. A routine request from the Bundesarchiv was low on their list of priorities. It was a month before one of their handwriting experts, Herr Huebner, was able to look at the material they had been sent. Huebner had four samples to check: a photocopy of the Hess announcement and originals of a message to General Franco, some speech notes and a letter to Goering. His comparison material, five original Hitler documents from the Bundesarchiv, was unpolluted by Heidemann’s fakes. Nevertheless, in a brief report submitted on 25 May, Huebner declared ‘with a probability bordering on certainty’, that three of the Stern documents were genuine. He could not be quite so positive about the Hess communiqué because he had not seen the original, but in his opinion it was ‘highly probable’ that it was in Hitler’s hand.