Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

At the end of the conversation, Heidemann reassured his colleagues in the history department that the leak was not as serious as it appeared. He played them a tape recording of his telephone call from Kujau during which ‘Conny’ told him not to worry about Irving. According to Leo Pesch, Heidemann told them that ‘“Conny” was putting so much pressure on Stiefel, there was no way he would hand over his diary volume to Irving.’

That same day, Heidemann collected another 450,000 marks from Sorge.

In London, Irving began transcribing the tape of his telephone call to Priesack. It was a laborious task and took him until after midnight to complete. At 2 a.m. he drove round to the offices of the Sunday Times in Grays Inn Road and left a copy of the transcript in reception addressed to Magnus Linklater. He fell into bed, exhausted, half an hour later.

Linklater found Irving’s envelope when he came into the office the next day. He was in a dilemma. Obviously he wanted to pursue the story. On the other hand, it was not wise, in his opinion, for the Sunday Times to become involved with a man of Irving’s reputation. Irving’s suggestion – that he should fly out to Hamburg and Munich at the paper’s expense in order ‘to identify and talk with the Stuttgart source’ – filled him with unease. Instead, he decided to do some checking of his own. He rang the German historian Hermann Weiss at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and explained what Irving had told him. Weiss’s reaction was that the story was rubbish: it was inconceivable that there were any such ‘Hitler diaries’. The Sunday Times also contacted Gerd Heidemann, whose name had been given to them by Irving. Heidemann, according to Linklater, confirmed he was involved in trying to obtain Hitler material, but said that as a result of recent publicity much of it had ‘gone back’ over the border to East Germany.

Early in the morning on Wednesday 15 December, five days after receiving Irving’s transcript of his conversation with Priesack, Linklater rang Irving at home. He told him that the Sunday Times could not afford to fly him to Germany: ‘We don’t have the large sums of money to throw around that we used to have.’ They would much prefer to send Hermann Weiss or one of their own reporters down to see Priesack. The paper wanted to involve someone who was ‘neutral’. Apologetic for the obvious inference in this remark, Linklater offered to pay Irving £250 for having given them the information in the first place. ‘We don’t want you to think we are trying to go behind your back,’ he said. He offered to give him time to think it over. Irving thanked him for his honesty and said he felt inclined to accept his offer.

As soon as Linklater had hung up, Irving telephoned a contact at the German publishing company Langen Mueller. He told them that if they wanted to secure Hitler’s diaries they should move fast because the Sunday Times was on to them. By mid-afternoon, the publishers had called him back and offered to pay his air fare if he would inspect the material on their behalf. Irving immediately booked seats on a flight to Munich. He had no intention of being double-crossed by the Sunday Times .

At the same time in Hamburg, Heidemann and Walde were being presented with a formal copy of the agreement sketched out in Cologne in October with Gerd Schulte-Hillen. Once the company had recovered its costs, the revenue generated by the diaries would be divided up between the journalists and Gruner and Jahr – and for the first time, in recognition of his work on the Hess manuscript, Leo Pesch was to be given a slice of the cake. Heidemann would receive 36 per cent of the money; Walde, 16 per cent; Pesch, 8 per cent; the company would take the remaining 40 per cent. These percentages would apply both to the sale of the syndication rights and to the sale of the actual diaries themselves.

An appendix to the contract set out in detail exactly how the agreement might work in practice. Supposing syndication sales brought in 10 million marks: the company would immediately claim 9 million to defray its own costs; of the remainder, Heidemann would receive 360,000 marks, Walde 160,000 and Pesch 80,000 – Gruner and Jahr’s 40 per cent share would yield it 400,000 marks. If the books were sold – say, to an archive or a collector – for an additional 5 million marks, the company would immediately take half to cover its initial outlay. Of the remaining 2.5 million marks, Heidemann would then take 900,000, Walde 400,000 and Pesch 200,000; again, the company’s share would be 40 per cent – i million marks. In other words, despite the readjustment insisted upon by Schulte-Hillen, the journalists still stood to become rich men as a result of the diaries’ publication.

Although individual volumes, mainly from the war years, were continuing to come in, the Hess manuscript was now finished. The most difficult task had been securing the cooperation of Frau Hess, from whom Walde and Pesch had wanted information about her visits to see her husband in Spandau. The Hess family had called in a lawyer who had insisted on payment of a fee of 5000 marks as well as a guarantee that the family’s ‘political standpoint’ would be represented when the story appeared in Stern. It had finally been agreed that this would be done in the form of an interview.

A copy of the manuscript of Plan 3 was sent to Henri Nannen for his approval while Felix Schmidt briefed the head of Stern ’s serialization department, Horst Treuke. Schmidt told Treuke to begin planning on the assumption that they would be running the Hess story in the summer of 1983. He also let him into the secret of the existence of the diaries. Treuke, startled by the news, asked if they were sure they were genuine. Schmidt reassured him. Did he seriously think that Schulte-Hillen would have paid out nine million marks to buy a set of forgeries?

David Irving arrived at August Priesack’s apartment at 8.30 a.m. on Saturday morning. The much-vaunted ‘archive’ was spread out on the floor. ‘It consisted’, recalled Irving, ‘of some twenty folders, A3-sized, with photographs stuck on the front and photocopies of documents of the entire Hitler period, from his birth to the end of his life. A special folder covered the years from 1939 to 1945.’ When Stiefel had called Priesack in to look at his collection in 1979, he had rashly provided the ‘professor’ with photocopies of much of his Hitler material, including half a dozen sheets covering the most interesting entries from the 1935 diary. Several times, while Irving was skimming through the material, the telephone rang with urgent messages. The caller was Fritz Stiefel, but despite pressure from Irving, Priesack refused to identify him. He referred to him either as ‘Fritz’ or ‘the client’. He said that he was in trouble for having said as much as he had, that according to ‘Fritz’ the entire higher command of the East German Army had been summoned to Berlin for an inquiry into the rumours that one general was smuggling Hitler’s diaries to the West.

If he was ever to get to the diaries, Irving knew that he needed to speak to this mysterious ‘client’. He decided to trick his doddering old host. ‘I persuaded Priesack – who would not give me Fritz’s other name however hard I tried – to telephone him reassuringly from the neighbouring room.’ Irving crept across to the door and counted the clicks as Priesack dialled the number. In this way he managed to make out the prefix code. (‘It’s easy. You know the first number is “0” and you can work out the rest from that.’)

Making an excuse that he had to go out for a while, Irving left Priesack’s apartment and found a neighbouring telephone office. ‘I checked all the phone books and found that the area code was for Waiblingen, and the number was for one Fritz Stiefel, whose address I thus obtained.’