Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

The search took Irving several hours. By the time he returned at 5.30 p.m., Priesack had already finished entertaining another visitor. Wolf Rudiger Hess, son of Rudolf Hess, had called to inspect the letter supposedly sent by his father to Hitler in May 1941. ‘He had roundly denounced the handwriting as a forgery,’ noted Irving. ‘If that is faked, what else might not be too?’

Promising to try to arrange a publisher for him, Irving managed to persuade Priesack to part with his precious folders.

Next morning, Irving left Munich for Stuttgart. He caught a train to Waiblingen and marched, unannounced, up to Fritz Stiefel’s front door. ‘Reluctantly, he appeared,’ recalled Irving, ‘and reluctantly invited me in.’ The historian explained that he had not telephoned because ‘one never knew who was listening in’. Stiefel said that if he had phoned him, he would have told him there was no point in coming. ‘He approved my method of gaining entry this way and congratulated me.’ To thaw the atmosphere further, Irving produced from his inside pocket one of his most valuable possessions: one of Adolf Hitler’s monogrammed teaspoons from the Berghof. Whenever Irving was researching in Germany, he carried it with him, a talisman to charm reluctant old Nazis into helping him. ‘That spoon’, says Irving, ‘has opened a lot of doors.’ Stiefel examined it and then went and fetched one of his own to show Irving.

Having compared cutlery the two men settled to business. Irving asked about the Hitler diaries and Stiefel – as Heidemann had predicted – proceeded to lie. A local dealer, he said, had been to see him a few years earlier and shown him a diary. He had kept it for one or two weeks and then given it back. Irving asked if there was any way of finding out where the other volumes were. Stiefel ‘answered that he’d heard they’d all been sold to an American’. The industrialist would not reveal the American’s name, nor would he identify the diaries’ supplier.

All Irving’s hard work and cunning appeared to have been in vain. His only consolation was that he had managed to get hold of Priesack’s photocopies.

On Tuesday 21 December he flew back to London. He rang Alan Samson, his publisher at Macmillan, and told him about the diaries. Samson was interested and they arranged an appointment for the following day.

Irving did not begin a detailed examination of the Priesack material until 8.30 the next morning. He sat in his first-floor study, pulled out his own folder of authenticated Hitler writing and then began indexing Priesack’s papers ‘to try to get an impression of their value’.

Whatever allegations may be levelled at Irving as an historian – and there have been many – there is no doubting his ability to sniff out original documents. Over the past twenty years he had become only too familiar with the scale of the trade in forgeries. He had himself almost been fooled by a faked ‘diary’ of the German intelligence chief, Wilhelm Canaris. He therefore approached Priesack’s papers critically – and almost at once he began finding discrepancies. The writing of words like ‘Deutsch’, ‘Nation’ and ‘NSDAP’ which recurred regularly varied in style from document to document. The most damning piece of evidence as far as he was concerned was a letter purporting to have been written by Goering in 1944. The word ‘ Reichsmarschall ’ in the printed letter-heading was misspelt ‘ Reichsmarsall ’. ‘By lunchtime,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘I was unfortunately satisfied that the Priesack collection is stuffed with fake documents.’ He cancelled his appointment with Macmillan and rang Priesack. ‘There are such huge variances,’ he told him, ‘that the documents cannot be genuine.’ Priesack, according to Irving, ‘gasped’. If Stiefel’s documents were fakes, how reliable was the rest of the businessman’s memorabilia? At that moment, one of the largest printing companies in Italy was busy producing several thousand copies of Billy Price’s book, Adolf Hitler as Painter and Draughtsman , which was full of pictures from Stiefel’s collection.

‘Does this mean’, asked Priesack, ‘that the watercolours are also forged? They come from the same source.’

Irving replied that he was no art expert. He could not answer that question. He did however say that in his opinion ‘the entire story about East German involvement’ was ‘part of an elaborate Schwindel to prevent the purchasers from showing their acquisitions around…. I urged him to advise Fritz Stiefel to buy nothing more from this source.’

According to Irving’s diary, Priesack was fawning in his gratitude. There were those, he said, who believed that Irving should be given the title ‘doctor’. He disagreed: in Germany, the name ‘David Irving’ was honour enough. To which Irving, angry at having wasted his time, and weary of this tiresome old man, added in his diary the single word: schmarm .

But if Irving’s visit to Germany had done little to restore his own fortunes, it did at least bring profit to August Priesack.

So far, using Kujau to pressure Fritz Stiefel into keeping quiet, Heidemann had been able to contain the damage done by Priesack’s disclosure. Now, the reporter acted to seal the leak altogether. Hard on the heels of David Irving, Heidemann travelled down to Munich to see Priesack. He offered him 30,000 marks in cash for his archive – a sum which Priesack, scraping a living on a school teacher’s pension, was happy to accept. ‘This is worth a lot to me,’ Heidemann told him. ‘Now I will own everything Stiefel has.’ He did not mention Stern ’s diaries: Priesack assumed that he and Stiefel were simply rival collectors. Anyway, the reason for the offer was of less interest to him at that moment than the 500- and 1000-mark notes his visitor now pulled out of his briefcase. If Heidemann wanted to throw his money about buying up photocopies, who was he to complain?

NINETEEN EIGHTY-THREE WAS going to be a big year for Gerd Heidemann and he and Gina were determined to greet it in style. At a cost of more than 5000 marks, the couple flew to New York to attend the annual New Year’s Eve Ball at the Waldorf Astoria.

As 1982 came to an end, Gerd Heidemann’s behaviour was – if anything – even odder than usual. Two-and-a-half years after his honeymoon visit to South America, he was once more obsessed by Martin Bormann, gripped as if by a bout of some recurrent tropical fever. He was utterly convinced by Medard Klapper’s stories that Bormann was still alive, presiding over a circle of old Nazis, shuttling between various countries in Europe and the Middle East. Klapper gave Heidemann Bormann’s telephone number in Spain and Bormann’s Spanish cover name, ‘Martin di Calde Villa’. He showed him a house in Zurich where the ‘Bormann Group’ had its headquarters and allowed Heidemann to photograph the building. He was always on the point of taking the reporter to meet Bormann – only to have to tell him, regretfully, a few days later, that ‘Martin’ couldn’t make the appointment. Heidemann commissioned one of his oldest colleagues, a photographer named Helmut Jabusch to fly to Zurich to take pictures of ‘one of the most prominent Nazis’: he even booked airline tickets, but once again, the assignment fell through.

In November 1982, Klapper gave Heidemann six Polaroid photographs of an old man whom he claimed was Bormann. The reporter paid him 25,000 marks for the pictures which he then began showing to colleagues. He pointed out to Felix Schmidt that the man in the photograph – who wore, as Schmidt recalled, ‘a Basque cap’ – had a birth mark on the left side of his forehead, exactly as Bormann had. According to Schmidt: ‘Heidemann explained that it was possible to make contact with Bormann. Everything had to go through a middleman but he was sure he would meet Bormann shortly, either in Zurich or in Cairo. The Nazis who surrounded Bormann were going to allow him to meet him. Heidemann always spoke of Bormann as “Martin”.’ Schmidt was incredulous: not least, because it was Stern that had actually proved that Bormann was dead. He began to have doubts about Heidemann’s mental health and confided his worries to Peter Koch. Koch shook his head. ‘With Heidemann,’ he said, ‘anything’s possible.’ Heidemann sent one of the photographs to Max Frei-Sulzer, who was commissioned to investigate it for fingerprints. The versatile Frei-Sulzer reported back on 21 November that he could not reach a positive conclusion: ‘Unfortunately, at the critical place there are several prints on top of one another which cannot be separated. The others are so fragmented, there is no question of being able to evaluate them.’ There was only one clear print, said Frei-Sulzer: its owner was unknown.