Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

In the afternoon, Sorge and Wickman went to see their other possible client, Times Newspapers. Colin Webb and Charles Wilson attended the meeting on behalf of The Times, Brian MacArthur for the Sunday Times. Before revealing what he had to offer, Sorge made the three men sign a pledge of secrecy. They were more interested in the story than David English, but before they could make any commitment, they would have to consult the editors of the two papers and their proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. The secrecy pledge was amended to allow these three gentlemen to be informed of Stern ’s scoop.

Sorge spent the night in the Savoy Hotel and the following morning returned to Hamburg.

Heidemann dreaded the impending launch of the diaries. His comfortable existence of the last two years – the suitcases full of money, the flattery of his superiors – was bound to come to an end. He would cease to have a hold over the company. He would suffer the humiliation of watching while the diaries were passed to other writers for exploitation. Already, he had been forced to entertain Wolf Thieme in his gallery in Milchstrasse and tell him the story of the diaries’ discovery. This meeting had posed another problem for Heidemann. It was safe for him to talk about the evacuation of documents from Berlin and the loss of the plane. He could describe how he had located the crash site using Gundlfinger’s name. He could talk of the local peasants who had salvaged material from the wrecked aircraft. But then, of necessity, there was a gap of more than thirty years, until the books started accumulating in the management’s safe in Hamburg. Heidemann explained to Thieme that he could not say any more without jeopardizing the lives of his informants. Naturally, he did not tell Thieme the other reason for his reticence: that if Kujau’s identity were ever disclosed, and if the garrulous relics dealer ever spoke to anyone else from Stern , it would only be a matter of time before the company discovered he had been defrauding them for the past two years.

To try to ward off publication, with all its attendant hazards, Heidemann used every argument, cajolement and threat at his disposal in a desperate attempt to make the company change its mind. On Thursday 17 March he went to see Schulte-Hillen and handed him a closely typed two-page memorandum ‘for his eyes only’. The managing director, said Heidemann, must destroy it as soon as he had read it. ‘Dear Herr Schulte-Hillen,’ it began,

Before you reach any irrevocable decisions, I would like once again to put my reservations on paper. I cannot guarantee that the missing diaries will be in Hamburg by the beginning of May 1983. There is no way that they will be with us by the beginning of April. How are the sales negotiations to proceed if we cannot offer those who are interested a complete set of diaries? Are we to answer questions by admitting that we have not had the nerve to wait as long as it takes to have the last diary in our hands? Are we to say to those interested that we are worried there might be photocopies of the diaries on the market? What do we do when the main protagonists [in the negotiations – i.e. Sorge] are insisting that the diaries can only be sold as a complete package and we should wait until the autumn? Of course I am of the opinion that we should have the complete story of the find and several issues prepared and ready to go in order to be able to begin publishing immediately should any photocopies surface. But this danger is very slight: my business partner in East Germany is counting on the fact that the ‘Swiss collector’ will eventually buy other things from him….

Heidemann went on to list fourteen separate sets of Hitler documents which his ‘business partner’ had told him were on offer:

1. Six diary-like volumes which Hitler wrote alongside the diaries which are known to us.

2. Adolf Hitler’s handwritten memoirs, My Life and Struggle for Germany , written in the years 1942–44.

3. Hitler’s book about women, in which there are said to be descriptions of his experiences with women.

4. Hitler’s plan for the solution of the Jewish question, written after the Wannsee Conference on 28 January 1942, in which he gives Himmler precise orders as to what is to happen to the Jews (eighteen handwritten pages).

5. Hitler’s handwritten Documents about Himmler, Ley and Others , including notes about the Jewish origins of those concerned.

6. Hitler’s notes from 18 April until his death on 30 April 1945.

7. Goebbels’s notes following Hitler’s suicide.

8. Hitler’s handwritten testament and marriage documents (twenty-one pages).

9. Hitler’s documents about his supposed son in France.

10. Hitler’s documents about his origins and relatives.

11. Secret Thoughts about Different Military and Political Problems .

12. Hitler’s book about Frederick the Great.

13. Hitler’s book about King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

14. Hitler’s opera, Wieland the Blacksmith .

Heidemann added that there were ‘three hundred other drawings and watercolours by Hitler’ also available in East Germany.

Heidemann was not necessarily lying when he outlined this fantastic catalogue to Schulte-Hillen. He appears to have genuinely believed what Kujau told him: that these documents could be rescued from behind the Iron Curtain and that premature disclosure might lose Stern the chance of obtaining them. Not all the items were new to Stern. For example, Kujau had first offered to sell Wieland the Blacksmith to Heidemann at the beginning of 1981. The forger had hit on the idea after reading the memoirs of August Kubizek. In The Young Hitler I Knew, published in 1955, Kubizek described how Hitler set about writing an opera, a sub-Wagnerian epic of rape and murder, set in the rugged wastes of Iceland, complete with flaming volcanoes, icy glaciers and winged Valkyries in shining helmets rising from the waters of ‘Wolf Lake’. In the end, Wieland the Blacksmith was too much even for Hitler, and he abandoned it, after a few weeks’ work, in 1907. The incident provided Kujau with a perfect cover story for another fake, and for more than two years he kept promising to supply the opera to Heidemann. The imagination recoils at the thought of what Bertelsmann’s marketing department might have done with a Hitler opera – especially as one of the company’s American subsidiaries was Arista Records. Mercifully, Wieland the Blacksmith was one piece of Hitleriana that Kujau never got round to forging. (He would have done it, he said later, but for the fact that he did not read music.)

Another of the new documents – the biography of King Ludwig II of Bavaria – was also familiar to Heidemann. One of the first diaries the reporter delivered to Hamburg contained a description of a visit supposedly made by Hitler to the town of Hohenschwangau. ‘During my address,’ noted ‘Hitler’ on 12 August 1933, ‘I mention that in earlier years I once wrote a small book about Ludwig II. This must be in Munich.’ Thus Kujau, with characteristic cheek, used one forgery to prepare the way for another.

In his memorandum, Heidemann warned Schulte-Hillen that it would be impossible to obtain all these treasures by 31 March – the managing director’s ‘target date’ for the completion of Stern ’s archive. Therefore, said Heidemann, he proposed to deliver the material to ‘other interested parties’, and asked to be released from his contract with Gruner and Jahr.

Schulte-Hillen was not impressed by Heidemann’s bluster. The reporter had threatened to resign so often over the past few years, the bluff no longer carried any conviction. It was not that Schulte-Hillen saw anything inherently implausible in such documents as Hitler’s ‘book about women’, it was simply that the time had passed when he was prepared to tolerate this sort of procrastination. Besides, the company already had enough Hitler material to fill Stern for the next eighteen months. He was a stubborn man, and he had made up his mind. They would begin publishing the diaries in May.