Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

For the ‘Sleuth of Oxford’, the years since the publication of The Last Days of Hitler had been filled with honours and success. In 1957, his friendship with one Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had helped bring him the post of Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University; and in 1979 Margaret Thatcher granted him a peerage. He was an honorary fellow of two Oxford colleges, a member of three London clubs, and a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. In 1954 he had married Lady Alexandra Howard-Johnston, elder daughter of Field Marshal Earl Haig, and the couple had become renowned for grand dinner parties at which Trevor-Roper would occasionally appear in velvet smoking jacket and embroidered slippers. His friend, the philosopher A. J. Ayer, ‘admired his intellectual elegance’ and ‘appreciated his malice’.

Intellectually, even in private, Trevor-Roper could be faintly menacing; in print, he was devastating. An attack on one historian’s work (on the Elizabethan aristocracy) was described as ‘a magnificent if terrifying work of destruction’ and brought him a rebuke from the venerable R. H. Tawney: ‘An erring colleague is not an Amalekite, to be smitten hip and thigh.’ In the course of one intellectual dogfight with Evelyn Waugh on the subject of the Catholic church, Waugh advised him to ‘change his name and seek a livelihood at Cambridge’. Trevor-Roper did so in 1980, taking the title Lord Dacre of Glanton and becoming Master of Peterhouse, the oldest and most conservative college in Cambridge. Since then, anecdotes of the running battle between the college’s High Church fellows and their anti-clerical Master had reached mythical proportions within the university. At his first dinner on High Table, Trevor-Roper was said to have objected to the consistency of the soup. ‘ Gentlemen ,’ he announced, ‘only have clear soup at dinner.’ The following evening’s menu began with Potage de Gentilhomme , a soup thick enough for the Master to stand his spoon in.

Trevor-Roper was not at home in Peterhouse when Webb tried to reach him on the telephone. It was Good Friday, and he and Lady Alexandra had retired for Easter to Chiefswood, their country house in Scotland, once the property of the novelist, Sir Walter Scott. Here, Trevor-Roper was able to escape the in-fighting of Oxbridge and affect the habits and costume of a laird of the Scottish borders; and it was here, on 1 April, that Webb tracked him down, told him of Hitler’s diaries, and asked him to fly to Zurich the following week.

On Easter Sunday, Peter Koch made several trips to Heidemann’s home on the Elbchaussee to pick up drawings and paintings from the reporter’s collection. The idea was to take them to Zurich and exhibit them alongside the diaries to create the right atmosphere for the negotiations. It was the first time Koch had seen Heidemann’s lifestyle at first hand, and he was shocked by its luxuriousness. As he was led from room to room he-tried to reckon up in his mind how much this would cost in rent. Ten thousand marks a month at least, he thought. Heidemann said he found it rather cramped. ‘He told me he was thinking of buying a house on the Elbchaussee,’ recalled Koch. ‘It was a place with a view of the Elbe.’ A house like that would cost over a million marks.

Heidemann pointed out some of his treasures. ‘There was a whole pile of antiques,’ said Koch. ‘There were some old walking sticks, drawings by Rembrandt and Dürer, a memento of Napoleon…. He also told me he had about three hundred paintings by Hitler.’ Heidemann produced Hitler’s suicide weapon, with Bormann’s note attached to it. ‘There was also a ladies’ pistol, which was supposed to have been Eva Braun’s.’ Heidemann told him it had all come from the Boernersdorf crash. Koch asked him how he had paid for it. The reporter told him the company had compensated him for buying it with a payment of 1.5 million marks.

Heidemann mentioned this quite casually, apparently assuming that Koch already knew of it. It was the first Koch had heard of any special payment and he confronted Schulte-Hillen with the story at one of the company’s routine financial meetings the following week. ‘He behaved as if he didn’t know anything,’ Koch remembered. ‘Then he asked his deputy, Hensmann, if he knew anything. They both looked very embarrassed, running their hands through their hair and behaving as if they had great difficulty in remembering. They hesitated and then they said they had made a special payment of 1.5 million marks to Heidemann.’

Koch told Felix Schmidt what the management had done. They were both angry. Money had been paid out to a member of their staff behind their backs, and they had learned of it only by accident. But they were not surprised. The longer the affair went on, the more private deals they seemed to discover. What might they stumble on next?

For all those involved in the Hitler diaries project, the pace of events now began to accelerate.

On Monday, 4 April, Klaus Harpprecht and Barbara Dickmann, together with executives from Stern ’s television company, arrived at Peter Koch’s apartment to meet Sorge, Walde, Pesch and Heidemann. The two television journalists were informed of the existence of the Hitler diaries. Koch said that Stern wanted a film ready to launch the scoop. It would almost certainly be bought by one of the West German networks, and probably by foreign stations as well. It would have a budget of 160,000 marks. Harpprecht and Dickmann were worried about their reputations as impartial reporters. To avoid being seen to be making a publicity puff for Stern , they asked for editorial freedom to make the film as they wished. Sorge and Koch readily agreed to their demands: all the information contained in the film would have to come from Stern , and most of the potential interviewees – old Nazis like Karl Wolff and Hans Baur – were acquaintances of Heidemann’s; in the time available, there was no chance of the television team carrying out independent investigations of their own.

On Tuesday, Heidemann withdrew another 300,000 marks from the diaries account.

On Wednesday, Walde telexed Dr Werner at the police headquarters in Wiesbaden: ‘I cannot yet give you our company’s decision regarding the material for authentication. We will ring you or your colleague on Monday 11 April to inform you what material can be given to you, and when.’

On Thursday, Dr Klaus Oldenhage of the Bundesarchiv drove up from Koblenz to the Gruner and Jahr offices for a meeting with the company’s lawyers.

In March, Gerd Schulte-Hillen had suddenly learned some shocking news. After more than two years of paying out money for the diaries, he was informed by the Gruner and Jahr legal department that the company did not actually own the diaries. The lawyers had revised their earlier opinion; the agreement with Werner Maser, they warned him, was probably worthless. It was impossible to say with certainty who held the copyright on the diaries: it could be the Federal Government; it could be the State of Bavaria; it might even be some distant relative of Hitler’s of whose existence no one was aware; at any rate, it was not Gruner and Jahr. Schulte-Hillen found himself preparing to hold syndication negotiations which technically involved the handling of stolen property. There was only one hope: an agreement with the Bundesarchiv.

The Federal Archives had known of the existence of Stern ’s hoard of Hitler’s writings for more than a year, ever since Walde had sent them samples for handwriting analysis. Legally, they were aware that ownership of the material might well be theirs anyway, as the archive’s lawyers thought that the copyright was vested in the West German Government. On the other hand, it was undeniable that without Stern ’s expertise and money, the documents would never have come to light. At his meeting with the lawyers in Hamburg on Thursday, Oldenhage therefore announced that the Bundesarchiv was prepared to do a deal with the magazine, allowing them exclusive rights to the material for a limited period – on condition that eventually the originals would all be deposited in the Bundesarchiv. A contract was drawn up. To avoid accusations that the authorities were giving special treatment to Stern , the agreement was in Heidemann’s name.