Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

A couple of hours later, back in Stern ’s suite at the Baur au Lac, Murdoch made Hensmann an offer. He told him he wanted to bid for syndication and book rights. Hensmann said he could not discuss a book deal – Bertelsmann was insisting that Bantam retained the first option. Disappointed, Murdoch submitted an opening bid for American, British and Commonwealth serial rights. Hensmann considered it too low. Murdoch and his team retired to confer and to make some telephone calls. Shortly afterwards, they returned. News International, announced Murdoch, was willing to offer $2.5 million for the American rights, plus an additional $750,000 for serialization in Britain and the Commonwealth.

Three and a quarter of a million dollars. It was a good offer. It would clear Gruner and Jahr’s costs and still leave them European and Asian serial rights and a percentage of the book sales. Hensmann, provisionally, agreed. He said he would give Murdoch a final answer at 5 p.m. on Monday. The two men shook hands and the News International team returned to London.

Meanwhile, Broyles and Parker were inspecting the books for Newsweek. They too considered the diaries a wonderful story. Serialization would attract tens of thousands of readers and give them a coveted boost in their ceaseless circulation battle with Time : whereas Newsweek sold roughly 3.5 million copies around the world each week, its rival had sales of almost 6 million.

The Hitler diaries appealed to Broyles in particular. A Texan, a former marine, only thirty-eight years old, he had been appointed editor the previous September. It had been a surprising choice. Broyles’s background had been in glossy magazines – Texas Monthly and California. He had no background in immediate news coverage. Announcing his arrival, Newsweek ’s owner, Katherine Graham, had declared: ‘He will add a whole new dimension.’ He had, and Newsweek ’s staff did not like it. He appeared to be more interested in features than news. Fashion, show business and social trends seemed to be his priorities. When Time led on the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in the Lebanon, Newsweek ’s cover story was the death of Princess Grace of Monaco. Broyles’s editorial standards were attacked, but he tried to keep above the intrigue. He saw it as his task to provide long-range direction; he did not bother with the day-to-day running of the magazine. Just as the Hitler diaries suited Murdoch’s style of running his company, so they fitted Broyles’s approach to editing Newsweek .

Returning from the bank at about 8 p.m., the Americans offered Hensmann $500,000 for serialization rights in the diaries. Hensmann, sitting on Murdoch’s offer of $3.25 million, found this ‘totally unacceptable’. Newsweek doubled its offer to $1 million. Hensmann told them he wanted $3 million for the American rights. He would not take less. Broyles and Parker said they would have to return to New York. They would telephone him on Monday with an answer.

Back at the bank, Wilfried Sorge supervised as a guard carried the diaries down from the negotiating room to the vault. He watched to make sure the volumes were safely stowed, locked the deposit box, and took a taxi to the airport. He managed to catch the last flight home. It was his fortieth birthday party in Hamburg that night and he had no intention of missing it.

At his house in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Gerhard Weinberg was telephoned by Maynard Parker.

Weinberg was fifty-five, a neat and bespectacled man, fastidious in his personal and professional habits. His origins were German Jewish. His family had fled the Third Reich when he was twelve and he now spoke in a broad New York accent which gave no hint of his German background. His name was not generally well known like Trevor-Roper’s, but among professional historians he was respected as a careful scholar. In 1952 he had helped compile the US armed forces’ Guide to Captured German Documents. He was the author of a two-volume study of Hitler’s pre-war foreign policy that had taken him more than a decade to complete. He did not like to be hurried and he did not care for journalists – their sloppiness, their deadlines, their assumption that one was willing to drop everything ‘to jump to their tune’.

Weinberg’s first reaction to the alleged discovery of Hitler’s diaries was the same as Trevor-Roper’s: he thought it was improbable but was reluctant to dismiss it out of hand. It was true that there were no references to diaries in any of the reminiscences of Hitler’s subordinates. It was also well known that Hitler had a strong personal aversion to writing in his own hand. (Weinberg knew this well, having enjoyed a minor historical scoop himself in the 1950s when he discovered the Führer’s private testament of 1938 – the longest passage of Hitler’s handwriting in existence; after drafting the will, Hitler had told his associates that the task had demanded ‘a quite special effort on my part, since for years I’ve had the habit of writing directly on the machine or dictating what I have to say’.) However, Weinberg – professionally cautious – considered that ‘too many things turn up which are not supposed to exist’; if the entries were short enough, the discovery of a diary might not be too far fetched.

The fact that Murdoch had already had his expert over to Zurich put added pressure on Newsweek. Parker said he wanted Weinberg to fly to Switzerland to look at the diaries. How soon could he go? Weinberg replied that he was going to work as a visiting professor at Bonn University for three months over the summer. He was flying out to Germany on 22 April – what if he was to go early and inspect the diaries then? No use, said Parker: he wanted Weinberg in Zurich next week. The historian protested that he had classes in North Carolina on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Cancel them, said Parker. Weinberg refused. He consulted his diary. ‘I could go after my last class on Monday,’ he said, ‘as long as you can guarantee to get me back in time for my next one on Wednesday. Talk to your travel people.’

The morning of Monday, 11 April found Sorge back in Zurich, exhausted after having snatched only four hours sleep in the past two days. At the bank he met the television presenter Barbara Dickmann, Heidemann and the Stern film crew who had arrived to shoot the opening sequence of the documentary; Sorge’s attendance was required because he was the only person with keys to the safety deposit box.

The lights were set up outside the vault, the camera began turning, and Heidemann self-consciously walked into shot. He plodded woodenly over to the deposit box, opened it, pulled out one of the diaries and began reading.

By mid-afternoon, the filming was finished, and for the second or third time that day Heidemann took the opportunity to slip out to attend to some mysterious ‘business’ in Zurich. Barbara Dickmann asked him what he was doing. Heidemann replied that he was trying to make arrangements to drop in and see Martin Bormann who lived nearby.

Meanwhile, in Hamburg, London and New York, the negotiations to buy the diaries continued.

For Newsweek it was clear that to stay in the game they would have to match the News International offer. On Monday, back in the Gruner and Jahr headquarters, Hensmann received a telephone call from the United States informing him that the magazine was now prepared to offer $3 million for the American serialization rights. The deal was conditional on their being satisfied that the diaries were genuine. Broyles and Parker wanted to return to Zurich the following day and show the books to their nominated expert, Gerhard Weinberg. Hensmann agreed. This opened up the enticing prospect for Gruner and Jahr of pushing up the price by playing off Newsweek and News International against one another.