Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

In London, Rupert Murdoch had already become suspicious that something was going on behind his back. Throughout the day, he made a number of attempts to ring Hensmann, without success. Each time he was told that Hensmann could not be reached. Finally, towards the end of the afternoon, the German rang him.

The deal was off, said Hensmann. Newsweek had made him a very attractive offer for the American rights. Murdoch could still have serial rights in the diaries in Britain and the Commonwealth for $750,000, but if he wanted the complete package, including United States rights, he would have to pay $3.75 million – $500,000 more than Murdoch had originally offered in Zurich on Saturday.

Murdoch was furious. He understood that the handshake had clinched the deal. He unleashed a torrent of invective down the telephone which a shaken Hensmann was later to describe as ‘bitter’.

Wilfried Sorge was at Zurich airport to catch the evening flight to Hamburg when he was paged over the public address system. It was Hensmann. ‘I don’t want you to come back. I want you to stay there,’ said the deputy managing director. ‘ Newsweek are coming to see the diaries tomorrow.’

Wearily, Sorge returned to the Baur au Lac.

Across the Atlantic, Gerhard Weinberg’s last class at the University of North Carolina – a two-hour seminar on Nazi Germany – was coming to an end. At 4.15 p.m. Weinberg dismissed his students, drove twenty miles to the local airport, Raleigh-Durham, and caught a flight to New York. There was a limousine waiting at La Guardia airport to rush him through the heavy evening traffic to the inter-continental terminal at JFK. Maynard Parker and William Broyles were already there waiting for him. Half an hour later, the three men boarded the overnight Swissair flight to Zurich.

Settled into their seats in the first-class section, the Newsweek men handed Weinberg the reports of the three handwriting experts. He read them carefully. ‘It looks good,’ he said when he had finished. ‘If these people say the handwriting is correct, that’s fine by me.’ Only one thing puzzled him: nowhere in the report was there any mention of diaries. He told Broyles and Parker that before they bought the books, they ought to have a specific volume checked. He also raised the question of copyright.

‘We’ll buy that off Stern ,’ replied Parker.

Weinberg shook his head. ‘Mr Parker, it’s not as easy as that.’

In the course of his work with original documents, Weinberg had acquired some understanding of the complexities of West German copyright law. As he understood it, literary rights in unpublished papers could not be confiscated. Although the State of Bavaria claimed ownership of Mein Kampf , it had no jurisdiction over Hitler’s private diaries.

‘I tell you what will happen,’ warned Weinberg. ‘Hitler’s heirs will wait until you’ve printed millions of copies – and then they’ll sue you.’

Weinberg, Broyles and Parker landed in Zurich shortly after 9 a.m. on Tuesday morning and went directly to the Handelsbank. They had no time to waste: the professor’s irritating insistence on being back in North Carolina in time to take his next class had forced Newsweek to book him on a 3 p.m. flight to New York out of Amsterdam. At the bank they were met by Sorge and also by Heidemann who had stayed overnight in Zurich after the previous day’s filming. The introductions were friendly. Heidemann especially struck Weinberg as charming and anxious to help.

The session began with Heidemann reading aloud extracts from the diaries for 1940 and 1945. Sorge then invited the Americans to help themselves to whatever volumes they wanted from the stack in front of them.

Weinberg had brought with him a copy of the diary of Hitler’s valet, Heinz Linge, covering the second part of 1943. Linge’s daily notes of Hitler’s activities were available for inspection in the National Archives in Washington but had never been published: if the Stern diaries were poor quality fakes, discrepancies with the Linge record would swiftly expose them. Unfortunately, the entries in the Stern diary covering the last three months of 1943 were so sketchy, Weinberg was unable to make an adequate comparison. He then asked to see the volumes covering the battle for Stalingrad. These were no use either. There was no typed transcript available and the handwriting was so bad that Weinberg was unable to decipher it. He pulled out a few other volumes at random. Nothing in them struck him as false. He noted that there was a page missing from the volume devoted to the Hess affair, and a statement witnessed by a notary indicating that it had been sent away for analysis. He looked up the entry for the Munich conference in 1938 and found a startling tribute from Hitler to the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain:

He almost outwitted me. This smoothie Englishman…. I would have imposed quite different conditions on Mussolini and Daladier [the French prime minister], but I couldn’t do so with this cunning fox, Chamberlain.

The entry impressed Weinberg, who nodded sagely as he read it. ‘This accords with my own theories,’ he announced.

Half-way through the examination, a third Newsweek journalist arrived. He was Milan Kubik, the magazine’s bureau chief in Jerusalem, flown in by the Americans to inspect the Jewish angle. Broyles and Parker introduced him and explained his presence on the grounds that the magazine expected there to be ‘enormous interest’ in the Hitler diaries in Israel. Throughout the meeting, the Newsweek editors kept probing the material for information which would appeal to their American readership. At one stage, Parker asked to see the volume covering the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944, but Heidemann told him it was one of the four books which had yet to be delivered from East Germany.

Two things, meanwhile, had struck Weinberg, who was carefully reading through the diaries. One was the fact that almost every page carried Hitler’s signature. No one in his right mind, he thought, would have risked forging hundreds of signatures; it seemed a strong argument in favour of authenticity.

He also pointed out to Broyles and Parker that most of the diaries began with a handwritten note stating that if anything happened to him, Hitler wanted the books to be given to his sister Paula. This could pose further copyright problems, said Weinberg, strengthening the case of any heirs of Hitler who cared to argue that the diaries were actually their property. Sorge and Heidemann, already aware of the problems over copyright, looked at one another in embarrassment: that had not occurred to them, they said.

Weinberg also wanted to know why no German scholar had been shown any of this material. Sorge replied that they were worried about leaks. He asked who Weinberg would recommend. Weinberg said he was thinking of a very reliable historian – Eberhard Jaeckel of Stuttgart. Had they heard of him? The Stern men replied that they had. ‘It was clear to me’, recalled Weinberg, ‘that they didn’t want to involve Jaeckel.’

At 2 p.m., Weinberg’s self-imposed deadline expired and the Newsweek party had to leave. In order to obtain Weinberg’s assessment, Broyles, Parker and Kubik had to fly with him to Amsterdam. The historian admitted he was ‘astonished’ by what he had seen. He had not been able to find fault with the diaries. On balance, he inclined to the view that they were authentic.

This was what Newsweek wanted to hear. At Amsterdam airport, Weinberg caught his flight to New York. The three Newsweek journalists boarded a flight to Hamburg to clinch the deal.

Stern ’s London office was based in Peter Wickman’s house in Barnet, miles out of town in the northernmost fringe of the capital. On Tuesday morning, as the Newsweek contingent sifted through the diaries in Zurich, Wickman’s telex machine suddenly clattered into life with an urgent message from the Gruner and Jahr headquarters. It was a contract requiring Rupert Murdoch’s agreement, offering him the British and Commonwealth rights in the Hitler diaries for $750,000. It included a 25 per cent penalty clause should News International default on the deal.