Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

Following Hensmann’s instructions, Wickman delivered the contract to Murdoch personally in his office in The Times building in Gray’s Inn Road. Murdoch scarcely glanced at it before handing Wickman his own version – roughly twenty pages long, drawn up by his lawyers, reiterating the terms he understood had been agreed in Switzerland on Saturday.

Wickman made his way back up to High Barnet and began feeding the pages into a telecopier, transmitting Murdoch’s counter offer back to Hamburg.

The next day, Wednesday 13 April, Heidemann and Barbara Dickmann continued their work on the Stern television film, driving to Herrsching, near Munich, to interview Hans Baur.

The Baur family detested the media, even when it came in the friendly and uncritical form of Gerd Heidemann. The eighty-five-year-old ex-Nazi hobbled over to them on his wooden leg and stared at the camera with undisguised hostility. Then a former Munich policeman arrived, ‘in a state of extreme agitation’, according to Dickmann, claiming he had been summoned by Baur to protect the family. On his advice, Frau Baur went round the house taking down photographs of her husband with Hitler and packing away various Nazi mementoes. Heidemann, the Baurs and the ex-policeman then disappeared into another room while Dickmann and the crew waited to hear whether they would be allowed to film.

After twenty minutes, the group reappeared. According to Baur, Heidemann had shown him one of the diaries: ‘a black book with a red cord and a red seal… I was of the opinion that it was Hitler’s writing.’ The camera was set up and Baur described the plane crash and Hitler’s distress.

When the interview was over, the atmosphere relaxed. The retired policeman, who came from Luxembourg, turned out to be a collector of Nazi relics. He told Heidemann, in Dickmann’s presence, that ‘his circle of friends was almost exclusively composed of prominent ex-Nazis’. He suggested that they should ‘set up an agency for Hitler relics in Munich’. Heidemann told him about the Blood Flag and offered to sell it to him. When the time came to leave, the two men made an appointment to have dinner together.

Listening to this coversation merely served to confirm Barbara Dickmann’s feelings about Heidemann. The man was ‘unable to distance himself professionally from the events of the Nazi era’. Although she had known him for little more than a week, she had already spent many hours with him, driving between locations. Being trapped in a car with Heidemann had not proved a pleasant experience. ‘I couldn’t avoid having to listen to his stories,’ she recalled.

He talked to me constantly about his friend ‘Martin’. He told me incredible stories about ‘Martin’s’ life after the collapse of the Third Reich. He said that ‘Martin’ was in Switzerland, that he was being watched over by the Israeli secret service.

Heidemann also indicated that he had original material belonging to Hitler supposedly containing the ‘ten theses’ of Hitler’s Final Solution.

He had told her during filming in Zurich on Monday that he was trying to arrange a meeting with Bormann. Later, he showed her his set of Polaroid pictures and confided to her that he was going to meet him on 20 April, Hitler’s birthday, when he would be given important documents. (Martin subsequently cancelled the meeting.) He showed her his collection of relics: ‘several glass cases in which he had helmets, uniforms, a brown shirt, a pair of trousers, a damaged watch, weapons, drawings allegedly by Hitler, a swastika flag, a Party book of Hitler’s, his passport and all sorts of other things’.

Dickmann was shocked by Heidemann’s behaviour. He seemed ‘euphoric’ about his access to senior Nazis, gripped by ‘sick fantasies’. Their relationship became ‘increasingly cool’. When the television team returned to Hamburg, she was worried enough to seek out Peter Koch and tell him what his reporter was up to. Koch reassured her: Heidemann always immersed himself in whatever he was researching – it was part of his technique for gaining access to circles which were normally impossible to penetrate. She could rely, said Koch, on the fact that Heidemann ‘was not a Nazi and that once he’d finished his researches he’d be normal again’.

Meanwhile, as Heidemann and Dickmann were leaving Hans Baur in Herrsching, Rupert Murdoch’s draft contract was arriving on Jan Hensmann’s desk in Hamburg. Stern ’s chief negotiator regarded it as ‘completely unacceptable’. News International had refused to improve its offer in the face of Newsweek ’s bid. Hensmann decided to sign a deal with the Americans.

Broyles, Parker and Kubik, who had arrived in Hamburg the previous night, were informed that their offer of $3 million for the American serial rights had been accepted. The Newsweek representatives were taken to the special suite of offices occupied by the diaries team. As a gesture of good faith, Peter Koch was authorized to give them the story of the find as it had been written by Wolf Thieme, together with the rough text for the first four instalments of the Stern serialization.

It was at this point that word came from the nearby Four Seasons Hotel that two emissaries from Rupert Murdoch – Richard Searby and Gerald Long – had arrived to discuss the News International offer. They wanted to come over to the Stern building straight away.

Confronted by this embarrassing situation, Hensmann dispatched Wilfried Sorge to the Four Seasons. He was to tell them to go home – the deal with Murdoch was off.

Sorge relayed the message.

He had often seen negotiators lose their tempers, but he had never before witnessed anything to compare with the reaction of the two Murdoch men. Searby was normally smooth and urbane; Long, beetle-browed and pugnacious, looked, even in his lighter moments, as if he would enjoy nothing more than a good Victorian eviction, preferably involving widows, orphans and a tied cottage. When Sorge told them that the diaries had been sold to Newsweek , both men blew up in anger. ‘They were beside themselves with rage,’ he recalled: as close as men could come to physical violence without actually resorting to it. But despite the threats and accusations of bad faith, Sorge refused to yield.

Later that night, after he had calmed down, Searby rang Sorge at home to ask him what the hell was going on. Privately, Sorge was beginning to have doubts himself about the way Hensmann was handling the negotiations, but in his conversation with Searby he remained loyal to his superior.

‘Murdoch’s people’, he recalled, ‘went away with nothing.’

In London, Peter Wickman received another urgent communication from Hamburg. Stern wanted to use three quotations from Trevor-Roper to launch the diaries. The quotes they had in mind were, first, that the discovery of the diaries ‘was the most important historical event of the last ten years’; secondly, that ‘it was a scoop to equal Watergate’; and thirdly, that it would ‘make it necessary, at least in part, to rewrite the history of the Third Reich’. All three lines were actually the work of Peter Koch, but he instructed Wickman to ask Trevor-Roper if he would allow them to be attributed to him.

For Wickman, this was the latest in a series of bizarre requests from Hamburg. Stern ’s mania for secrecy was such that he now had to make any telephone calls connected with the diaries from a public call box in case MI6 had bugged his phone. He was also sick of having to shuttle back and forth between Hensmann and Murdoch. It was with some embarrassment that he rang Trevor-Roper and relayed Koch’s request.

Trevor-Roper was not enthusiastic. ‘I didn’t like any of the quotes,’ he recalled, ‘and said so to Wickman.’ Nevertheless, reluctantly, he agreed to put his name to the statements that the diaries represented the most important historical discovery of the decade and a scoop of Watergate proportions. He rejected the third one about the rewriting of history – he had yet to see the promised transcript of the diaries.