Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

After this guided tour, Heidemann took his guest over to the Atlantic – one of the most imposing and luxurious hotels in Hamburg, looking out across the Alster to the Stern building. Stern had reserved Trevor-Roper a room for the night. In another part of the hotel, the film crew was waiting. Trevor-Roper took his place in front of the camera and recorded a brief interview. Despite his personal misgivings about Heidemann, he was still convinced that the diaries were genuine and he said so. Heidemann was delighted.

Trevor-Roper had been looking forward to a quiet meal alone with a book followed by an early night before his flight back to London. But Heidemann insisted that they dined together. He led the protesting historian into the bar.

Heidemann ordered meals for them both and began drinking heavily. He became loquacious. Trevor-Roper experienced the sequence of emotions familiar to those who had had the misfortune to be trapped in a conversation with Heidemann: bewilderment, disbelief, distaste and an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia.

He told Trevor-Roper that he had access to an important archive of Nazi documents which Martin Bormann had deposited in Madrid in 1938.

Trevor-Roper pointed out that such an action by Bormann was rather unlikely – Madrid was in Republican hands in 1938.

Perhaps it was somewhere outside Madrid, said Heidemann. Or perhaps it was 1939. Anyway, it was certainly true; he had been told the story personally – by Martin Bormann.

Trevor-Roper smiled, assuming that Heidemann was making a joke. But the reporter was serious. He pulled out his wallet and produced a photograph. ‘This is a picture of Martin, taken recently.’

The historian studied the photograph. It showed a man in his mid-sixties – an obvious impostor, considering that Bormann would by then have been eighty-three.

Heidemann would not be dissuaded. Martin, he insisted, was alive and living in Switzerland….

The evening crept by with more stories of Heidemann’s Nazi contacts, until Trevor-Roper at last felt able to make a polite excuse and escape to his bedroom.

In retrospect it is difficulty to understand why Trevor-Roper’s uneasiness and scepticism about Heidemann did not begin now to extend to the diaries he had seen in the Swiss bank. In fact, his reaction was almost exactly the opposite. He reasoned that if he, after half a day’s acquaintance, found Heidemann unreliable, Stern , after employing him for thirty years, must surely have known what he was like and been all the more careful about checking his stories. He was under the impression that this had been done. As far as he was concerned, the diaries had been authenticated by three handwriting experts and by forensic analysis; their provenance in the Boernersdorf air crash was entirely credible; their contents had been thoroughly investigated by Stern over a period of several years; and the magazine’s editor had assured him that the supplier of the diaries was known to them and had also been checked.

Heidemann reminded Trevor-Roper of the late Ladislas Farago, the American writer who claimed he had seen a decrepit Bormann propped up in a large bed in 1973 surrounded by Bolivian nuns. Farago had visited Trevor-Roper in Oxford and had exhibited a similar naïvety and readiness to believe whatever he was told, combined with a genuine talent for unearthing documents and information.

With these complacent thoughts, the historian retired to his bed, his belief in the Hitler diaries unshaken.

Murdoch’s handling of the negotiations had been masterful. By Tuesday, isolated in New York, Koch and Schulte-Hillen found themselves effectively reduced to begging the Australian to buy the syndication rights. When he finally consented to resume negotiations, he was able to dictate his own price. His original offer for the British and Commonwealth rights had been $750,000. Now, he picked them up for little more than half that sum – $400,000. The money was to be paid over the next two years. The first instalment of $200,000 was handed over on signature of the contract. (Shortly afterwards, Murdoch also acquired the American rights for a bargain price of $800,000.)

The continuing silence from Newsweek convinced the Germans that the magazine was indeed going to steal their story. Further negotiations were useless. The pair had the feeling that they were being deliberately kept waiting around in a New York hotel in order to hold up publication in Hamburg.

On Wednesday, Schulte-Hillen telephoned Reinhard Mohn and confessed to the Bertelsmann owner that he had made a mess of the negotiations – in his words, he had ‘over-pokered’ his hand. He also rang Hensmann and issued orders confirming that Stern would publish its scoop the following Monday. The discovery of the diaries would be announced in a statement on Friday.

Koch and Schulte-Hillen caught the next plane back to Germany.

In the offices of The Times and Sunday Times that Wednesday, very few people knew of the impending acquisition of the Hitler diaries. Those who did were mostly confused or apprehensive.

Phillip Knightley had arrived back at the Sunday Times on Tuesday after four months in Australia. That night he had gone out for a drink with Eric Jacobs, the editor responsible for commissioning the long articles on the front of the paper’s Review section. He wouldn’t be requiring anything for a while, he told Knightley. He understood he was going to be running the Hitler diaries in that space.

The next day, Knightley went in to see Magnus Linklater, the Features Editor. ‘These Hitler diaries,’ he asked, ‘they’re not the ones that David Irving put us on to in December, are they?’ Linklater said they weren’t – they’d been offered to the paper by Stern. A few minutes later, Knightley bumped into the Sunday Times editor, Frank Giles, in the lavatory. He told him he was worried about the rumours he was picking up regarding the diaries. It all sounded very suspicious.

‘You’re right to be cautious,’ replied Giles. ‘But don’t worry. It doesn’t concern us. Murdoch’s going to run them in The Times .’

Knightley was still anxious. He asked if he could submit a memorandum setting out his reservations.

By all means, said Giles, but keep it to one page. Murdoch’s attention span was notoriously short; there was no point in giving him anything longer than a few hundred words to read.

What was nagging away at the back of Knightley’s mind was the memory of another set of wartime documents which had been bought for the Sunday Times fifteen years earlier – the diaries of Benito Mussolini. These had been offered to the Thomson Organization, at that time the owners of the Sunday Times , for £250,000. A series of expert examinations had failed to find anything wrong with them, and £100,000 had been handed over as a down payment to a Polish-born arms dealer who was acting as middle man. Further large sums had been paid out in expenses – for example, Vittorio Mussolini, the dictator’s son, had been given £3500 in cash in a brown paper bag in order to buy himself a sports car in return for agreeing to renounce his claim on the diaries. In the end, the books had turned out to be the work of an Italian woman called Amalia Panvini and her eighty-four-year-old mother, Rosa. The affair had cost Thomsons a fortune and made the Sunday Times a temporary laughing-stock in Fleet Street. Knightley – one of the few reporters left on the paper who remembered the affair – had been cautious of so-called ‘finds’ of wartime papers ever since.

It took him the rest of Wednesday to write his memorandum. Point by point, he drew attention to the similarities between the forgery of 1968 and the ‘scoop’ of 1983. The Mussolini fiasco should have taught the Sunday Times some lessons: