Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

1 You cannot rely on expert authentication. Thomson engaged five experts, including the author of the standard work on Mussolini, the world’s greatest authority on paper, a famous handwriting expert, an internationally known palaeographer and an academic who authenticated the Casement Diaries. Not one expert said that they were fake .

2 You cannot rely on people close to the subject. Vittorio Mussolini, Mussolini’s son, said that the diaries were definitely his father’s.

3 You cannot rely on legal protection. Slaughter and May [a firm of solicitors] did the negotiations for Thomson. They did not succeed in recovering a single penny when the diaries turned out to be fakes.

4 Beware of secrecy and being pressed to make a quick decision. The Mussolini con men were able to bring off their sting by pressing Thomson to make a quick deal. Absolute secrecy was essential, they said, to prevent the Italian government from stepping in. Both manoeuvres prevented proper examination of the background of the salesmen and the provenance of the diaries.

Questions to consider :

1 What German academic experts have seen all the diaries? Has, for instance, the Institute of Contemporary History seen them?

2 What non-academic British experts have seen all the diaries? Has David Irving seen them?

3 How thoroughly has the vendor explained where the diaries have been all these years and why they have surfaced now : the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler’s accession to power.

The crux of the matter is that secrecy and speed work for the con man. To mount a proper check would protect us but would not be acceptable to the vendor. We should insist on doing our own checks and not accept the checks of any other publishing organization.

Knightley’s intuition was subsequently proved correct in almost every detail: the authentication had been inadequate; the supposed involvement of East German officials and the fear that the copyright might not be secure had fostered a climate of secrecy, bordering on paranoia; no German historians had been allowed to see the diaries; no explanation had been given as to where the diaries had been kept for more than thirty years; and Times Newspapers had not carried out its own checks, apart from sending Trevor-Roper on his brief expedition into the Swiss bank.

Knightley sent his memorandum to Frank Giles to be forwarded to Murdoch. He never heard another word about it. It was too late. Murdoch had bought the diaries and now his priority, like Stern ’s, was to beat Newsweek into print.

Trevor-Roper arrived home in Cambridge late on Wednesday night. He was talking to his wife in her sitting-room at about midnight when he received a transatlantic telephone call from Murdoch and Charles Douglas-Home in New York. Murdoch told him that Stern was bringing forward its publication date to Monday. News International had acquired syndication rights in the diaries. ‘I think we’ll put them in the Sunday Times ,’ he said. The announcement of the discovery would be made on Friday morning, in less than thirty-six hours’ time. Douglas-Home cut in. ‘We want a piece from you for Saturday’s Times. Can you do it?’ Trevor-Roper said he thought he could, if he wrote ‘flat out’. It was agreed that the article would be picked up from Peterhouse by dispatch rider on Friday morning.

In Hamburg on Thursday, Sorge and Hensmann tied up the loose ends with Stern ’s smaller, European syndication partners. Paris Match bought the diaries for $400,000. The Spanish company Grupo Zeta paid $150,000. Geillustreerde Pers of the Netherlands handed over $125,000 for serial rights in Belgium and Holland. Norshe Presse of Norway bought the diaries for $50,000. The Italian rights went to Mondadori, publishers of the magazine Panorama , although as a precaution they decided at this stage to buy only the first four instalments for $50,000. Added together with the $1.2 million paid by News International for the English language serialization, this meant that the Hitler diaries had so far realized $1.975 million – less than Stern had originally hoped for, but still one of the largest syndication deals in history. And, of course, there were still the world book rights to come.

The Peterhouse Master’s Lodge is a large and stately Queen Anne house on the eastern side of Trumpington Street, opposite the college. This spacious and well-proportioned home was regarded by Trevor-Roper as one of the more attractive aspects of being Master of Peterhouse. (‘The only drawback’, he remarked, ‘is that the college comes with it.’)

Throughout Thursday, 21 April, Trevor-Roper sat in his first-floor study, trying to write his article for The Times. Although justifiably renowned for his literary style (A. J. P. Taylor called him ‘an incomparable essayist’), he had always found writing ‘terribly painful’. Deadlines especially were a torture to him. He never used a typewriter, always a fountain pen, and liked to ‘write, sleep on it, and then rewrite’. Today he had no time for such luxuries. At length, having sorted through his notes and cleared his mind, he set to work.

‘A new document’ – he began – ‘or rather, a whole new archive of documents – has recently come to light in Germany. It is an archive of great historical significance. When it is available to historians, it will occupy them for some time. It may also disconcert them. It is Hitler’s private diary, kept by him, in his own hand, throughout almost the whole of his reign….’

On Thursday night in his laboratory in the small town of Bad Ems outside Koblenz, Dr Arnold Rentz completed his analysis of the three sheets of paper Stern had sent to the Bundesarchiv the previous week.

When he had commissioned him, Dr Josef Henke had told Rentz that the tests were a matter of the utmost urgency. The chemist therefore worked late in order to be able to give Henke the results the following day. He had some good news, and some bad.

FRIDAY 22 APRIL.

At 9 a.m. a motorcycle dispatch-rider from The Times arrived at the Peterhouse Master’s Lodge.

Trevor-Roper was entitled to feel a certain professional pride as he handed over his article. It was long – over 3000 words – and had been difficult to write, but he had finished it in a day and submitted it on time. It was an impressive piece of journalism, if not of scholarship.

His career had always been marked by a curious dichotomy. There was Hugh Trevor-Roper, patient historian, author of learned works on such esoterica as the sixteenth-century European witch craze, the ancient Scottish constitution and the life of the fraudulent Sinologist, Edmund Backhouse, ‘the Hermit of Peking’. And then there was Lord Dacre, man of public affairs, newspaper director, pundit, MI5 officer and Hitler expert. His article for The Times represented the triumph of the intelligence officer over the scholar. His authentication of the Hitler diaries was not based on a careful analysis of their content – it could not be, he had scarcely bothered to read a single entry. It was based almost entirely on circumstantial evidence.

He confessed that to start with he had been sceptical (‘the very idea of Hitler as a methodical diarist is new’). But then he had ‘entered the back room in the Swiss bank, and turned the pages of those volumes, and learned the extraordinary story of their discovery’ and his doubts had ‘gradually dissolved’. What most impressed him, he wrote, were the other parts of the Hitler archive shown to him by Stern in Zurich and by Heidemann in Hamburg: