Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

…it is these other documents – letters, notes, notices of meetings, mementoes, and, above all, signed paintings and drawings by Hitler, all covering several decades – which convinced me of the authenticity of the diaries. For all belong to the same archive, and whereas signatures, single documents, or even groups of documents can be skilfully forged, a whole coherent archive covering 35 years is far less easily manufactured.

Such a disproportionate and indeed extravagant effort offers too large and vulnerable a flank to the critics who will undoubtedly assail it…. The archive, in fact, is not only a collection of documents which can be individually tested: it coheres as a whole and the diaries are an integral part of it.

That is the internal evidence of authenticity….

Trevor-Roper’s entire misjudgement was founded upon the non sequitur contained in that last, fatally confident sentence. The fact that the archive spanned thirty-five years and included paintings and other documents did not, except in the most superficial sense, provide ‘internal evidence of authenticity’. If such internal evidence existed, it was to be found in the detailed content of the diaries themselves. But no German scholar had even been allowed to see them, let alone check every entry; at least twenty volumes had not yet been transcribed into typescript; and Walde and Pesch, the only journalists apart from Heidemann who had access to the diaries, had thoroughly examined only one volume: that devoted to the flight of Rudolf Hess. (Ironically, the authenticity of the Hess book was the one feature of the diaries which still worried Trevor-Roper. ‘We must not jump to premature conclusions,’ he wrote. ‘There are many mysteries in the case of Hess.’)

The ‘external fact’ which impressed Trevor-Roper was the plane crash and Hitler’s reaction to it: ‘a clue which connects him, by a thin but direct line, with this archive’. The outburst in the bunker, together with the extent of the material accompanying the diaries, ‘seems to me to constitute clear proof of their authenticity’.

The world, he concluded, would have to revise its opinion of Hitler to take account of the fact that he was ‘a compulsive diarist’.

In fact, we must envisage him, every night, after he had apparently gone to bed… sitting down to write his daily record: and perhaps more too, for the archive contains not only the diaries but whole books by Hitler – books on Jesus Christ, on Frederick the Great, on himself (the three subjects which seem equally to fascinate megalomaniac Germans) – and a third volume of Mein Kampf . If Hitler (as he said in 1942) had long ago found writing by hand a great effort, that may be not so much because he was out of practice as because he already suffered from writer’s cramp.

As this hasty compilation of donnish jokes and misunderstanding sped down the M11 to London, Felix Schmidt opened the regular Stern editorial conference in Hamburg. It was 11 a.m., German time.

He had a brief announcement to make, he said. His statement was simple and to the point. Over the past few days, colleagues had probably heard rumours of an impending scoop of great importance. He was now pleased to be able to let them in on a secret which had been kept by the magazine for the past two years. Stern had acquired the diaries of Adolf Hitler and would begin publishing them on Monday.

The news was met with gasps and whistles of astonishment.

Simultaneously, the magazine was issuing a public statement announcing its discovery to the world. ‘Following evaluation of the diaries,’ it claimed, ‘the biography of the dictator, and with it the history of the Nazi state, will have to be written in large part anew.’

At 11.15 a.m., Stern ’s news department began sending out the telexed message – to the German press agency, DPA, to Associated Press, to Reuters, to United Press International, to West German radio and television….

It was at this point, with the juggernaut already beginning to roll, that Thomas Walde received a telephone call from Dr Josef Henke at the Bundesarchiv. Henke had received the results of Rentz’s forensic analysis. The two blank pages which had been cut from the diaries did not contain paper whitener and therefore could have been manufactured either before or during the Second World War. The Mussolini telegram, however, did contain whitener and Rentz was convinced the paper was made after 1945. Rentz’s findings supported those of the West German police in March: while the diaries might be genuine, much of the accompanying archive (whose existence had done so much to convince Trevor-Roper) was faked.

Walde thanked Rentz for his help and asked him to rush Rentz’s written report to Hamburg as quickly as possible.

At first sight, this news was not too disturbing for Stern : the diaries, after all, were what mattered, and Heidemann had already told Walde that, according to ‘Fischer’, the other material did not necessarily come from the Boernersdorf crash. But considered more carefully, the implications of the Rentz report were frightening. Three handwriting experts had concluded that the draft telegrams to Admiral Horthy and General Franco (similar to, and from the same source as, the Mussolini telegram) were written by the same person as the author of the page from the Hess special volume. If they were fakes, how much reliance could be placed on the handwriting authentication? And Rentz had been able to establish, by the apparent absence of whitener, only that the two diary pages might be from the right period: they could still be made of paper manufactured after 1945 by an old-fashioned process (as indeed eventually proved to be the case). Thus, at the very moment that news of Stern ’s scoop was being flashed around the world, the magazine received indications about its authenticity which were, at best, ambiguous.

As soon as Walde had finished speaking to Henke, he went off to find Peter Koch to tell him the news. Koch, newly returned from America, was understandably alarmed. Walde tried to reassure him: according to Heidemann, he said, whitener was in use before the war; and even if the Mussolini telegram was a fake, it did not originate from the same source as the diaries.

Koch was still not happy. He told Walde that they must inform the management at once. They collected Felix Schmidt on the way, briefed him on what had happened, and together all three went up to the ninth floor to see Schulte-Hillen.

Koch explained the situation and made a short speech. At any moment, he declared, a wave of scepticism was going to descend upon them. They were going to be attacked by academics and newspapers all over the world. They had to be absolutely confident that the story was watertight. There was only one way they could be sure. Heidemann must be made to divulge the name of his source. Koch was worried. ‘I told Schulte-Hillen,’ he recalled, ‘“Heidemann has greater trust in you than in me. Please ask him to write down the exact course of events. You can then read the piece of paper and lock it away in a safe. You don’t even need to give it to me to read. Just tell me that the source is OK.”’

Schulte-Hillen agreed. He asked his secretary to get Gerd Heidemann on the telephone.

The reporter was not in Hamburg. He was eventually traced to the Bayerischer Hof, an expensive hotel in the centre of Munich.

Schulte-Hillen explained the problem and asked him to write down, in confidence, the complete story of how he had obtained the diaries. Heidemann refused. ‘I asked him again,’ recalled Schulte-Hillen, ‘emphatically.’ It was no use. According to the managing director:

He told me that as an experienced journalist he knew that anything that was written down could also be copied and anything that was said could be passed on to other people. He was not so unscrupulous that he would endanger the life of his informant. He could not live with his conscience if he put someone else’s life in danger.