Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

Almost every big American magazine found itself pressed to issue a statement. Time ’s was terse (‘We have had an interest’); Life ’s was baffled (‘We haven’t been involved at all; we just heard about it today’); the National Enquirer tried to pretend it was on the point of clinching a deal (‘right now we are involved in negotiations with Stern ’). The longest came from Newsweek , read out by the magazine’s publicity director, Gary Gerard: ‘ Newsweek does not have an agreement with Stern for publishing rights to the Adolf Hitler diaries. We are covering the story as news.’

Newsweek ’s behaviour went much further than merely ‘covering the story as news’. At a morning editorial conference it was decided to ransack the material handed over in Hamburg. Hitler would go on the cover. Inside the magazine, thirteen pages would be devoted to the diaries (as opposed to four for the week’s main story, the bombing of the US embassy in Beirut which left forty-seven dead). The advertising department was instructed to prepare an extensive publicity campaign. Full-page advertisements were taken out in six major US newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post ; these were to be backed up by thirty-second television commercials in twelve American cities.

As it happened, this was the day on which Newsweek ’s nominated expert, Gerhard Weinberg, was due to fly to Germany to take up a temporary teaching post in Bonn. Maynard Parker was nevertheless determined to extract an article from him. Weinberg dismissed his last class on the campus at Chapel Hill at 11 a.m. He and his wife caught a flight to New York and at 3 p.m. were met at La Guardia airport by two Newsweek reporters and a photographer. The journalists steered the professor into a corner of the arrivals lounge and thrust a copy of Trevor-Roper’s Times article into his hands – the text had just been wired over from London. Weinberg skimmed through it: ‘ doubts dissolved… satisfied documents authentic… standard accounts Hitler’s personality have to be revised… astonishing archive…. ’ Weinberg, who had always respected Trevor-Roper’s scholarship, was startled by the lack of equivocation. Such a ringing endorsement seemed to him ‘in itself to be a strong argument in favour of the diaries’ authenticity’. Trevor-Roper, he reasoned, must know something he didn’t. He told the Newsweek reporters that in view of the article, the diaries, in his opinion, were now more likely to be genuine than not.

The Newsweek men still needed more information to complete their coverage. Weinberg was equally determined to catch his flight to Germany. The only solution was for one of the journalists, Steven Strasser, to fly out with him, interview him on the plane, and file a piece by telephone from Germany. The photographer stood Professor Weinberg against a wall and took a few hasty pictures. Then Weinberg, his wife, and Mr Strasser left to catch the afternoon flight to Frankfurt.

Peter Koch’s prediction of the hostility the diaries would arouse was already coming true.

In Stuttgart, Eberhard Jaeckel – although, like Weinberg, ‘shaken by Trevor-Roper’s position’ – declared himself ‘extremely sceptical’. He had seen a so-called ‘Hitler diary’ some years before, he said, and decided it was forged.

‘I have not seen their evidence, but everything speaks against it,’ Werner Maser told Reuters. ‘It smacks of pure sensationalism.’

‘I am extraordinary sceptical,’ announced Karl-Dietrich Bracher of Bonn University. ‘It would be a total surprise and I consider it highly unlikely.’

A spokesman for the Federal Archives in Koblenz confirmed that they had arranged for the examination of ‘about ten pages’ of Hitler’s handwriting for Stern , but denied having authenticated any diaries.

The loudest condemnations of all were emanating from London.

David Irving reckoned he was due for some luck. For two years, everything had gone wrong for him. His marriage had ended in an acrimonious divorce. He was being pursued by the Inland Revenue. His political activities had collapsed due to lack of funds. He was on the point of being evicted from his flat. Most of the furniture had been taken by his wife and entire rooms were left stripped and abandoned while he was reduced to squatting in one corner. By the spring of 1983, he was in desperate need of money and a boost for his flagging career. And now, as if in answer to a prayer, Adolf Hitler came to his rescue.

Ever since 10 a.m., when a reporter from Der Spiegel had called to tell him of Stern ’s impending announcement, he had been inundated with inquiries from around the world – Reuters, Newsweek , the New York Times , the Observer , the Sunday Mirror, Bild Zeitung , Independent Radio News, the BBC…. ‘As soon as I rang off, the phone rang again,’ he noted in his diary. ‘Quite extraordinary.’ His answer to all of them was the same: the Hitler diaries were fakes, and he had the evidence to prove it.

He was ‘shocked’ by Stern ’s decision to publish. He was certain that the forgeries he had received from Priesack in December originated from the same source as Heidemann’s diaries. Thankfully, he still had photocopies of the material – letters, drawings, a few pages from the original volume for 1935 (the one Kujau had forged in 1978 and given to Fritz Stiefel). With the Hitler diaries fast becoming the hottest news story in the world, these worthless scraps had suddenly become a potential gold mine. Irving’s priority now was to make money as quickly as possible.

In between constant interruptions from the telephone, he wrote to the Sunday Times drawing their attention to the fact that he had given them an ‘exclusive lead to these documents’ before Christmas and demanding as commission a percentage of the price paid for the diaries. He then set about marketing his information. Der Spiegel offered to pay him for his photocopies. Bild Zeitung , a mass-circulation West German paper, promised to meet his expenses and provide a fee if he would fly out to Hamburg to confront Stern at its press conference on Monday. One of the Sunday Times’s main rivals, the Observer, paid him £1000 for his help in compiling an article which derided the diaries’ authenticity; another, the Mail on Sunday , gave him £5000 for his documents and a statement that the diaries were forged.

This was only the beginning of an extraordinary resurgence in Irving’s fortunes. No one now cared about his reputation as a right-wing maverick. Seeing their circulations threatened by the Hitler scoop, newspapers and magazines which would have treated him as a pariah twenty-four hours earlier queued up for quotes. By the end of the afternoon Irving had emerged as Stern ’s most vociferous and dangerous assailant.

At 9.30 p.m., a BBC taxi picked him up and took him to Television Centre where he appeared in a live studio confrontation with Charles Douglas-Home. Irving waved his fakes at the camera. Douglas-Home was unperturbed. ‘I have smelt them,’ he said of the diaries. ‘I’m a minor historian and we know about the smell of old documents. They certainly smelt.’

At that moment, sitting in the audience at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Times Newspapers’ star witness was beginning to have second thoughts. Borne along by the momentum of deadlines, midnight phone calls and departure times, infected by the pervading atmosphere of excitement and secrecy, he had scarcely had time for an hour’s calm reflection all week. Now, as the other academics and their wives concentrated on the music of Verdi’s Don Carlos , Trevor-Roper’s thoughts were elsewhere, ranging back over his experiences in Hamburg and Zurich, with one incident in particular gnawing at his mind.