Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

On Tuesday, Heidemann had shown him a letter, supposedly by Hitler. It was dated 1908 and addressed to a girl with whom Hitler was supposed to have been infatuated during his days in Vienna. The incident had been described by August Kubizek in The Young Hitler I Knew . In retrospect, this letter ‘disquieted’ Trevor-Roper. It fitted in ‘just a little too neatly’ with the known historical record. ‘Could this letter have been forged for this purpose?’ he wondered. And why was it with Hitler’s papers? Why wasn’t it with the girl’s? Until this moment he had taken the existence of such supplementary material, which helped to make up the sheer bulk of the archive, as an almost unanswerable argument in favour of the diaries’ authenticity. Suddenly he saw the flaw in this logic. For the first time since leaving the Swiss bank, he allowed his mind to approach the Stern find from a different angle.

I began to consider the whole archive with the mind of a forger. How would a forger of Hitler’s diaries proceed? I decided that he would concentrate on a period when Hitler’s movements were well documented, and, outside that period, select only detached episodes for which public evidence was accessible. He would also, since his main material would be derivative or trivial, vary it where he safely could with interesting deviations. The diaries, I noted, had a discomforting correspondence with this model. They were continuous from 1932; before that there were isolated episodes; and an interesting variation was suggested in the affair of Rudolf Hess.

Trevor-Roper had always had doubts about the Hess book: ‘That Hitler, with his political brain, should have sanctioned such a mission – it was insane.’ Now, these doubts and his reservations about the 1908 letter, began to set off a fearful chain reaction in his mind. Why hadn’t any German experts seen the material? And Heidemann – the memory of that awful evening at the Atlantic swam back into his memory – Heidemann could so easily have been deceived; ‘he was not a critical spirit’. Trevor-Roper’s confidence in his judgement began rapidly unravelling.

‘If at that moment,’ he said later, ‘I could have stopped the course of events, I would have done so.’

He briefly considered groping his way out of the dimly lit auditorium to find a telephone. He rejected the idea. He knew the workings of a modern newspaper sufficiently well to appreciate that there was no chance of stopping his article now. At that moment, less than a mile away, in the print-room of Times Newspapers, twelve hours after it had been picked up from his home, 400,000 copies of it were coming off the presses.

HUGH TREVOR-ROPER ARRIVED home in Cambridge in the early hours of Saturday morning. He went to bed but was soon up again. Shortly after 7 a.m. he went down to collect the morning’s edition of The Times . The story dominated the front page:

• Hitler approved the ‘peace’ flight to Scotland in 1941 by his deputy, Rudolf Hess but then declared him insane.

• He ordered his troops not to destroy the British Expeditionary Force trapped at Dunkirk in 1940 in the hope that he could conclude a negotiated peace.

• He thought Neville Chamberlain, whom history has judged harshly, was a skilled negotiator and admired his toughness.

Trevor-Roper opened the paper. His own article was spread across an entire page:

‘When I had entered the back room in the Swiss bank, and turned the pages of those volumes, my doubts gradually dissolved. I am now satisfied they are authentic.’

Reading the article spurred Trevor-Roper into action. At 8 a.m. he began making a series of telephone calls.

He rang Charles Douglas-Home and told him he now had ‘some doubts’ about the authenticity of the diaries. ‘They were not doubts such that I could say I disbelieved in the diaries,’ he recalled – but they were serious reservations. Douglas-Home took the news with remarkable calmness. He told the historian that there had been a good deal of publicity on television the previous evening, with David Irving emerging as ‘prosecuting counsel’. He said that he, too, personally regretted the deal with Stern – the Germans were unpleasant to deal with, arrogant and paranoid. They still hadn’t supplied a complete transcript of the material. The conditions they had imposed were ‘insulting’. They would have to see what developed over the next few days.

Trevor-Roper also spoke of his doubts to Colin Webb. Next, he rang Peter Wickman. Stern wanted him to attend the press conference to launch the diaries on Monday. Trevor-Roper told Wickman he would take part only if he were given an opportunity to put some questions to Gerd Heidemann beforehand. In addition, he wanted to see a typed transcript of the Hess volume. Wickman promised to see what he could do.

One good reason for Douglas-Home’s stoicism in the face of Trevor-Roper’s sudden nervousness was the fact that he was no longer responsible for the diaries. That burden had passed on Thursday to Frank Giles at the Sunday Times. A fatal breakdown in communication now occurred. Douglas-Home believed that Trevor-Roper’s doubts were relatively minor; if they were serious, he assumed the historian would pass them on to the Sunday Times. But Trevor-Roper was relying on Douglas-Home to spread the word of his unease around Gray’s Inn Road. He did not think of calling them direct. ‘I had had no dealings with the Sunday Times myself,’ he explained. ‘I had been employed solely by The Times. ’ He sat at home in Cambridge and waited for Knightley or Giles to ring him. He was ‘surprised that they didn’t call; it would seem the thing to do’.

Meanwhile, happily ignorant of Trevor-Roper’s change of heart, the staff of the Sunday Times were racing against the paper’s deadline to do justice to a story endorsed by the historian as the greatest scoop since Watergate. Professional instincts were now overriding natural scepticism. Magnus Linklater (co-author of Hoax , the story of the faked Howard Hughes autobiography) and Paul Eddy, the head of the paper’s Insight team, were responsible for putting together the coverage. Stern would not allow them to talk to Heidemann directly. Quotations from the diaries were having to be extracted from the Germans by Anthony Terry, the Sunday Times representative in Hamburg, who translated them and telexed them to London. Even as they worked, Linklater and Eddy were conscious of how phoney they sounded. According to the telexes, Hitler had written some peculiar entries.

[ On Goebbels’s affair with a Czech actress ]

The little Dr Goebbels is up to his old tricks again with women.

[ On Himmler ]

I shall show this deceitful small animal breeder with his lust for power; this unfathomable little penny-pincher will find out what I am about.

[ On the July 1944 bomb plot ]

Ha, ha, isn’t it laughable? This scum, these loafers and good-for-nothings. These people were bunglers.

The two journalists discussed what they should do. ‘We agreed,’ said Linklater afterwards, ‘that the honourable course would have been to have refused to touch it. But as Paul said, if we did that, we would have to resign. We both laughed about that, so we carried on – like a couple of hacks.’

Phillip Knightley was also searching his conscience. His task was to write an article setting out the reasons for the diaries’ authenticity and their importance as an historical source. ‘I agreed to do it on the understanding that my name wasn’t to be attached to it. Then someone pointed out that it would look odd if the article appeared anonymously and I was asked to reconsider.’ Knightley went off to consult John Whale, the Sunday Times’s religious correspondent, ‘a great moral force on the paper’. Knightley showed him what he had written and asked him what he should do. Whale advised him to agree to the request – he had been sufficiently detached in the piece to cover himself against the possibility that the material was fraudulent. (Only one sentence – the first – later returned to haunt Knightley: ‘Hitler’s diaries’, he wrote, ‘have been submitted to the most rigorous tests to establish their authenticity.’)