Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

Trevor-Roper was immediately suspicious. This was the third version of the story he had heard, he said. Originally, in Zurich, he had been told by Peter Koch that the diaries’ supplier lived in East Germany: that was why his name could not be disclosed. Then, in Hamburg last week, Heidemann had told him that the so-called ‘Wehrmacht officer’ lived in Switzerland and could not be identified for tax reasons. Now he was supposed to live in West Germany and only to have supplied the diaries, not the additional material. Which version was correct?

Heidemann blustered. He was not responsible for anything Koch said. Koch knew nothing. Koch knew only as much as he, Heidemann, chose to tell him.

The historian was insistent. He would not authenticate the diaries unless Heidemann gave him the full story of their discovery. They should start again from the beginning. How had the diaries come into Stern ’s possession?

‘In interrogation,’ Trevor-Roper once observed, ‘pressure must be uninterrupted.’ That afternoon in the Atlantic Hotel he drew on the skills he had learned in the prisoner of war cages of Germany in the autumn of 1945. Remorselessly, he battered away at Heidemann’s story in a way that no one had done since the diaries had first begun to emerge in Hamburg. Heidemann pulled out document after document from his briefcase. ‘I’ll produce anything if you just won’t put me through the mincing machine.’

Trevor-Roper read through the Hess special volume. It was ludicrously superficial. He had no doubts now. It was a forgery.

‘Can you give me’, he demanded, ‘any reason why I should believe in this Wehrmacht officer?’

‘No,’ said Heidemann. ‘Why should I?’

‘Well, then, why should I believe?’ retorted Trevor-Roper.

There was real anger in the exchanges; old resentments flared. ‘You are behaving exactly like an officer of the British secret service,’ shouted Heidemann. ‘We are no longer in 1945.’ After putting up a stubborn resistance for more than an hour, the reporter declared that he had had enough and stalked out of the room, refusing to attend a dinner that Stern was supposed to be giving in Trevor-Roper’s honour that evening.

Trevor-Roper, too, considered boycotting the meal. In the end he agreed to attend only in the hope of extracting the name of the diaries’ supplier from Peter Koch. But to the historian’s astonishment, Koch, when confronted with his earlier assertion that Stern knew the identity of the ‘Wehrmacht officer’, calmly denied ever having made such a claim. Trevor-Roper threatened to stay away from the following morning’s press conference. The Stern men were unmoved. The dinner ended, according to the subsequent Stern Report , with ‘an icy atmosphere around the table’.

After the meal, Trevor-Roper discussed his dilemma with Paul Eddy, Brian MacArthur and Anthony Terry. They urged him not to recant in public at the press conference. He should at least wait until he had returned to Britain. The three Sunday Times men were persuasive, and by the time they left him at midnight, the historian was half convinced. He was crossing the lobby of the hotel on his way up to bed when he unexpectedly ran into an old friend – Sir Nicholas Henderson, Britain’s former ambassador in Washington and Bonn. The two men retreated to the bar and drank beer until 2 a.m. Henderson’s advice was unequivocal. Trevor-Roper should state his reservations as quickly and publicly as possible. He would not have a better opportunity than the Stern press conference in a few hours’ time. Trevor-Roper decided ‘to sleep on the matter’.

Monday, 25 April.

‘The big day,’ wrote Irving in his diary.

The special issue of Stern was already piled up on the news-stands to greet the early morning commuters. More than two and a quarter million copies had been printed over the weekend. ‘Hitler’s Diary Discovered,’ proclaimed the cover, displaying a stack of black-bound volumes, topped by one bearing the Gothic initials ‘FH’ (the ‘F’ still assumed by Stern to be an ‘A’). Coverage of the diaries sprawled across more than forty pages, with extracts blown up to three or four times their original size. There was Hitler on Ernst Roehm:

I gave him the chance to draw the consequences, but he was too cowardly to do so. On my orders he was later shot.

Hitler on the Kristallnacht, the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ in 1938, when Jewish shops and synagogues were smashed and thousands of Jews sent to concentration camps:

Report brought to me of some ugly attacks by people in uniform in various places, also of Jews beaten to death and Jewish suicides. What will they say abroad? The necessary orders will be given immediately.

Hitler on the Russian attack on Berlin in April 1945:

The long-awaited offensive has begun. May the Lord God stand by us.

There were pictures of Hitler in the Reichschancellery in 1945, Hitler with Mussolini, Hitler writing at his desk, Hitler holding a bunch of flowers, Hitler with Hess; the only other person shown as often was Gerd Heidemann: Heidemann on Carin II , Heidemann with the diaries, Heidemann in Boernersdorf, Heidemann with Wolff, Heidemann with Guensche and Mohnke – the entire issue was a monument to one man’s obsession, a tasteless and hysterical trampling over thirty-eight years of post-war German sensitivity about the Nazis. Stern was already under attack for its handling of the diaries; this tactless treatment was to earn the magazine the odium of almost the entire West German press.

In the Four Seasons Hotel, Irving was up early. He prepared for the morning’s combat with a haircut in the hotel barber’s followed by a heavy German breakfast. The restaurant, he found, was ‘packed with journalists and television teams, poring over this morning’s Stern ’.

Trevor-Roper woke at 8 a.m. to a telephone call from Charles Douglas-Home. How was he feeling? Trevor-Roper said that he had talked to Heidemann, that his doubts had not been assuaged, that they had, in fact, increased. Douglas-Home urged him not to ‘burn his boats’ at the press conference.

By 10.30 a.m., the Stern canteen was packed with journalists. More than two hundied had converged on Hamburg from all over the world. There were twenty-seven television crews. All the seats were taken and reporters and photographers squeezed into every corner, squatting, and in some cases lying full-length, beneath the platform at the far end of the room. Incongruous yet unnoticed, in the centre of it all, sat General Wilhelm Mohnke, attending by special invitation of Gerd Heidemann. Each of the journalists was issued with a press kit: twenty pages of information about the diaries and a set of seven photographs. Also included were copies of the Rentz forensic reports on the two diary pages; the Rentz finding on the Mussolini telegram was omitted, giving the impression that his tests had been a hundred per cent in favour of the authenticity of the Stern material.

At 11 a.m., the stars of the conference filed in to a battery of flashes from the photographers: Peter Koch, Felix Schmidt, Thomas Walde, Gerd Heidemann and Hugh Trevor-Roper. The professor was startled by the size of the audience, the hot and noisy atmosphere, the brilliance of the television lights. It looked, wrote one journalist afterwards, like ‘a Sadler’s Wells set for hell’.

Peter Koch’s introduction was aggressive. He denounced the attacks on the diaries’ authenticity. Eberhard Jaeckel was making assertions about material he had not even seen. ‘If we as journalists behaved in such a manner,’ said Koch, ‘we would be accused of superficiality.’ David Irving – sitting half-way down the room – he dismissed as an historian ‘with no reputation to lose’. ‘I am a hundred per cent convinced that Hitler wrote every single word in those books,’ insisted Koch. ‘We paid a lot of money for the diaries, but when it comes to informing the reader, nothing is too expensive.’