Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

The press was then shown the Stern documentary film, The Find . Trevor-Roper watched his own endorsement of the diaries, recorded the previous week, with his head in his hand. When the programme finished, a young woman pushed her way through the cameras to the tables at the end of the canteen and tipped out the contents of two parcels: a dozen volumes of the Hitler diaries. It was a coup de théâtre – ‘as if,’ said Brian James of the Daily Mail , ‘Hitler had suddenly thrust an arm out of the grave’. The photographers scrambled for close-ups. The Stern men tried to shield the contents to prevent any premature disclosure. Koch thrust a handful of diaries at Gerd Heidemann who was persuaded to stand up, with great reluctance, and pose with them for the cameras. Koch invited questions. Almost all of them were directed at Trevor-Roper.

In his own mind, the historian had already concluded that the diaries could well be false. ‘Having once admitted it to myself,’ he said later, ‘I felt I must attend the press conference and admit it to others.’ With head tilted back, eyes focused on some indeterminate point in the middle distance, he began to recant. ‘The question of the authenticity of the diaries is inseparable from the history of the diaries. The question is: are these documents linked necessarily to that aeroplane? When I saw the documents in Zurich, I understood – or, er, misunderstood – that that link was absolutely established….’ The diaries ‘might’ be genuine, he said, but ‘the thing looks more shaky’ – there was, after all, ‘such a thing as a perfect forgery’. He ended with a swipe at Stern and Times Newspapers:

As a historian, I regret that the, er, normal method of historical verification, er, has, perhaps necessarily, been to some extent sacrificed to the requirements of a journalistic scoop.

One of Trevor-Roper’s Oxford pupils, Timothy Garton Ash, covering the press conference for the New Republic , described the performance as ‘rather like watching a Victorian gentleman trying to back peddle on a penny farthing’.

Someone asked the historian about the damage the affair had done to his reputation. Trevor-Roper took a meditative sip from a glass of water. ‘I suppose my personal reputation is linked to anything I say. I am prepared to express my opinion, and if I am wrong I am wrong, and if I am right I am right. I don’t worry about these things.’

Until Trevor-Roper’s contribution, the press conference had been going well for the Stern men. Now they sat, stony-faced, with arms folded, as the proceedings began to disintegrate around them. David Irving leapt to the microphone in the centre of the hall, incensed at Koch’s description of him as a man without any reputation. ‘I decided to play hardball,’ he wrote in his diary afterwards. ‘I am the British historian David Irving,’ he declared. ‘1 May not have a doctorate, or a professorship, or even the title “Lord”, but I believe I have a reputation in Germany nevertheless.’ He demanded to know how Hitler could have written of the July bomb plot in his diary, when Stern ’s own film had just shown the dictator meeting Mussolini a few hours after the explosion, and having to shake hands with him with his left hand. He brandished his photocopies. ‘I know the collection from which these diaries come. It is an old collection, full of forgeries. I have some here.’ The television cameras swung away from the Stern dignatories and on to the gesticulating figure in the middle of the room. ‘Reporters stormed towards me,’ recalled Irving, ‘lights blazing, and microphones were thrust at me.’ A Japanese film crew was trampled in the rush and a fist fight broke out. Chairs and lights were scattered as chaos rippled across the crowded floor. From the platform, Koch shouted that Irving should ask questions, not make speeches. Irving’s microphone was switched off. But it was too late. Irving challenged Stern to say whether the diaries’ ink had been tested for its age. There was no answer. ‘Ink! ink!’ shouted some of the reporters. ‘Torpedo running,’ whispered Irving to one of the journalists sitting next to him as he sat down. The local NBC correspondent approached and asked if he would leave immediately to take part in a live link-up with the Today show, now on the air in America. Irving agreed. ‘All most exhilarating,’ he noted, ‘and I left a trail of chaos behind me.’

As Irving was going out of the Stern building, Gerhard Weinberg was coming in. The American academic had been unpacking in Bonn on Saturday, finishing off his interview with Steven Strasser of Newsweek, when Peter Koch telephoned him. Koch had pleaded with him to attend the press conference. Weinberg had told him that it was impossible – he had his first class in Bonn at 10 a.m. on Monday; he wouldn’t cancel it. (‘It took him some time to realize I wasn’t being difficult,’ said Weinberg. ‘I was just being me.’) But Koch was persistent: he would fix the travel arrangements to ensure that the professor did not miss his class. Accordingly, the instant his lecture finished, at 11 a.m. on Monday, a Stern driver rushed Weinberg from the university campus to the airport. From Bonn he was flown in the company’s private plane to Hamburg, then driven straight to the Stern office. At 12.30 p.m. he took his place on the platform.

Weinberg repaid Stern for its trouble and expense by raising fresh doubts about its scoop. ‘All the handwriting authentication I have seen’, he told the world’s press, ‘pertains to documents other than the diaries, except one page said to have been cut out of one diary. In other words, the memorandum from the American handwriting expert and the German police handwriting expert refer to Hitler’s handwriting, but not to Hitler’s handwriting in the diaries. In fact, they probably didn’t know the diaries existed when shown this evidence.’ It was ‘inappropriate’ to cite the analysis of one set of documents and apply it to another.

Koch stared at Weinberg in horror, but the professor had not finished yet. In his careful, pedantic manner, he continued: ‘One question has troubled me from the outset – that no knowledgeable expert on the Third Reich has been allowed to study the whole text to see if there are any textual absurdities. I mean, we’re not living on a South Sea island here, they wouldn’t have had to have gone outside the Hamburg city limits to find experts who would know. It is vital now that a group-of experts from all over the world should be given the chance to test these manuscripts.’ Koch cut in to say that, of course, experts would be given the opportunity to study the diaries. There were shouts of ‘When?’ and ‘Set a date.’ ‘When the journalistic evaluation has been completed,’ replied Koch.

The news conference, which had begun so well for Stern , broke up after more than two hours in complete disarray. It was not merely a public relations disaster; the failure to produce convincing evidence for the diaries’ authenticity also had legal implications. One of Stern ’s lawyers, Herr Hagen, had warned Schulte-Hillen on Friday in a confidential memorandum that the magazine’s coverage was such that the company risked prosecution for disseminating Nazi propaganda. Stern ’s defence, obviously, would be that it was furthering historical research. But that argument could collapse if historians regarded the diaries as being of dubious value. The State of Bavaria could use the uncertainty as a pretext to withdraw the publishing rights it had conceded through the agreement with the Bundesarchiv. Watching as the press conference disintegrated, Hagen decided that ‘only a quick and definitive judgement on the diaries’ authenticity could save the situation’. With the consent of the Stern management, he arranged for three of the diaries – the Hess special volume and books from 1934 and 1943 – to be handed over immediately to Dr Henke of the Bundesarchiv, who had attended the conference. Henke promised to deliver a judgement to Hagen swiftly and privately. The lawyer was relieved. The prospect of a court battle to try to establish that Stern was not sympathetic to the Nazis, with Gerd Heidemann possibly called as a witness, did not bear contemplating.