Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

Trevor-Roper felt a sense of relief as he left the Stern building. His action might have come as ‘a painful surprise’ to his hosts, but he had done as his conscience dictated. After a light lunch with the three Sunday Times journalists, he caught an afternoon flight back to London.

Trevor-Roper hoped he might now begin putting the whole affair behind him. He was over-optimistic. One of the first things he saw on his arrival at Heathrow was a placard advertising the London Standard. Its front-page banner headline was ‘HITLER DIARIES: DACRE DOUBTS’. ‘My heart sank,’ he recalled.

At home in Cambridge the telephone had scarcely stopped ringing since his departure for Germany on Sunday. He found his wife deeply upset. Reporters were camped on his doorstep. His first act was to instruct the Porter’s Lodge not to put through any more calls. It was impossible to stroll across the road to Peterhouse without running the gauntlet of journalists in the street outside. Instead, he had to leave through his garden, shin a back wall, cut through a car park and sneak into the college a few yards further up the street. He had to keep up this performance for the rest of the week.

Pictures of the Stern press conference were carried on all the evening news bulletins and dominated the following morning’s papers. The stories all focused on Trevor-Roper: ‘I’M NOT SURE NOW CONFESSES HITLER DIARY PROFESSOR’, ‘HITLER: THE GREAT RETREAT’, ‘BOFFINS’ BATTLE ON NAZI “DIARIES”’, ‘FISTS FLY IN HITLER UPROAR’, ‘I’M NOT QUITE SO SURE, SAYS DACRE’. The Guardian wanted to know why he had decided to ‘risk his reputation by pronouncing the diaries genuine after only the most cursory examination?’ His former colleague at Oxford, A. L. Rowse, wrote an article headed ‘The trial of Lord Dacre’ describing him, at the age of nearly seventy, as ‘a young man in a hurry’. ‘I have always had reservations about him,’ said Rowse, ‘since he started writing at Oxford as my protégé.’ A limerick did the rounds of Cambridge senior common rooms:

The final insult came in a solicitor’s letter sent on behalf of Rachel, Lady Dacre. She was a distant cousin who had arranged for the ancient Barony of Dacre to be called out of abeyance in her favour in 1970; she had strongly objected to Trevor-Roper’s decision to use the same name when he was awarded a life peerage in 1979. Now she had her lawyers warn him always to use his full title – Lord Dacre of Glanton – so as not to embarrass her side of the family in the light of his action over the Hitler diaries.

‘Life’, said Trevor-Roper, subsequently reflecting on the period, ‘was torture.’

BUT WHAT WAS torture to one historian was food and drink to another. After his triumph at the press conference, David Irving spent the rest of Monday writing articles and giving interviews. ‘Adolf Hitler is still big box office, from Hamburg to Harlem,’ he wrote in the Daily Mail. He described Heidemann as ‘a typical nice guy. He does not believe that villains exist in this world; he is the kind of man who believes the claims of tyre advertisements.’ For the readers of Bild Zeitung he outlined seven reasons why the diaries had to be forgeries. He was inexhaustible. At 3.30a.m. on Tuesday morning, he was roused in his hotel room in Hamburg and rushed to a local television studio for a live link-up with the ABC programme Nightline. ‘Twenty million viewers again,’ recorded Irving gleefully in his diary. ‘Paid 700 marks in cash as requested.’ From the studio he was taken back to his hotel. He grabbed another two hours’ sleep and after breakfast heard from Der Spiegel that they were willing to pay him 20,000 marks for his photocopies and his story. ‘ Very satisfactory,’ he noted. ‘That brings the total up to about £15,000 in three days.’ In the afternoon, he flew to Frankfurt to take part in a West German television debate on the diaries’ authenticity.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the full extent of Newsweek ’s alleged perfidy was at last apparent. Monday had seen the airing of the magazine’s television commercials, none of which made any mention of doubts about whether the diaries might be genuine. Casual readers of the accompanying newspaper advertisements would also have had the impression that Newsweek had bought the diaries and that there was no question surrounding their authenticity:

These controversial papers could rewrite the history of the Third Reich from Hitler’s rise to power to his suicide in the ruins of Berlin.

They shed new light on his character, his plans for war, Munich, the miracle of Dunkirk, the flight of Rudolf Hess, his military campaigns, his relations to his lover, Eva Braun.

The patient reader had to wade through to the fifth paragraph before coming to the throwaway question ‘Are they real?’ Maynard Parker, responsible for putting together the Newsweek treatment, was subsequently unrepentant about this aggressive salesmanship: ‘The advertising department had earlier deadlines than ours, but I do not feel that the ads misrepresent what is in the magazine.’

This was true. Although Newsweek gave some space to the views of the sceptics, the overwhelming impression left by its extensive coverage was that the diaries were genuine. The magazine actually ran more extracts than Stern – seventeen individual quotations, culled during the course of the syndication negotiations. Here was an ‘awestruck’ Hitler on Josef Stalin (‘How on earth does Stalin manage it?’); Hitler on Mussolini (‘He does not have the courtesy to face me’); on the Wehrmacht High Command (‘These old officers let themselves be hung with titles, decorations and property, but they don’t obey my orders’); and a ‘tender and sentimental’ Hitler on Eva Braun (‘Eva had to endure much suffering’). The Germans were predictably outraged. ‘That was a nice dirty trick,’ Peter Koch complained in an interview with Time . ‘We would like to sue. We were cheated and I guarantee Newsweek will regret what they did.’ There was a separate article on the forensic and handwriting examinations commissioned by Stern , there was ‘A Scholar’s Appraisal’ by Gerhard Weinberg and a piece on ‘Hitler and the Holocaust’. The magazine concluded with a prediction that the discovery of the diaries would force the world ‘to deal, once again, with the fact of Hitler himself’.

Germans will have to wonder anew about their collective, inherited guilt. Jews will have to face their fears again. All of us will have to ask once more whether Hitler’s evil was unique, or whether it lurks somewhere in everyone. Those speculations have been trivialized for years in gaudy paperback thrillers and made-for-television movies. Now the appearance of Hitler’s diaries – genuine or not, it almost doesn’t matter in the end – reminds us of the horrible reality on which our doubts about ourselves, and each other, are based.

Newsweek ’s behaviour over the Hitler diaries was widely criticized in the United States. An editorial in the New York Times entitled ‘Heil History’ poured particular scorn on the magazine’s assertion that the question of whether or not the diaries were genuine ‘almost doesn’t matter’:

Almost doesn’t matter? Almost doesn’t matter what really drove the century’s most diabolic tyranny? Almost doesn’t matter whether Hitler is reincarnated, perhaps redefined, by fact or forgery?