Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

Journalism should take no solace from the customary excuse that it must deal with history in a hurry. And scholars in such a hurry, their second thoughts notwithstanding, can hardly be called historians.

Newsweek gave enormous play to the diaries, but the magazine was not alone in seeing it as the most important story of the moment: the New York Times itself ran it on its front page on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday; the mass-circulation tabloids gave it even greater space. By the fifth day the Hitler diaries affair had turned into a kind of giant soap opera – an international entertainment playing on almost every radio and television network and newspaper front page in the world. And what a story it was – Hitler’s bunker, old Nazis, a wartime plane crash, a trail across the Iron Curtain, millions of dollars, Swiss bank vaults, secret documents, a punch-up in front of the cameras, dramatic changes of heart, the Rewriting of History, Lord Dacre, David Irving, Rupert Murdoch, Gerd Heidemann….

It seemed that every academic who had ever written about Hitler was at some stage called upon to comment. Professor Donald Watt, the editor of the most recent English language edition of Mein Kampf, thought the diaries ‘odd’. John Kenneth Galbraith called them ‘impossible’. William L. Shirer said they were ‘outlandish… a hoax’. ‘I don’t think serious historians will touch these things for a long time,’ said J. P. Stern, the author of The Führer and the People. Professor Gordon A. Craig called it ‘one of the most sensational finds of the century’. ‘The question is of little importance,’ was A. J. P. Taylor’s characteristic comment. ‘Who cares about Hitler nowadays?’

There was a section of opinion which held that the material, even if genuine, should not be published. What had caught the popular imagination was the fact that these were Hitler’s diaries. A diary was something intimate and human. How could a figure who had caused so much suffering be allowed to speak in ordinary language, to justify what he did? It directly touched the point George Steiner had made: ‘You will think him a man and no longer believe what he did.’ The Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Immanuel Jakobovits, put this argument in a letter to The Times which was extensively quoted around the world, especially in West Germany:

As a human being – victim and survivor of history’s most monstrous tyranny – I protest vehemently against the publication of the so-called Hitler diaries. Whether they are authentic or not is quite immaterial to the outrage of resurrecting the incarnation of evil and his propaganda, rehabilitating him for a generation which knew not this master gangster…. Hailing this find as ‘the biggest literary discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls’ is a sacrilege which only compounds the insult to the millions who perished and suffered under this tyranny.

Nineteen eighty-three marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazis’ rise to power. But although more than a generation had passed since the end of the war, the reaction aroused by the diaries showed how potent a symbol Hitler remained. It was not simply fresh proof of the accuracy of the old cliché about the fascination of evil; the comments also revealed how little attitudes towards Hitler had changed. In the communist world, the Hitler portrayed in the diaries was denounced as an agent of capitalism. Similarly, some conservatives in the West, in their comments on Stern ’s Hitler, were blinded to any other consideration by their overwhelming mistrust of the Soviet Union. Both responses were a curious echo of those of the 1930s.

On the day of the Stern press conference, Professor Karl-Dietrich Bracher of Bonn University dismissed the diaries as forgeries and speculated as to who might be responsible. He noted that this was a Hitler who was supposed to have expressed admiration for the shrewdness of the arch-appeaser, Neville Chamberlain; who had allowed the British Army to escape at Dunkirk; who had sanctioned Hess’s peace mission in 1941. Perversely, it was Hitler’s enemies in the West, Churchill and Roosevelt, who were portrayed as the warmongers. Bracher suggested that the diaries were ‘an attempt to manipulate German history at a politically sensitive moment’. Perhaps the diaries were the work of a foreign power? The 1980s, after all, were ‘a time of intense debate about the deployment of new NATO missiles in West Germany’ – at such a moment ‘there was a growing audience for history unfavourable to the United States and Britain’. Werner Maser alleged the diaries were the work of an official ‘forgery factory’ in Potsdam in East Germany ‘where Hitler letters and Hitler notes are produced to earn hard currency for the East Germans’. This theme was developed in Britain in a radio interview by George Young, a former deputy director of MI6 and a noted cold warrior. Without any evidence – without even having seen the diaries – he alleged the affair might be part of ‘an East German official disinformation effort’:

The East German security and intelligence service has a document-faking or disinformation section. No doubt they would be capable of doing this…. It would suit the Russians’ book to sow mistrust in any shape or form, particularly among the West Germans. NATO croaks and groans quite a bit these days and anything that sows doubts about the past may create mistrust about the present.

At a press luncheon in New York on Tuesday, the American Ambassador to the United Nations, Mrs Jeanne Kirkpatrick, also detected in the diaries the hand of an Eastern intelligence agency. ‘I have no doubt’, she claimed, ‘that there are those in central Europe today who would, and indeed do, attempt to sow distrust between the United States and its German friends.’

The communists nurtured suspicions of their own. The Soviet Union lost 20 million dead in Hitler’s war; the memory was still a decisive influence on Russia’s foreign policy. Moscow had not officially confirmed Hitler’s death until 1968 and remained acutely sensitive to what it saw as any attempt to rehabilitate the Nazis. On Monday, Professor Sergei Tikhvinski, a leading Russian historian and a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, denounced the Hitler diaries as ‘a most obvious act of political sabotage’. At 6.30 on Wednesday evening, Soviet television described the diaries’ publication as ‘an attempt to whitewash the chief fascist criminal’. Ninety minutes later, Radio Moscow International broadcast a similar opinion to its listeners in France, where Paris Match had just begun its serialization:

The phantom of the human Führer… is an attempt to make allowances in advance in the eyes of public opinion for those in the USA and in NATO headquarters who are working out new versions of limited warfare, or other wars for Europe, using the pretext of the old myth of the threat from the East – the one that allowed Hitler to unleash the Second World War.

‘These “diaries”’, claimed the official news agency Tass, ‘are intended to propagandize Nazism among the young generation, to distract them from the fight for peace and put them on the path of right-wing nationalist forces in the Federal Republic.’

In Berlin, the East German Foreign Ministry issued an official statement: ‘The German Democratic Republic regards the publication of the Hitler diaries in Stern as a belated attempt to rehabilitate Hitler.’ Western journalists who applied for permission to visit the site of the crashed plane in Boernersdorf found that visas were granted with unusual speed. The East Germans were eager to allow foreigners to speak to the local farmers who, virtually without exception, derided the idea that documents could have been salvaged from the burning wreck. Suddenly, after centuries of calm, the peaceful village was invaded by the western media. Ignorant of the furore about the diaries, a rumour went round Boernersdorf that the reason for the influx of cameramen and reporters was that two of the graves in the churchyard, marked ‘Unknown man’ and ‘Unknown woman’, contained the remains of Hitler and Eva Braun.