Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

On Thursday 28 April Heidemann announced that the missing diaries had at last arrived in a consignment of pianos delivered to Saarbruecken. He visited Peter Kuehsel in his office and arranged to pick up the final instalment of 300,000 marks at 9.30 a.m. the next morning.

On Friday, he met Konrad Kujau in Hamburg and took delivery of the last four volumes.

Kujau had been watching events unfold from Stuttgart with some interest. On Friday, when the evening news had announced the diaries’ discovery, he had telephoned Maria Modritsch and told her to switch on her television. He had viewed the coverage of Monday’s press conference and found it ‘unbelievable’. Could he get away with it? He was confident enough to believe that he could: he had, after all, been forging Nazi documents for the best part of a decade and had so far managed to avoid detection. Surely Stern would not be publishing the material unless it had already succeeded in fooling enough experts to put him in the clear? When Ulli Blaschke, his friend in the police force, saw him in the Beer Bar in Stuttgart at the height of the controversy, he brought up the subject of the diaries and asked Conny whether he thought they were genuine. Kujau solemnly assured him that in his opinion they were.

The forger has provided a colourful account of his final transaction with Heidemann that Friday. According to him, they met in the archive in Milchstrasse. Outside, the public debate about the diaries was still raging; inside, the telephone scarcely stopped ringing. Heidemann received the diaries and handed him in return 12,000 marks and an IOU for a further 100,000, He then told Kujau that he had a plan showing the location of a hoard of Nazi treasure in East Berlin, buried ‘two spades deep’. Heidemann suggested that Conny and Edith should go over together and dig it up. He would pay them 20,000 marks as a reward. ‘Oh yes?’ replied Kujau. ‘You’ll be coming to hold the lamp, will you?’ The reporter said he couldn’t: it was impossible for him to cross the border at the moment. Kujau immediately suspected that Heidemann planned to tip off the East German police and arrange for him to disappear into a communist jail. He declined the offer and returned to Stuttgart.

A few hours after saying goodbye to Kujau, Heidemann rang David Irving in London.

Since his return to Duke Street, Irving had been pondering the events of the past few days. He was forced to admit that as far as attacking the authenticity of Stern ’s diaries went, he had ‘squeezed the lemon dry’. He asked himself what he could do to recapture the initiative, and he came up with one answer: he could announce that he had changed his mind and declare the diaries genuine.

There were a number of factors which made this an attractive idea, apart from the obvious injection of fresh publicity it would provide. One was temperamental. Irving had always relished his role as an enfant terrible . He liked being outrageous, making liberal flesh creep. Now, for the first time in his career, his stand on the diaries had put him on the side of conventional opinion. It was not his style and he found it disconcerting.

He had also begun to have genuine doubts about the wisdom of the uncompromising line he had adopted. He had been shaken by the sheer quantity of Stern ’s archive when he had seen it in the ZDF studio on Tuesday night. Perhaps there was a genuine set of Hitler diaries somewhere, which had served as a model for the forgery in his possession? One of his objections to the Stern material had been that Hitler had suffered from Parkinson’s Disease in the final weeks of his life. Now he had to admit, having seen them, that the final entries did slant sharply to the right, as if oblivious to the lines on the page – a classic symptom of Parkinsonism. And finally, there was the fact that the diaries did not contain any evidence to suggest that Hitler was aware of the Holocaust – Stern might help substantiate the thesis of Hitler’s War .

Irving told Heidemann that he was on the point of changing his mind. He had given an interview to the BBC that morning announcing his reservations. Heidemann asked him when it would be broadcast. Next Wednesday, replied Irving. ‘Heidemann’, he wrote in his diary, ‘urged me to say it now as Peter Koch is going on television in New York on Monday with his counter-attack.’ Irving promised to think it over.

Meanwhile, that afternoon, Radio Moscow had resumed its attack on the diaries with a heavy-handed ‘satirical broadcast’ to West Germany. Its target was a new one: not Stern , but the rest of the republic’s press, at that moment filling its pages with reports of the affair. The broadcast took the form of a story set in the office of the editor of Die Welt . The editor wants to know what he should put in the paper over the next few weeks. The home editor suggests unemployment, which is about to reach three million. The foreign editor suggests the deployment of American missiles. The editor-in-chief ‘explodes’:

‘You are quitters. The hit of the coming months is the diaries of our Führer. Granted, the copyright is in the hands of our business rivals. To hell with them. Nobody can stop us discussing the authenticity of the diaries. We shall quote from the diaries in every edition and in every column. You [he says to one reporter] will have to take care of statements by historians from abroad. You [to another] provide interviews on the subject with comrades-in-arms of the Führer. What is important is to make the Führer appear as respectable as possible. And you, well you go to Berchtesgaden, to the former residence of the Führer. He says in his diary that his favourite alsatian, Blondi, always stopped at the gate during walks. You take samples of the soil there and give them to the laboratory. If these soil tests are compatible, then…?’

‘The diaries are authentic,’ the reporter bursts out.

‘That’s right,’ the boss says, grinning. ‘Let’s get to work now. And don’t say a word about missiles or unemployment.’

For once, Hugh Trevor-Roper had other things on his mind apart from the Hitler diaries. Friday 29 April was an important occasion in the life of Peterhouse – the day of the annual college Feast, an ancient ritual of good food and fine wine. The guest of honour was the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, who arrived in mid-afternoon to take tea with Trevor-Roper and his wife in the Master’s Lodge.

It was now four days since the historian had given orders to have all telephone calls to the Lodge stopped at the porter’s switchboard. It was inconvenient, particularly with a member of the Cabinet in the house. In some trepidation, Trevor-Roper decided to rescind the instruction. The telephone rang almost immediately. ‘I’ll answer it,’ said Hailsham.

It was the Observer .

‘I’m afraid Lord Dacre is not at home at present,’ said the seventy-five-year-old Lord Chancellor. ‘May I take a message? I’m his butler.’

It was an amusing end to what was otherwise one of the more unpleasant weeks of Trevor-Roper’s career.

AS THE CRISIS over the Hitler diaries worsened, Rupert Murdoch flew back from New York to London. The Sunday Times ’s reputation was clearly in jeopardy, but Magnus Linklater was struck by Murdoch’s apparent lack of concern. He seemed almost bored by the diaries: they were yesterday’s deal; his restless mind had already moved on to other matters. In commercial terms, the question of whether or not the diaries were genuine was of only minor importance. In the past week, sales of the Sunday Times had increased by 60,000 copies. As long as the controversy continued, circulation was likely to remain buoyant. Besides, under the terms of News International’s agreement with Gruner and Jahr, his money would be refunded if the diaries proved to be fakes. Whatever the final verdict on authenticity, Murdoch would not suffer. At a meeting with the journalists involved in the project he readily agreed that if the situation worsened, he would suspend publication. They wanted to know how much worse things had to get. Murdoch said he would pull out of the deal only if there was a 55 per cent chance that the diaries were forged – in other words, the onus was on the sceptics to substantiate their doubts, not on Stern to justify its faith. This irresponsible formula was, none the less, regarded at the time as a major concession on Murdoch’s part.