Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

The psychology which was leading Stern to disaster now began to operate on the Sunday Times. The reporters involved on the story had no desire to see their paper humiliated; they wanted to believe that the diaries were genuine and set out to find evidence to keep their hopes alive. Brian Moynahan was dispatched to Boernersdorf where he managed to find a fifty-one-year-old quarryman named Helmut Schmidt who had been thirteen when the Junkers 352 had crashed. Schmidt told Moynahan that he had seen one of the survivors sitting dazed on the ground clutching a wooden case more than two feet long and eighteen inches wide. ‘He hung on to it like this,’ he claimed, at which point, according to Moynahan, ‘Schmidt, working on his allotment, gripped his hoe until his veins rose.’

While Moynahan tramped round Boernersdorf, in London, Elaine Potter ploughed through some of the US Counter-Intelligence Corps files. She extracted the story of how the CIC picked up rumours of a ‘Hitler diary’ during its investigations in the Berchtesgaden area in 1945.

In Hamburg, Gitta Sereny interviewed Heidemann. The reporter gave her the variation on his original story which he had given to Trevor-Roper on Sunday: the diaries had stayed in the hayloft in Boernersdorf for only a few days; they had been brought to the West by an officer in 1945; this officer was now over seventy and had given Heidemann the documents on condition his name should never be divulged; Heidemann claimed to have talked to him only ‘two days ago’. ‘Here,’ wrote Sereny, ‘is one of the indispensable links demanded by critics who have questioned the authenticity of the diaries.’

Frank Giles presided over this rearguard action with his customary diffluence. When the Sunday Times journalists in London expressed their concern about the affair and asked him to address a union meeting, he turned them down. He told them he was going away on holiday to Corfu. ‘Even if I were here,’ he added, ‘I must tell you that I do not think that this matter is appropriate for the chapel.’ Publication of the diaries would go ahead in his absence, he informed the editorial conference, and would stop only if the diaries were conclusively proved to be forgeries.

On Sunday, the paper appeared with a somewhat more muted front page than it had presented the previous week:

The editor of the Sunday Times then left the country.

David Irving spent the day sending out invoices to newspapers and magazines, billing them for his work attacking the diaries’ authenticity. Shortly before noon, a reporter from the Daily Express rang to ask if it was true that he was suing the Sunday Times for failing to pay him his commission for putting them on to the Hitler diaries. ‘Not suing,’ replied Irving, ‘just asking.’ He then told him to ‘hold on to his hat’ and gave him what he modestly described as ‘the story of the day’: that he now believed the diaries were genuine.

The Express ran the story in its early editions, and at 11 p.m. a sub-editor from The Times rang to ask if the report in the Express was correct. Irving said it was.

The Times immediately put it on its front page.

The following morning, as The Times in Britain announced Irving’s belief that the diaries were genuine, Der Spiegel appeared in Germany carrying his assertion that they were fakes. ‘Hitler’s Diary: Find or Forgery?’ was the title on the magazine’s cover; the contents left little doubt of Der Spiegel ’s opinion as to the correct answer. It was a devastating assault, attacking the Stern scoop for ‘bad German, bad punctuation and banality’. Der Spiegel’s reporters had tracked down the SS man who discovered the Boernersdorf crash and using his testimony they picked Heidemann’s research apart. The Junkers’ fuselage had been made of metal, not canvas, as Stern had claimed; the plane had ploughed straight into the ground, not ended up on its roof; gold bars, pistols and ammunition had been salvaged, but no papers. In contrast to the carefully cultivated image of ‘the Bloodhound’ which Stern ’s public relations department had built up of Heidemann, the reporter was depicted as an obsessive friend of old Nazis, whose discovery had been inadequately checked and blown up into an international sensation. ‘If it all goes wrong,’ Peter Koch was quoted as saying, ‘the editors will charter Heidemann’s boat, sail it to Helgoland and pull out the plugs.’ Much of the information had been provided by Irving and the centrepiece of the attack was a reproduction of a page from his fake diary.

Der Spiegel’s attack was bad enough news for one day, but worse was to come when the company’s lawyer, Dr Hagen, arrived at the Bundesarchiv.

Josef Henke had handed the three diary volumes given to him after the Stern press conference to the Federal Institute for Forensic Investigation in Berlin. On Monday, he was able to give Hagen the scientists’ preliminary findings. All three volumes contained traces of polyamid 6, a synthetic textile invented in 1938 but not manufactured in bulk until 1943. The binding of the Hess special volume – supposedly written in 1941 – included polyester which had not been made until 1953. Ultraviolet light had also shown up fluorescent material in the paper. These results had yet to be confirmed in writing, said Henke, but Stern ’s scoop was beginning to look extremely dubious. In addition, although the archive’s researchers had had time for only a brief check of the diaries’ written content, they had already found a couple of textual errors: two laws relating to agriculture and student organizations were not passed on the dates given in the diaries.

Hagen hurried back to Hamburg to pass on this information.

At about 6 p.m. Schulte-Hillen convened a crisis meeting in his office on the ninth floor of the Stern building. Wilfried Sorge did not attend (he was on holiday in Italy), nor did Koch, who was in the United States preparing his media campaign, but all the other leading figures in the affair were present: Jan Hensmann, Felix Schmidt, Rolf Gillhausen, Henri Nannen, Gerd Heidemann and Thomas Walde.

As Hagen reported the Bundesarchiv’s findings an atmosphere of barely suppressed panic spread through the room. Only Heidemann seemed unmoved, sitting wrapped in his own private world as the others began shouting at him. Felix Schmidt was enraged by his calmness. How could he sit there, he demanded, and act as if none of this concerned him? It was imperative that he reveal the name of his source; otherwise, publication of the diaries should be stopped. Heidemann remained silent. ‘You either belong in a madhouse or a prison,’ Nannen told him. He added that in his opinion, the magazine’s editors could not be allowed ‘to dangle like this any longer’.

Schulte-Hillen now spoke up, and for the first time he addressed Heidemann sharply: he wanted to speak to the reporter alone – immediately. The two men left the room.

Before the emergency meeting began, the managing director had been approached in private by Felix Schmidt who had suggested that Heidemann might be keeping the identity of his supplier secret because he had stolen some of the money. As far as Schmidt was concerned, that no longer mattered: the important thing was to find out whether the diaries were genuine. He had pleaded with Schulte-Hillen to try once more to persuade Heidemann to tell him the whole story, if necessary by promising him ‘that if he has pocketed some of the money, it will not be held against him’.