Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

Kujau’s plan had been to stay away from Stuttgart until things cooled off. But it quickly became apparent that this was not going to happen – indeed, things were hotting up. Kujau was sitting watching the Modritschs’ television when his picture was flashed on the screen as the man who had allegedly supplied Heidemann with the Hitler diaries. When it was also announced that Stern had paid out 9 million marks for the material, Kujau shot out of his chair. Nine million marks ? He had received only a quarter of that sum. The deceiver had been deceived. The forger was full of moral outrage at Heidemann’s dishonesty. ‘He was bitterly upset,’ recalled Edith. Kujau was certain that the reporter, believing him to be behind the Iron Curtain looking for the Wagner opera, had deliberately betrayed him: once his name was known, he would then never have been able to get back over the border; he would have conveniently disappeared into the clutches of the secret police, leaving Heidemann to enjoy the millions of marks which should rightfully have been Kujau’s – such, at least, was the forger’s conviction.

Kujau telephoned his lawyer in Stuttgart and learned that the Hamburg State Prosecutor was looking for him and proposed to raid his home and shop. It was clear that it was all over. On Friday 13 May Dietrich Klein of the Hamburg Prosecutor’s office, accompanied by a group of police, broke into Kujau’s premises and, watched by a crowd of reporters, began removing evidence: ten cartons and two plastic sacks full of books about Hitler, correspondence, newspaper cuttings, a signed copy of Mein Kampf and artists’ materials. There were also Nazi uniforms, military decorations, swastikas and photographs. Screwed to the wall above the entrance to Kujau’s collection was a coat of arms with the motto ‘Fearless and True’.

Klein was in Kujau’s house, sifting through his property, when the telephone rang. ‘This is Klein speaking,’ said the prosecutor. ‘This is Kujau speaking,’ came the reply. Kujau told the official that he understood he wanted to speak to him. He was willing to come forward voluntarily. He told Klein he would meet him at a border post on the Austrian frontier early the following morning.

At 8 a.m. on Saturday, Kujau said goodbye to Edith and Maria and made his way to the German border where Klein was waiting with a warrant for his arrest.

Kujau had agreed to give himself up. He had not agreed to tell the truth. During the long journey north to Hamburg he asked the prosecutor what would happen to him. According to Kujau, Klein told him that if he was not the man who wrote the diaries, he would be free in ten days; if he was: ‘It could take a long time.’

‘I decided’, said Kujau afterwards, ‘to tell him Grimms’ fairy stories.’

Kujau’s tale – which he stuck to throughout the next week – was that he was simply a middleman: the idea that he was the forger of the diaries he dismissed as ‘absurd’. He claimed to have met a man known only as ‘Mirdorf’ in East Germany in 1978 who had offered to supply him with Hitler material. In this way, Kujau said he had obtained a diary and given it to Fritz Stiefel. Later, when Heidemann had heard about the story, he had pressured him to provide more diaries. Kujau told the prosecutor that as a result he had renewed his contact with Mirdorf who had promised to obtain them. The books had then emerged from East Germany over the next two years through another man called Lauser. Above all, Kujau denied emphatically the allegation that he had been given 9 million marks for the books. He had passed on no more than 2.5 million, of which he had taken 300,000 in commission.

Kujau’s story sounded wildly improbable, and Klein had no difficulty in demolishing large sections of it almost at once. For example, when Maria Modritsch was interrogated, two days after her lover’s arrest, she identified the shadowy ‘Mr Lauser’ not as a Swiss businessman but as ‘a man who used to come to the Sissy Bar to fix the juke box’. And if Kujau had not been aware that the diaries were forged, demanded Klein, why did he have in his house more than six hundred carefully marked books and newspaper articles detailing Adolf Hitler’s daily movements? And why had the police also found several empty notebooks identical to the so-called diaries?

The questions were unanswerable. But what eventually proved most effective in breaking Kujau’s resistance was the image the police could conjure up of Heidemann. Whilst he languished in prison, the reporter was still enjoying his freedom in Hamburg, telling everyone he had handed over all the money to Kujau. The idea of it was intolerable. On Thursday 26 May, his thirteenth day in custody, Kujau confessed in writing to having forged more than sixty volumes of Hitler’s diaries. To prove his guilt, he wrote out part of his confession in the same gothic script he had used in the diaries. As a final, malicious embellishment, he added that Heidemann had known about the forgery all along.

It had been clear to Heidemann for some time that he had become the subject of a criminal investigation. Within hours of Kujau’s arrest, on Saturday 14 May the Hamburg police had raided the family’s home on the Elbchausee along with his archive in Milchstrasse; Carin II had also been searched and impounded. Heidemann’s collection of Nazi memorabilia and many of his private papers were seized. Four days later, the police carried out a second raid. It turned up ‘nothing new’ according to the prosecutor’s office, but it made it obvious to Heidemann that his days of freedom were drawing to a close.

He read of Kujau’s arrest in the newspapers and reacted to the growing rumours that ‘Conny’ was the forger with incredulity. ‘I don’t believe it at all,’ he told Reuters: Kujau would have had to have been a ‘wonder boy’ to have forged so much. ‘If these diaries are not genuine,’ Heidemann confided to his friend Randolph Braumann, ‘then there must – somewhere – be some genuine ones. Kujau cannot have made it all up alone – all those complicated historical situations. Maybe Kujau copied them up from genuine diaries which still exist somewhere.’

Heidemann told Braumann that he was feeling ‘completely kaputt , flat out’ and Gina warned him that her husband was ‘terribly depressed’. The company Mercedes had been taken away; their credit cards had been cancelled; they were social lepers. Braumann felt very sorry for them. On Monday 23 May he rang and invited the couple round for a drink that evening. Gina doubted whether Heidemann would leave the flat. ‘He’s depressed again,’ she said.

The Heidemanns eventually turned up at 10.30 p.m., and stayed drinking with Braumann and his wife until three o’clock the next morning. Heidemann was listless and full of self-pity. The other three tried to make him pull himself together, but he simply sat slumped in his chair, shaking his head. ‘Everything seems to have collapsed at the same time,’ he complained. ‘Everything has crumbled. If only a scientist would appear and prove that the diaries, or at least some of them, were genuine.’

Braumann said that what was so astonishing was that the diaries were such primitive forgeries. Heidemann said that it was easy to say that now: ‘But I never doubted. It all seemed to fit together so well. One thing followed another: first the Hitler pictures, then the things that he’d painted in his youth, then the writing from his time in Vienna, then his applicatior to the school of art and his rejection by the professors – everything genuine, everything proven; then the positive results on the diaries. No one ever dreamed it could all have beer forged.’

Braumann asked about the two police raids.

‘They’ve taken everything away,’ said Heidemann. ‘Documents, photographs, all the paperwork – everything, without a receipt.’