Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

‘He was really apathetic,’ recalled Braumann, ‘like a man who had seen all his hopes and dreams destroyed. He didn’t drink very much. His thoughts seemed to be stuck in a groove, going round and round on the subject of where the diaries came from, whether they were genuine or whether they were false.’

‘I don’t want to be remembered’, said Heidemann, ‘as the man responsible for the greatest flop in newspaper history.’

Braumann promised to do all he could to help Heidemann, but time had run out. Three days later, Kujau implicated him in the forgery and at 10 p.m. on the night of Thursday 26 May the reporter was arrested at his home and taken into custody.

A VARIETY OF theories have been advanced to explain the origin of the Hitler diaries. Radio Moscow alleged that the whole affair was a CIA plot ‘intended to exonerate and glorify the Third Reich’. The CIA, claimed the Russians, had provided the information contained in the diaries and trained the forger. Its aim was ‘to divert the attention of the West German public from the vital problems of the country prior to the deployment of new US missiles’ and to discredit the normally left-wing Stern . In this version of events, Kujau was an American stooge:

Half a century ago the Nazis set fire to the Reichstag building and accused the insignificant provocateur Marinus van der Lubbe of arson. Van der Lubbe was supposed to provide proof against the communists, and he did. Now, another van der Lubbe has been found, a small-time dealer, possessed by the mad idea of going down in history, psychologically as unstable as van der Lubbe. Even now the West German bourgeois press predicts that this new van der Lubbe will testify against East Germany. This is not just the normal style of the CIA: one clearly also detects the hand of the [West German] intelligence service and the Munich provocateurs from the circle around Franz Josef Strauss.

(The fact that the writer Fritz Tobias had established more than twenty years previously that the Nazis did not set fire to the Reichstag, and that the blaze was the work of van der Lubbe, is apparently still not officially accepted by the Soviet Union.) The Hitler diaries, wrote Izvestia , ‘parted the curtains a little to reveal the morals of the Western “free press” and the political morality of bourgeois society’.

Henri Nannen, on the other hand, told the New York Times that in his view the affair could have resulted from ‘an interest in East Germany to spread disinformation and destabilize the Federal Republic’. According to Stern ’s rival, Quick , East German intelligence concocted the diaries and transported them to the West ‘to provide a spur for neo-Nazis and to resurrect the Nazi past as a means of damaging the reputation of the Federal Republic’. The West German authorities took the allegations seriously enough to ask the central police forensic laboratory to examine the diaries to see if their paper and ink could have originated in the East. The anti-communist hysteria surrounding the fraud was sufficiently widespread to be cited as a reason by the East Germans for cancelling the planned visit to Bonn of their leader, Erich Hoenecker.

Another conspiracy theory was put forward by the Sunday Times in December 1983 after a lengthy investigation into the hoax. According to this account, the Hitler diaries were organized as a fund-raising operation by the SS ‘mutual aid society’ HIAG, which pays out funds to old SS men who lost their pensions at the end of the war. Despite the paucity of evidence put forward to support its thesis, the paper stated flatly that ‘most or all of the money’ paid out by Stern ‘went to HIAG’. The idea was dismissed in West Germany and since appears to have been quietly dropped by the Sunday Times itself: not one word has appeared in the paper about the subject since 1983.

Most of these theories about the diaries reveal more about their authors than they do about the fraud. Because the figure of Adolf Hitler overshadows the forgery, people have tended to read into it whatever they want to see. To a communist the affair is a capitalist plot; to a capitalist, a communist conspiracy; to a writer on the Third Reich, fresh evidence of the continuing hold of the Nazis on West German society. This is not surprising. Hitler has always had the capacity to reflect whatever phobia afflicts the person who stares at him – as the columnist George F. Will wrote at the height of the diaries controversy, Hitler ‘is a dark mirror held up to mankind’. Equally, it flattered the victims of the fraud to believe that they were not gulled by their own paranoia and greed for sensation, but were actually the targets of a massive ‘disinformation’ operation or giant criminal conspiracy, trapped by something too complex, powerful and cunning to resist. How else could a successful and worldly publication like Stern have fallen for such obvious fakes? How else could they have paid out so much money? How else could the story have been bought by someone as shrewd as Rupert Murdoch and launched, unchecked, in such a distinguished publication as the Sunday Times ? Anyone who took the magnitude of the fiasco as their starting point was bound to look for an appropriately sophisticated plot as the only possible explanation. When Konrad Kujau crawled out from beneath the wreckage of Stern ’s million-dollar syndication deals, people refused to believe that such an odd individual could be responsible.

There are many unanswered questions relating to Kujau, of which the most important are how and why did he learn to forge Nazi documents with such skill; his craftsmanship certainly suggests that at some stage he may have learned his trade by working for someone else. But, although it is possible that Kujau may have had an accomplice to help him write the diaries, it would appear, on present evidence, that there was no extensive conspiracy to rob Stern. The fraud swelled to the proportions it did only because of the incompetence displayed within Gruner and Jahr. How could anyone possibly have guessed in advance that the magazine would have behaved so foolishly? The editors, presented with a fait accompli , relied upon the management; the management relied upon Heidemann and Walde; Heidemann and Walde relied upon Kujau; and between them all, they managed to bungle the process of authentication. A competent forensic scientist would have established in less than a day that the diaries were forgeries: any conspirators would have been aware of that. Only the uncovenanted stupidity of Stern , along with a series of flukes, prevented the fraud from being exposed long before publication. The Hitler diaries affair is a monument to the cock-up theory of history. If HIAG or some similar group had really been so desperate for 9 million marks as to contemplate crime, they would have been far better served to have staged an old-fashioned bank raid.

But money need not have been the only motive behind the appearance of the diaries. It has also been suggested that they were concocted in an attempt to rehabilitate Hitler. Gitta Sereny, responsible for the Sunday Times investigation, has claimed that the diaries’ content is ‘totally beyond’ Kujau’s abilities, that a ‘coherent psycho-political line’ emerges, presenting Hitler as ‘a reasonable and lonely man’. The suggestion is that Kujau was told what to write by someone else: the candidate put forward by the Sunday Times was Medard Klapper, ‘the central organizer of the conspiracy’. Again, this now seems highly improbable. In the first place, it greatly exaggerates the sophistication of the diaries. They read like the handiwork of a fairly uneducated man, obsessively interested in Hitler, who has cobbled together whatever he can lay his hands on from the published sources – they read, in other words, like the handiwork of Konrad Kujau. Secondly, the idea that Medard Klapper of all people might be the political brain behind the whitewashing of Hitler seems somewhat unlikely. Is the man who promised to introduce Heidemann to Martin Bormann once he had undergone a ‘Sippung’ any more credible as an author of the diaries than Kujau? HIAG would have had to be desperate.