Hitler's Diaries: The Hoax of a Century

Wars are fought amid chaos, and they end in chaos. The end of the Second World War was no exception. After the Allied and Soviet forces had beaten back the Nazis, much was lost in the aftermath. In the decades that followed, the possibility of finding 10 chests filled with private papers belonging to Adolf Hitler was a “tantalizing state of affairs,” according to journalist Robert Harris, one that would “provide the perfect scenario for forgery.”

In 1981, Gerd Heidemann, a reporter for the German weekly news magazine Stern, came across what seemed like the Holy Grail of World War II stories—a lead on the lost Hitler diaries which had gone down with that plane. The lead took him to a man named Konrad Kujau, who made his living selling black market Nazi memorabilia.

Kujau claimed to have 27 volumes of the Hitler diaries, an unpublished third volume of Mein Kampf, several letters and some of Hitler’s paintings, and even an opera written by the dictator. Together, the two hammered out the “foundation of a deal” for Heidemann to buy the collection with the intent of publishing it.

Over the next few months, a deal was worked out between Kujau, Heidemann, and the publishers at Stern, and delivery of the supposed diaries began. Rather than 27, the total number of volumes delivered was eventually 62, for which Stern paid more than 9 million Deutsche Marks, though only about half of that went to Kujau, with Heidemann allegedly pocketing the other half, thereby defrauding both his employer and his contact.

Naturally, Stern wasn’t the only publication interested in the potential of hundreds of never-before-seen pages of material written by Adolf Hitler. Stern reached deals with other publications including The Sunday Times, Newsweek, and others.

Several experts initially signed off on the authenticity of the diaries, including British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who, unfamiliar with the financial arrangement wherein Kujau was paid per diary, wondered, “who, I asked myself, would forge sixty volumes when six would have served his purpose?” In an article in The Times, Trevor-Roper wrote that “the standard accounts of Hitler’s writing habits, of his personality, and even, perhaps, of some public events may, in consequence, have to be revised.”

By the time a press conference was announced to reveal the existence of the diaries to the public on April 25, 1983, however, these initial certainties had turned to skepticism. At the press conference, Trevor-Roper made a “180-degree turn,” stating that he had serious doubts as to the authenticity of the diaries. “I regret that the normal method of historical verification has been sacrificed to the perhaps necessary requirements of a journalistic scoop,” he said.

Among those who spoke at the press conference was English author and future Holocaust denier David Irving who, at the time, had been described as a historian “with no reputation to lose.” Behind the microphone, Irving loudly denounced the diaries as hoaxes and demanded to know if the ink had been tested. The story goes that some punches were thrown by journalists as they jostled to get photographs of Irving as he was forcibly removed by security guards while shouting “Ink! Ink!”

What had initially looked like the scoop of the century was rapidly turning into a career-ending fiasco. As doubts about the authenticity of the diaries mounted, the publishers of Stern faced the possibility of legal action for disseminating Nazi propaganda. Meanwhile, Irving had performed a U-turn of his own, and now said that he thought the diaries were genuine.

Amidst all this, pressure for more testing grew. In the U.S., handwriting expert Kenneth W. Rendell examined one of the volumes and reported that “everything looked wrong.” Ultimately, he concluded that the diaries were “bad forgeries but a great hoax,” citing the forger’s “terrible renditions” of Hitler’s signature, and stating that “the forger failed to observe or to imitate the most fundamental characteristics of his handwriting.”

With the evidence against the diaries mounting, Stern attempted to get ahead of the bad publicity, but were beaten to the punch by an official government announcement, which was released just five minutes before their own statement, declaring that the diaries were not only forgeries, but “poor” ones.

So what really happened, and how did what looked like “the most stunning scoop of our careers” trick so many experienced journalists and publishers? It turns out that Konrad Kujau was more than just a seller of Nazi memorabilia—he was an experienced forger, who mixed forgeries in with actual pieces of Nazi ephemera to increase his profits.

Before he met Heidemann, he had already been selling forgeries of paintings that he claimed were done by Hitler, as well as other wartime documents. Together, he and Heidemann had effectively swindled each other—and the various newspapers who bought the story—with the scoop of a lifetime in the form of the massive number of forged diaries, which Kujau turned out with a speed of up to one diary per day, writing them by hand, and artificially aging them with tea or by banging them against his desk.

Both men were arrested following the discovery of the hoax and sentenced to a little over four years each for their respective parts in it. The judge in the case said that “the negligence of Stern” in verifying the scoop was a factor in his decision to “soften the sentences” against the two men.

As for Stern, two of the magazine’s editors lost their jobs following the scandal, while similar changes took place at other newspapers, and several historians who were involved in the events found that their reputations were tarnished as a result.

The hoax itself became the subject of several books, as well as the 1991 film Selling Hitler (based on Richard Harris’ 1986 book of the same name), the German film Schtonk!, and the 2021 television series Faking Hitler.

Featured photo: Wikipedia ; Patrick Tomasso / Unsplash

Sources: BBC