The Hitler Diaries: History's Greatest Hoaxes
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Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. It was one of the greatest discoveries of the last century. 62 volumes of the handwritten personal diaries of one of the most infamous and reviled men in modern history, Adolf Hitler. The question was, were they real? Business tycoon Rupert Murdoch

paid a cool $500,000 for the right to publish them in the Sunday Times. And the so-called Hitler Diaries made headline news around the world. But what was the real story? The Hitler Diaries hoax was massive because the appetite for them to exist was huge. The Hitler Diaries hoax was without doubt the single greatest scam ever pulled on a magazine and a collection of newspapers.

These diaries would have been absolutely of interest not only, I think, to historians and people in the military, but I think to the average person. It really has it all. It's got Nazis. It's got press barons. It's got millions and millions of pounds of money being siphoned from the accounts of major corporations.

And it's all about a collection of black exercise books that supposedly contain the diaries of the most evil man of the 20th century or perhaps any century, and that of course is Adolf Hitler. In 1983, two volumes of some A4-sized black leather diaries were shown to the editors of Die Stern, an internationally respected German news magazine, by Gerd Heidemann, one of its journalists.

He claimed that they were the authentic personal diaries of Adolf Hitler, written by the Fuhrer himself during the war. Heidemann said that they were the property of a serious collector of Nazi material called Konrad Fischer. Fischer would later turn out to be the notorious hoaxer Konrad Kuyau.

He showed me the diaries, just one book. I asked where they had come from. He said that they came from a plane that had crashed in 1945 on its way from Berlin to Salzburg. He said that there were over 25 of these diaries, but they were all still in the GDR and that he and his brother could get them from a source that they didn't want to disclose, as he would be smuggling the rest into the West.

What Kuyau did not present Heidemann with was a massive block of dozens of diaries, you know, as this massive treasure trove of the ultimate Hitler memorabilia. What he does, he presents him with one diary and Heidemann goes, "Okay, this is brilliant. This is incredible. Are there any more?"

Kuyao says, "Yes, they're all in East Germany and it's very difficult to get a hold of them. I don't want to get them all out in one block because my contact there is very worried about being rumbled. They can only come through one at a time every few months. This is going to involve me costly and dangerous trips across the border. They need to be smuggled out." Kuyao has been very cunning here.

You kind of hear Hitler diaries and you're thinking, well, you know, what do they look like? Are they kind of covered by a sort of small self-destructing bombs or are they kind of covered in gold and diamonds? No, it was leather bound and inside sort of those A4 pieces of writing that obviously looked very much like Hitler's.

The first time I read Hitler's diaries, I was struck by how trivial it all was, and I was disappointed at the content. It described how after he'd got up that morning, what it had for breakfast, where he was going in his coach, what he was planning on giving someone for their birthday. And if it said "conversation with the general", it didn't say what they had discussed.

There were almost just a little bit more than an appointment diary with sort of a few notes or observations that seemed somewhat banal. Many of the people who actually read the supposed diary said, "Actually, these are quite boring." But it didn't matter because the fact is they were Hitler's diaries in Hitler's own hand and that was dynamite. -Gerd Heydemann was a trusted and well-respected journalist.

So it was not surprising that when he showed the diaries to one of the editors of Die Stern, he took very little convincing. The editor, Peter Koch, said he wanted to write a huge discovery story. It was enough for me to say we had gotten hold of the material, but the editor said no, we have to publish a huge discovery story and that's how the story was published. It was the editor's idea.

When Heidemann goes to his bosses and says, "I've got access to all of Hitler's diaries," he's only really selling it on one or two copies. When Stern goes, "Yes, basically, here's a blank cheque. Go out and get them all," Heidemann is having to, you know, pester Kuy out, "Come on, I want these diaries," saying to the management at Stern, "They're coming, they're coming, they're coming."

With the green light from Dichtern, Heidemann sat down and discussed a deal with Kujau.

There was no written contract with Kuyau. Originally it was going to be 85,000 Deutschmarks per diary. But then the generals that Kuyau was working with, allegedly to get these diaries, said that they wanted more money, as one page of Hitler's handwriting could go for 4,500 Deutschmarks. So we got to a sum of about 9.3 million Deutschmarks for all of the diaries.

And you know, Koochow must be sitting there thinking, "God, I found the biggest sucker in the world." He's not dealing with just small-time collectors anymore. He's got a big-time corporation he's reeled in.

Stern basically said, "We've opened a bank account with millions of marks in it, from which Heidemann is allowed to withdraw vast piles of money in cash to pay to Kuyau. No receipts." It's brilliant. It's basically, here's lots of free money, he gives some of it to Kuyau and keeps a lot for himself. Basically, he wrote a couple of them, speculatively, because, you know,

There'd be a lot of diaries. You wouldn't write them all before you knew you could sell them. That would be exhausting. So he wrote two, and he went, "Do you want these? 'Cause I've got the rest. Trust me, I've got the rest." And they went, "Yeah, we'll have them." - Heidemann argued that the existence of the diaries made perfect sense, pointing as proof to a little-known Nazi plan. In April 1945, during the final days of the war,

the Nazis removed valuable documents from a main Berlin bunker and stored them in bunkers in southern Germany. It was known as Operation Seralio. One of the transport planes involved was carrying 10 heavy chests of Hitler's personal belongings. But the plane crashed en route, coming down in the Heidenholz Forest in southeast Germany, near the Czech border. Heidemann claimed that in this plane,

were Hitler's diaries. It had crashed in the Eastern Ore Mountains near a village called Bernersdorf, four kilometers from the Czechoslovakian border. And that's where I went and found the graves of the pilots. Kujau told Heidemann what seems on the face of it a very plausible story as to where the diaries had come from.

In the last dying days of the Third Reich in Berlin, as it's being encircled by the Soviet army, a plane flies out of Berlin with a top-secret cargo. A cargo that contains all sorts of valuables associated with Hitler, but most important of all, Hitler's personal papers. This becomes the idea that makes the diaries credible.

He's found this plane crash and verified it, therefore he believes that this allows him to proceed with everything else. Because that is actually feasible to some extent, right? It did really crash, it was his stuff, then the idea that these were real actually has some authority.

So therefore it seems very plausible, if you ignore the fact the plane burst into flames of course, and paper diaries do tend to burn in hot airplane fires. However, that was the backstory and it was, to be fair, believable. Gerd Heidemann maintains an underground bunker in Hamburg in Germany, where he keeps his vast library of Nazi documents, photos and other data. He also has some crash wreckage from Hitler's plane.

This includes two intact passenger windows from the plane, which he says he bought off a local farmer. When word of the existence of the diaries reached Rupert Murdoch, he was determined to have them. In 1983, Murdoch already owned a large slice of the international media world. In the UK alone, he owned The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun, all major British newspapers.

His executives contacted Die Stern and told them that they wanted to buy the worldwide rights. A senior journalist with the Sunday Times at that time was Magnus Linklater. We were told that we were being offered exclusive rights to the Hitler diaries which Stern magazine had bought up and researched.

At that stage, all our instincts as an investigative newspaper were to find out what lay behind this. We were told, however, that that was not going to be possible because Rupert Murdoch himself personally had arranged the deal and we were required to run the diaries unchecked. I was given 24 hours

to read the first installment of the diaries and prepare it for publication. Having already put in place a deal to buy the Hitler diaries, Linklater was tasked with trying to authenticate their content and validate Murdoch's proposed purchase. We hadn't actually seen the physical diaries at all. We had seen facsimiles of some of the pages. What we were given was an English translation.

The more we read it, the more appalled we were. We were expecting huge revelations. "Hitler, why I called off the invasion of England." "My plans for the Jews, how they've been exaggerated." Anything like that, we found nothing. We found day-to-day tittle-tattle saying, "Goering once again appears in an ill-fitting suit." It was pretty terrible stuff. At one stage, they say, "Look,

Maybe we just ought to have nothing to do with this, but I'm afraid we just carried on. Stern's condition of sale was that nobody from the outside should be allowed access to the diaries because otherwise they were frightened of a leak. And this, of course, is what tends to happen on these occasions, that you are so desperate for news not to leak out that you keep it from the very people

who might be able to demonstrate whether they're genuine or not. The Sunday Times was still not completely sure that the diaries weren't fakes, so they asked revered Cambridge historian Hugh Trevor Roper, Lord Dacre, who was also a news international director, to analyze them.

So Murdoch absolutely sensibly thinks, "I have got the best person sitting on my board to go over to Switzerland where the diaries are hidden in a vault to go and verify these diaries." The diaries are there in this vault and you can imagine the scene, these big black volumes all stacked up on a table. They must have looked very impressive. And it'd be one of the reasons why Trevor Roper will end up verifying them is that no one can believe who had forged so many.

The other problem, though, with Trevor Roper is that he was the first to acknowledge that German was not a language he felt comfortable in, not a language he could read, and not a language in that script from the 1930s and '40s that Germans wrote in, and which Couillard was so brilliant at forging. It is not something, if you look at that text, it is very, very hard to read.

But Magnus Linklater was still worried about the authenticity of the diaries and called Hugh Trevor Roper again for reassurance. So I rang Hugh Trevor Roper and I said, "I just need to ask you, are you absolutely convinced that this is authentic?" And I'll never forget his answer. He said, "Yes, of course I am. But all letters say I'm 99% convinced."

And ever since then, I thought 99% is never good enough. Now backed by Hugh Trevor Roper, Murdoch called the Stern to close the deal. But unknown to him, the Stern executives had gone to Newsweek in America to ask them for $3.6 million. So Murdoch does a brilliant thing. He rings up Newsweek and says, "Why don't we work on this together and drop our bids? We'll have one collective bid of half a million bucks."

And so, obviously, Stern, absolutely, they've nowhere else to go, and Murdoch plays a complete blinder. Murdoch had beaten Dichtern down on the price and had won the rights to publish the Hitler diaries for a knockdown figure. It was a great coup, just like his victory over the print unions. It was, commercially, an amazing deal. And he had the reassurances from one of the world's leading historians, Hugh Trevor Roper, that these diaries were authentic.

So in Rupert Murdoch's mind, that was enough. But in the weeks leading up to publication in The Times, Hugh Trevor Roper, the man who Murdoch had chosen to validate the diaries, began to have serious doubts. He starts desperately trying to phone editors. He tries to say, listen, I'm not comfortable. I want to withdraw my backing towards these. I really suspect they may be fake. I don't understand that.

When Murdoch is eventually told, "Listen, Trevor Roper has got severe doubts," Murdoch's reply is, "Daker, let's publish." And so on that Sunday morning, the Sunday Times comes out, banner headlines, massive exclusive, Hitler diaries, reveals everything we need to know about Hitler and more. It seems like a most incredible story, and the world kind of holds its breath. - The Sunday Times gained an extra 60,000 in sales that Sunday.

a huge success and reward for what seemed a great scoop. But a huge shock was just around the corner. I will never forget the scene in the editor's office when we were all congratulating each other on one of the great front pages that we'd ever produced. And the telephone went, and we could hear the editor saying, "Hello, Hugh." And we realized that he was talking to Hugh Trevor Roper.

We heard this awful half-end of a conversation: "Don't tell me you're having second thoughts." Terrible pause. So you are having second thoughts. And at this stage, we almost literally collapsed. One of our members did slump to the floor. Because at that stage, we realised that the foundation on which these diaries rested for us had simply been withdrawn and everything else collapsed.

The day after the Sunday Times publishes, Die Stern magazine holds its own press conference at its offices in Hamburg to reveal more details about the source of the diaries. When Stern gave a press conference, announcing the publication and saying, "We've tested it, we've done all the graphology," a man stands up, waves a piece of paper, which is a photocopy from the diaries, and says, "These diaries are absolute tosh."

That man is a man called David Irving. He stood up and went, "These diaries are not true, and it causes an absolute bedlam at the press conference."

I remember being so distraught. For some reason, I rang up my friend George Steiner, a distinguished academic at Oxford, and I said to him, "What is the academic world making of this? Is the Sunday Times reputation shredded forever?" And he said, "Yes, it is a disaster for the paper. I don't know how you will ever recover."

In fact, it turns out that many historians and experts, not just David Irving, had their doubts about the authenticity of the diaries. It's very difficult to establish whether Hitler really did or did not have a diary. Of course, it's perfectly possible that in the dead of night when he went to bed, that he may have scribbled a few lines into a notebook and locked it away.

However, not one of his surviving inner circle ever recalled Hitler keeping a diary, having to store a diary, anything like that at all. What's really funny is that I think people would assume these are Hitler's diaries. There's probably kind of insights into his deep dark psyche and world domination, the sadism, but not so much. Apparently there was entries in there like, "Oops, I think Eva thinks I've got bad breath and must get tickets for the Olympics."

So there was these really sort of mundane, everyday details. And I think anybody perhaps that had actually stopped and looked at them would have thought, "Is this genuinely true?" Within days of the Die Stoen news conference, there was a dramatic twist to the story. The German Federal Archive in Berlin declared that the so-called Hitler diaries were in fact a fake.

They sent it to the Federal Institute for Material Testing in West Berlin. And they found out that the diaries had been bound using nylon thread. I always said the ink had to be tested properly and the paper's exact age had to be determined. A small group of us on the Sunday Times were so distraught at the potential that we had been sold a pup

that we felt we had to go and discuss it with Rupert Murdoch himself. So we went to see him in his office. We were trying to find out how we could pull back our reputation from this appalling disaster. Rupert was sitting behind his desk and I looked up at one stage and he was bored. He was bored by these journalists going on, whinging on as he might have put it.

He said at one stage, "I don't know why you lot are fussing so much. After all, we put on 64,000 extra copies last Sunday." I don't think he was too bothered by the fact that we had just perpetrated an appalling fake. As most newspapers do, they had it both ways. They went, "Hitler diaries, here we go. We've got them. The biggest monster in history."

And then a couple of weeks later, biggest fraud in history. We've got the information and here it all is. Had it both ways. And even after the diary story ended, they still kept 20,000 of those readers. So it didn't matter to Murdoch whether they were fake or not because he was still making more money. Even though these diaries ended up not being true, they sold just as many papers because the next headline was, oh my gosh, can you believe these aren't true? And can you believe that these horrible people duped us? Win-win.

The German police were now heavily involved in what was clearly a crime. Within days of the National Archives revealing that the diaries were clever forgeries, they released the name of Konrad Kuyau, the forger, and explained how he'd created the fakes.

Once these diaries were made available to the German archives, and you actually had professionals looking at them, it didn't take years or months, it took a few days for them to realize that actually these were absolutely fakes. And the smoking gun was the type of paper and glue that was used in the diaries. So, you know, the paper dated from, I think, somewhere in the 70s, and likewise the glue wouldn't have been around back in the 1930s or 40s, whenever they were dated from.

So very quickly, when someone did their job the right way, and actually did their job without, you know, having this sort of ticking time bomb that I need to break this story, that I want the story to be true, did their job from a place of science, from a place of objectivity, it took literally days. The Sunday Times itself carried out tests on one of the Hitler diaries. They too concluded that based simply on the age of the paper, the diaries were forgeries.

We had actually finally managed to get hold of a copy of one of the diaries. And the first thing we did was we sent it to a leading agency which examines forensically things like binding, paper, the glue. They came back and said, "By the way, this is modern paper."

It's been stuck together with modern glue. If we'd had that information just 24 hours earlier, we could have pulled back from the whole thing. But there was one more crucial and incontrovertible mistake in the diaries. The most notorious mistake, very bizarre and amusing, was that on the front of each notebook he put Hitler's monograms, and they were the initials FH.

Nobody stopped to think, "Why are the initials FH on the front of Adolf Hitler's notebooks?" The reason was, is because it was this fancy German script and Kuchel had mistaken the F for an A. That right there, it should have clued into somebody that this doesn't look right.

It was stupid. There were so many elements that should have raised alarm bells for Stern, and it didn't. There is nothing in these books that says that they were contemporaneous with Adolf Hitler. They've been so comprehensively hoodwinked. I mean, Heidemann goes to bits and is still in denial. And of course, the only man who knows for true that these lab tests are utterly accurate is, of course, Kuyau.

It turned out that Kujau had a history of fraud and forgery, and unbelievably, also selling forged diaries. His biographer is Gerhard Klusmeier. Kujau wrote down all the things he got from real historic books. And so all the people saw, "That's right. That's right. He was there and he did these things. He was so good."

in Hitler's handwriting that no one saw a difference between real writings from Hitler and Kuhlhaus. He was genius to do that in that way. Several of the forged diaries are today kept in a museum in Bonn, and Peter Hoffman, the archivist, agreed to remove one of the volumes from the archives. After the press conference,

There was a bit of paper taken out of this volume. This paper was sent to the Bundesanstalt für Materialprüfung. This is a federal institution to prove this material. They proved the paper and they proved the glue and the sort of binding these pages together. And there's no doubt this is a fake. The president of the National Archive, Mr. Booms, he proved there's one day only could be false. And there are other facts that could not be true.

Another example that these diaries are, you know, false and not well made. He tea stained the pages. That's how he made them look odd. We did tea staining in the first productions I did.

at drama school, they went, "Look, if you dip paper in tea, you can make it look a bit old. Burn the edges as well and then blow it out." Look at that. That's probably from Julius Caesar's time. That's how he did it. Oh, and banged the diaries on the corner of his desk as well. 'Cause what you know about Hitler is the diaries will have had desk-shaped indentations. You only have to look at that famous scene from Downfall to know what a temper the man had.

He'd have written a bit: "Dear diary, go the English are… It's so bad." Gerd Heydemann still claims that he was the innocent party in this affair, and that he believed the Hitler diaries were real. He says that he was duped by Kujau. "I had strong information and confirmation that he had been born and raised not far from where the plane had crashed."

The generals had confirmed in writing that Hitler had diaries. So all I had were confirmations. The big question is: how much is Heydermann a believer in the diaries? In some ways the jury's out. I suspect in his heart he knew they were fakes.

But he was so desperate to believe. Why? For two very important reasons. One, he was very, very short of money. He had bought Hermann Göring's yacht that had cost him millions of marks to try and restore. Millions of marks he didn't have. The Hitler Diaries, if true and if published with him at the helm, would make him millions, more than enough to restore Göring's yacht.

the second reason why i suspect the heidemann was so keen to believe in these diaries was that he had an absolutely sort of maniacal desire to collect as much nazi memorabilia as he could anybody who went to his flat would look at it and go oh my god it's like a shrine to the nazis you know around the bed of him and his wife were pictures by hitler

And one reporter says, "How could you sleep with these sort of Hitler memorabilia around your bed?" And his wife answers, "How could you sleep without them?" I don't think actually you really have to choose, was Heidemann a true believer? Was he just out to make money? I think it was a combination of all those things.

Maybe somewhere in the back of his mind he had suspicions, but when you're skimming off millions of marks, you just put that to the back of your mind. You don't really care about that. It's one of the wonderful, bizarre things about the human mind is we can just compartmentalize away things that might challenge the bad things we're doing.

I think what's so difficult is to unravel negligence from, you know, this intense desire to have your story of a lifetime. And I think that's what's going on in Heidemann's case.

Was there intent to deceive? I don't think so. I think this person had been a historian with a fascination in this area. He was coming sort of this climax in his career that could have sort of grounded him as a huge figure in history himself. So he wanted it to be true and no doubt that clouded his judgment. Now does that make him a bad person or does it make him just a weak person? I would argue probably the latter more than the former.

Konrad Kuyau, he will admit to being the man who wrote the diaries and not Adolf Hitler. There is this photograph of him holding them up with a big grin on his face. He knows he's hoodwinked the entire world and been the recipient of a vast amount of money. The man who goes to pieces is Gert Heidemann, who knows that finally his reputation is absolutely irreparably in tatters and absolutely no one will ever take him seriously again.

It's interesting that Heidemann was also sent a photograph of Hitler's bedroom in his bunker. In the background, you can clearly see over a dozen dark-covered books which are very similar in size and make to the so-called Hitler diaries. Heidemann believes that these could be copies of the Führer's original real diaries. Heinrich Hoffmann sent me this picture and wrote:

Dear Gerd, I have seen the box in Hitler's sleeping room and this book is like the diaries from Hitler. All the black books here. Gerd Heydmann was a Nazi memorabilia obsessive. Over many, many years he had spent an enormous amount of money which he didn't have on Nazi memorabilia and also Nazi faked memorabilia. He was willing to believe anything.

He had more paintings in his flat by Hitler than Hitler probably painted in his life. He had every single supposedly important relic from Nazi Germany that you can imagine, including apparently the Wulfer pistol that Hitler used to shoot himself. These are obviously extraordinary things to have in your collection and Heidemann was a very, very gullible collector.

The grim walls of Hamburg city jail, the end of the road for the scoop that never was. On the basis of Konrad Kujau's confession that he wrote the Hitler diaries, police searched Gerd Heidemann's home last night for two hours, then took him into custody to join Kujau who has been under arrest for two weeks.

The city prosecutor said today that according to the Kuyau confession, Heidemann knew all along that the diaries were fakes. A statement that came as quite a relief to Heidemann's former employers, Stern Magazine, who are suing him for substantial damages. But for Stern, the headaches don't end here. They're still trying to track down the two and a half million pounds they say they gave Heidemann to buy the diaries.

Eventually, both Kuyau and Heinemann were sentenced to over four and a half years in prison, a relatively short sentence which surprised many people.

It's all about intent, and Kujao clearly intended to deceive. I think Heidemann, what he was guilty of was being gullible. And maybe that is professional negligence, and he should have gotten, I guess, reprimanded for that. But the idea that they'd both get the same amount of time, I don't know, from what we know about them, I think seems a little bit unfair. They didn't get me on fraud, but rather accused me of pocketing money and giving them wrong prices.

The judge gave them what in the minds of many people were sentences that were really too light. They got four years, even though there were millions of marks involved in this. And I think part of the reason he gave was that he looked at the management of Stern and said, "You guys were so stupid. You've got to share culpability for this." So that's part of the reason why Heidemann and Kujout got off slightly light.

I think that Heidemann can't have been as great a fool and as easily gulled as he might like to try and make out. If I, as a historian and a journalist, were given a document that claimed to be a diary written by Adolf Hitler, I would in no way wish to look a fool.

Why doesn't he insist that these books are subjected to every form of scientific analysis around? Why does he not do that? In some way, he is so willing to believe them to be true. And if you're that willing to believe these diaries to be true, and you need money, it looks to me highly likely that this is a man who is complicit. In the end, the whole sorry tale was splashed across the world's media.

complete with endless examinations of who did what, why and how. Meanwhile, the alleged perpetrators languished behind bars. Konrad Kujau died in 2000 in Stuttgart, Germany. Kujau was imprisoned and he's now dead. Heidemann is largely ruined professionally. His reputation was in tatters after this. Both Die Stern and The Sunday Times are going from strength to strength, and I think that's what the media does.

The appetite in Dear Stern for this to be the real thing and then the Sunday Times was vast, so it went way further than it should have done. But that's the basis of a good hoax, isn't it? You need first for there to be an appetite. I could make something up right now, but unless somebody wants it to be true, it's not going to go very far. Not only had we carried a story that was patently false,

Also, we had undermined our own reputation as a great investigative newspaper. This is what we were meant to be good at, and on the most important story that we'd almost ever handled, we'd failed by our own lights. So, yeah, it was a bad time.

It wasn't a clever forgery. You can say this because you can easily prove that the paper, the glue and all materials could not fit to the time of Adolf Hitler until the Nazi era. So it, yeah, it was an amateur. It's generally accepted that the whole Hitler diary saga was one of the low points for newspaper journalism in the 1980s and that the reputation of News International has never fully recovered since.

Although Rupert Murdoch went on to build one of the world's largest media corporations over the last three decades, Hugh Trevor Roper's reputation took a massive hit. I honestly believe that if we had managed to come up with this concrete evidence that this was a fake, demonstrably, i.e. the paper was modern, the bindings were false,

I think even Rupert Murdoch, committed as he was to the project, would have pulled back. Because after all, you know, he's a journalist in his instincts and he would have known that this was a disaster in the making.

Clearly though, when you've got something this big, actually there should be much more scientific rigor attached to literally the sheets of paper to see whether the initials actually say AH on the cover rather than FH. But there's a need to believe. And also frankly, as Rupert Murdoch is a master of doing is he's there to sell newspapers and entertain people. And if they're not real, he'll still keep the circulation.

I think it's actually guaranteed that we're going to have the media fooled by hoaxes again and again and again. It's in the nature of the beast. They get fooled, they report it as a hoax. There's really not a lot of downside for them. Obviously, if somebody came forward with Hitler diaries today, I think they'd be checked and double-checked and triple-checked. I don't think anyone would fall for Hitler diaries again.

I think Kuya's last laugh was getting the money and he was proud to fake all the people around him. That was his last laughing. This should absolutely not have gone the distance, but the newspapers wanted it to be true. I mean, fortunately, they've learned their lesson now.

You know, the fact checking in modern journalism is much, much better now. You'd never get anything published that isn't true now. No chance.