Deep Dive
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It's the early 1980s, and in a house in West Germany, a man called Gerd Heidemann is flicking through a book with mounting excitement. Sentences leap from the page. The burning of the books was not a good idea of Goebbels. "I have violent flatulence and," says Eva, "bad breath. The measures against the Jews are too strong for me."
The book he is reading is one of 60 volumes of the revelatory personal diaries of Adolf Hitler himself.
And through Heidemann, they will be purchased for millions of dollars and published in the world's leading newspapers and magazines. But on publication day, with the world captivated by the opportunity to read the innermost thoughts of the most notorious dictator in history, the scoop of the century falls apart. The diaries are total fakes, and not even particularly good ones.
So how are some of the world's foremost journalists conned? And who is behind a fraud that has gone down in media legend? The Hitler Diaries hoax was without doubt the single greatest scam ever pulled on a magazine and a collection of newspapers. There was almost such a desire for this to be true that the normal checks and balances any journalist would go through, they don't seem to have been gone through.
It really has it all. It's got Nazis, it's got press barons, it's got millions and millions of pounds and dollars' worth of money being siphoned from the accounts of major corporations. Rupert Murdoch himself personally had arranged the deal and we were required to run the diaries unchecked. And of course it's something I personally and the newspaper itself regrets enormously.
You're listening to Forbidden History, the podcast series that explores the past's darkest corners, sheds light on the lives of intriguing individuals, and uncovers the truth buried deep in history's most controversial legacies. I'm Janine Harony, and this is The Hitler Diaries. The story begins in January 1980. Gerd Heidemann touches down at Stuttgart Airport, West Germany.
Heidemann is a collector of Nazi memorabilia. The pride of his collection is a luxury yacht, once owned by Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring. With the yacht having fallen into disrepair and the restoration costs spiraling out of control, he's in town today to meet a fellow collector and try and convince him to put up some money.
But when he meets this collector, called Fritz Steifel, he is soon disappointed. Steifel is quite simply not interested. It's not to be a wasted journey, however, because Steifel can't resist showing Heidemann his Nazi collection. Today, Gerd Heidemann is in his 90s.
And we interviewed him in his private bunker in Hamburg, where, surrounded by his collection of Nazi documents and artifacts, he recalled what he saw all those years ago. He showed me his entire collection of Hitler things, watercolors, oil paintings, and over a thousand documents from Hitler, and an alleged Hitler diary.
It has never been recorded that Hitler ever kept a diary. And yet what Heidemann held in his hands is a dark blue notebook, roughly A4 sized, with a battered spine and yellowing pages, filled with daily entries of Hitler's own handwriting. On the cover is a wax seal bearing a German eagle, and in the bottom right hand corner is Gothic script, which appears to be Hitler's initials, A.H.
Heidemann becomes curious. Maybe Hitler did have a secret diary after all. And I asked him where it could have come from. He said it was all supposed to be from a crashed plane, in which Hitler was getting things from Berlin to Salzburg, because it was all going to be brought to Obersalzburg. And there are over 25 of them. But most of them are still behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany.
40 years ago, Heidemann flicked through the diary, becoming more and more intrigued. But his interest is not only personal, it's professional, for he is no mere memorabilia collector. Heidemann is a journalist for Stern Magazine, one of West Germany's most prestigious publications. And as he examines the pages, he sees an opportunity. Guy Walters is an historian and author of Hunting Evil,
He believes Heidemann saw the potential to make money.
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. He was also a journalist for Stern, and he used to love working on stories about Nazi Germany, to the extent that the management actually regarded him as being kind of SS and Nazi-obsessed. 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.
Heidemann's desire for money, his passion for Nazi memorabilia, and his influential position in the media would prove a dangerous combination and enable one of the greatest journalistic frauds of the 20th century. Heidemann returns home to Hamburg and heads for the Stern Magazine headquarters.
He tells his editors that he held an original volume of Hitler's diaries, the existence of which was not even known. But he's not given the reception he expected. Most at the magazine believe that his obsession with Nazi memorabilia has gotten out of hand. He's laughed out of the room.
But one man takes Heidemann seriously: Thomas Wald, the head of a department which deals with historical stories. Wald and Heidemann agree to go it alone and prove the diaries' authenticity. First, Heidemann taps up his network of former Nazis to ask them whether Hitler even kept diaries. Heidemann recalls the first piece of evidence that helped convince him the diaries were genuine.
And now I've interviewed all the generals I knew. General Wolf has confirmed to me that Hitler always held his monologues at the Führer's headquarters until two o'clock in the morning and then said he had to withdraw now to make entries into his diary. Then I learned from the window of his driver, Erich Kemper, that Hitler always took notes on the way and told the driver that everything was intended for his diary.
Heidemann's conversations with former Nazis do seem to suggest that Hitler did indeed keep a diary. We asked historian Guy Walters for his opinion.
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, don't forget Hitler would go to bed at 2, 3, 4 o'clock in the morning, 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.
To a historian today, the testimonies of a former Nazi general and Hitler's driver's widow are not strong enough when the sheer lack of evidence from those closer to the Fuhrer himself is taken into account. But to Heidemann, who wants those diaries to be real, the evidence is compelling. And the former Nazis give up another secret, revealing the existence of Operation Seraglio.
Operation Seraglio was a mission that would appear to corroborate Steiffel's story of the diaries having been recovered from a plane crash. Guy Walters: In the last dying days of the Third Reich in Berlin as it's being encircled by the Soviet army, a plane, a Junkers 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. That plane crashes somewhere in southern Germany, in a place called Bernersdorf, and it's there that it explodes into flames. And according to the received wisdom, everybody on board was killed and the contents of the cargo were all destroyed.
It is recorded that Hitler was utterly distraught upon hearing about the plane crash. Could this have been because he believed his diaries to have gone up in flames? That would explain Hitler's reaction, his very upset reaction. Hitler was clearly in an emotional state anyway. So therefore it seems very plausible if you ignore the fact that 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.
Next, Heidemann and Wald make it their mission to track down the crash site. Heidemann. I made a couple of phone calls and found it. The plane had crashed in the east of the Ore Mountains, in Bornersdorf, which is four kilometers from the Czechoslovak border. We can't go there without a residence permit.
And whether or not we ask the Stasi officers, they are coming with us. And so we went down there with the Stasi. And then I found it all: the graves on the airfield. The discovery of the graves makes a strong impression on him.
and later, secret visits would yield further evidence. Heidemann shows us two intact windows from the aircraft that he recovered on a later trip to the site. The survival of the windows leads him to believe that the diaries could possibly have survived too. And so Heidemann now tracks down the man who sold the diary to Steiffel. He turns out to be a dealer of Militaria residing in Stuttgart, known only as Herr Fischer.
Heinemann calls him, and Fischer explains that he was originally from East Germany. His brother still lives across the border, and he had been in touch with locals in the area of the plane crash. From them, he had bought a hoard of material that had been salvaged from the burning aircraft, including the diaries.
With the story having checked out, Heidemann and Wald now decide to go over the heads of the editors at Stern Magazine, who had previously turned them down, and instead pitch the story to the managing directors at the magazine's parent company, Gruner & Jahr.
This time, they are successful. The directors become excited by the potential money to be made if they can secure the diaries for Stern magazine. Publishers live or die by their journalistic integrity. So what made Gruner and Jahr so willing to risk the reputation of one of their most respected magazines? We asked psychologist Linda Papadopoulos.
If you actually have Hitler's diaries, Hitler's diaries, you're going to want them to be true at any cost. So I wonder how much bias there was to actually doing the explorative work that would have enabled them to see that this probably isn't true at all. In effect, their desire to have this huge scoop trumped any proper investigation that they would have done.
Sold by the story and flattered by the fact that two experienced journalists had come direct to them, the directors at Gruner & Jahr give Heidemann the authority to draw out a 200,000 Deutsche Mark deposit, which is around $80,000, to secure the diaries. And so in February 1981, Heidemann finds himself shaking hands with Herr Fischer himself, Heidemann.
I drove to his apartment in Stuttgart and found him there. That was all in the beginning of 1981. Well, he made a funny impression. He was very funny and actually was very personable. Heidemann has a positive first meeting with Herr Fischer.
But it would later transpire that Fischer is not who he seems. His real name is Konrad Kujau, and he's a forger and con artist. Using the alias "Hair Fischer," Kujau has flooded the memorabilia market with forged Nazi documents and fake paintings said to be by Hitler. And unbeknownst to him, Heidemann already owns some of them.
The Hitler Diaries promise to be Cujao's biggest scam yet. And in this gullible journalist, he has found the perfect mark. Cujao therefore promises 27 volumes. But as Guy Walters explains, there was a problem.
He hasn't written them. They don't exist. And so what he has to do is he has to keep Heidemann waiting by saying, I have to get them from across the border in East Germany. Don't forget Germany is still divided here. It's the early '80s. From my contact, it's very dangerous. It's going to cost you lots of money. It's going to take time. I don't want to get them out all in one block. I don't want to tell my contact there's any chance of them going to Stern because lives may be lost.
Heidemann totally buys this story. In fact, Kujo's colorful tale makes it seem even more believable. And so the pair reach a tentative agreement. Heidemann will pay for the diaries as soon as Kujo is able to secure them. And so Kujo will now dedicate his time to executing his crime.
He copies out pages from a compendium of Hitler's speeches into a notebook, stains the pages with tea, and bashes the books to make them look old, before affixing a wax Nazi seal on the front and the letters "AH." Once a few diaries have been prepared, Heidemann heads to Stuttgart with his publisher's money to collect them.
I think what was so clever about the forgery is that it looked as though it was written probably quite late, it was quite rushed, it was just a few lines per day, and therefore it looked like the diary of a man who was going to bed late and just had time to scribble out a few sentences. So, yeah, I think that what was so good about all these great hoaxes is that they build on the truth in a very plausible way. They don't create a new truth, but they augment and slightly twist existing truth.
But there is another dimension to this story. Heidemann himself is also twisting the truth. The amount he agreed to pay for the diaries is less than he's told his publishers. And so Heidemann is siphoning off money for himself with every purchase.
Heidemann has jumped across to the senior bosses, who'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. And so at this point, the publishers Gruner and Jahr are deceiving Stern magazine by not telling their editors about the scoop they're acquiring for them.
Heidemann is deceiving Gruner and Jahr by keeping money for himself. And Cugiao is deceiving everyone. And so because no one is playing it straight, the diaries are not properly scrutinized. But things begin to unravel when in 1981, Pope John Paul II is shot and wounded in Rome. When Stern needs a journalist to cover the story, it's Heidemann they turn to.
With his hands full acquiring the Hitler diaries, he's forced to come clean and tell Stern the truth of what he's busy working on. The Stern editors initially react angrily to having been deceived by their management, but a chance to properly scrutinize the diaries is missed. They reason that Gruner and Jahr would hardly have invested in something this big unless they were absolutely certain of its value. Kujao's deception has drawn more people in.
Psychologist Linda Papadopoulos. When you look at hoaxes in general, one of the things that we know makes people believe is looking at what everyone else believes. And we know for a fact that if people around you believe something, you're more likely to believe it. And it's precisely this kind of groupthink mentality that psychologists speak about that gets people into trouble time and time again.
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And now, encouraged by his success so far, Ku Jiao takes his fraud to another level. He announces to Heidemann that the Hall of Diaries is far larger than he first thought, but they're gonna cost more money. Heidemann remembers the story Ku Jiao spun.
At the beginning, of course, you didn't even know what it would cost. We expected a little over two million. Because at the beginning there was always talk of a little over 25 diaries. And then there were more and more.
And then Kujau was still making up stories about how dangerous it was to get them. He said the East German generals would know what the prices are like in the West, and his brother would have to share the money with three other generals in order to protect himself. ...three other generals of the NVA, up to Army General Hoffmann, to secure themselves.
The price shoots up to nearly $80,000 per volume. And yet, the price rise merely convinces Stern that the diaries must be genuine. They are at least reassuringly expensive, and so they sanction further spending. Kujo gets to work making more and more fakes.
In the spring of 1982, Heidemann's partner Thomas Wald finally decides that now is the time to submit samples for professional analysis. This is the moment the fraud should finally be exposed. The diaries are hardly sophisticated fakes. After all, Cujo had simply used modern notebooks with modern bindings and aged them with tea.
But once again, he would be saved by his victims. Because Stern, blindingly confident in the diaries and fearful of a leak, only submit a single page for analysis. And the technique they choose is graphology, or handwriting analysis, which, as Guy Walters explains, is a less than perfect test.
They used graphology, which is a very flawed science, if you can call it a science. People's handwriting changes all the time, and the idea that you're just sending photocopies of some of the handwriting to graphological experts is ludicrous in itself. But this was not to be the biggest problem. In order to conduct the analysis, the experts require an authentic sample of Hitler's handwriting to compare with the diary extract.
And Heidemann, being an avid collector of Hitler memorabilia, is more than happy to supply one. The trouble is, Heidemann's own collection is utterly infested with fakes by Konrad Kujau. Some of the sample signatures of Hitlers they were using to compare to the fake diaries were in themselves earlier fakes made by Kujau.
So you are comparing a fake with a fake. And so when the results come back, the graphologists say, "Yep, that looks like real Hitler's handwriting." Because it compared very well to the other faked Hitler's handwriting. The graphologists weren't to know. Kujo is such a prolific fraudster that by pure awful coincidence, a small sample of forged handwriting has been authenticated against handwriting from the same forger.
And as a result, the entire hoard of diaries is deemed authentic. They're sent to a vault in Switzerland for safekeeping. Champagne is opened in the offices of Stern, and Heidemann goes on a spending spree, buying a new flat and several luxury cars. But over the coming months, he'll also become remarkably indiscreet.
He shows off original diaries to former Nazis, and so word of their existence soon begins to leak. For Stern, this is a potential disaster. If a rival breaks the story before them, their investment will have been for nothing. It's now a race against time.
They will publish in April 1983. And what's more, to maximize the Diaries' commercial potential, they'll license them to foreign news outlets. One man who's very interested in the Diaries is Rupert Murdoch. Director of Media Empire News International, Murdoch sees the opportunity to purchase the rights for Britain, the Commonwealth, and the United States.
But first, he wants to have the diaries authenticated by his choice of experts. And he has someone in mind. British historian Hugh Trevor Roper is on the board of one of his newspapers, The Times, and is one of the world's foremost experts on Nazi Germany. He should have been the man to finally pronounce these diaries fakes.
But while Trevor Roper is an expert on Nazi history, in one crucial aspect, he's not the ideal man for the job.
The 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 Kuyau was so brilliant at forging. It is not something-- if you look at that text, it is very, very hard to read. And you have to really know your stuff. And Trevor Roper did not know his stuff.
This should not have been a problem. Trevor Roper's initial agreement with Murdoch is that he'd have a preliminary look at the diaries and then be sent English transcriptions to go through the content in detail. But Murdoch reneges on this agreement. So keen is he to make a quick deal that he orders Trevor Roper to give an instant decision.
And so Trevor Roper is taken into the Swiss vault where the diaries are kept and is confronted by a staggering 58 volumes of material. He'd later admit that he was simply blown away by the sheer number of diaries in front of him and forced to make a quick decision. The world's foremost authority on Nazi Germany pronounces the diaries authentic. This is just the news Murdoch is waiting for.
He arranges a deal with Stern for the US, English and Commonwealth rights. And the story arrives on the desk of Magnus Linklater, who was the executive editor of features at the Sunday Times. We asked him about his initial reaction.
Rupert Murdoch had pulled off what he thought was an amazing deal. And indeed, it was commercially an amazing deal. And of course, at that stage, all our instincts as an investigative newspaper were to find out what lay behind this, to unleash our reporters, to check it out at every available opportunity. We were told, however, that that was not going to be possible.
because Stern had sold a package deal, Rupert Murdoch himself personally had arranged the deal, and we were required to run the diaries unchecked. But as the Sunday Times gears up for publication, Linklater decides to contact the one man who should be able to relieve his nagging feeling that something wasn't right. I thought I really must go to the source and ask him to reassure me. So I rang Hugh Trevor Roper,
at Peterhouse, the college at Cambridge that he was, and I got through to him and I said, "I've been working on this material and 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." Or let us say, "I'm 99% convinced."
And ever since then I thought 99% is never good enough. By now, events are moving fast. On Friday the 22nd of April, Stern issues a press release announcing the existence of the diaries and their forthcoming publication. A press conference is also scheduled for the 25th of April. With the news now broken, the public begin to get excited at the prospect of soon being able to read Hitler's innermost thoughts.
But at the same time, historians around the world begin to air their doubts that these diaries could possibly be authentic. Nevertheless, back in Britain, Murdoch has committed the Sunday Times to the story. And the following day, the printing presses begin rolling. There's no turning back. But the offices of the Sunday Times are about to receive a phone call.
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. And we heard this awful half-end of a conversation.
which is, "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.
Murdoch is alerted to the devastating news. But instead of pulling the story, he insists they go ahead regardless. For now, he will be vindicated. The following day, the Sunday Times Hitler Diary exclusive sees the paper gain 60,000 new readers. But the assault on the diary's authenticity is already intensifying. The following day, Stern magazine hits the newsstands in West Germany.
But at their press conference, Hugh Trevor Roper admits his doubts in public for the first time. Another man, David Irving, then grabs a microphone at the center of the hall and denounces them too. Guy Walters.
David Irving is a man who describes himself as a historian. I would describe him as a historical writer. He has a deeply, deeply offensive political agenda, but he's an important character in this story because Irving, like Heidemann, knows lots and lots of these former Nazis, knows his way around that very, very strange underworld of senior figures from the Third Reich. He stood up and went, these diaries are not true, and it causes an absolute bedlam at the press conference.
Stern realizes that only a quick and definitive judgment on the diaries' authenticity can save the situation. And so, they finally send West Germany's Bundesarchiv complete volumes of the diaries for full chemical analysis of the paper they were written on. And as Linda Papadopoulos describes, it doesn't take them long to come to their conclusions.
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, it seems, was the type of paper and glue that was used in the diaries. So, you know, 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 the fact of the matter is that
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 the 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 also carries out tests on one of the Hitler diaries. They too conclude that simply based on the age of the paper, the diaries are a forgery.
Stern issues a press release admitting their mistake. Their reputation is in tatters, and they give Rupert Murdoch his money back. Magnus Linklater recalls going to see Murdoch himself when the news came through. We went to see him in his office, and we were trying to find out how we could pull back our reputation from this appalling disaster. And as we were discussing it,
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. And 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.
So I don't think he was too bothered by the fact that we had just perpetrated an appalling fake. For Gerd Heidemann, the man whose strange interest in Nazi memorabilia had started this whole affair, his world has fallen apart. Not only does his dream of being the man who shared Hitler's diaries with the world lie in tatters,
But he also realizes it will only be a matter of time before it's discovered that he's been stealing money for himself. Kujao meanwhile leaves Zhukot for the Austrian border, before finally surrendering to the authorities and confessing all, implicating Heidemann in the conspiracy. Kujao will be sentenced to four years and six months in prison for receiving 1.5 million Deutschmarks for the forgeries.
Heidemann is given 4 years and 8 months for stealing 1.7 million marks from Stern. Despite a lengthy trial, at least 5 million marks are unaccounted for. To this day, Heidemann remains bitter about his treatment, and his reputation will never recover. But Kujao turns his prison sentence into a PR triumph.
He plays the role of likable rogue and sells his life story to Stern's rival for a hundred thousand marks. In the Stern offices, many of the journalists are fired, but the senior management at Gruner & Jahr, who had sanctioned the spending on the diaries, remained in their jobs.
The money men somehow seem to walk through this unscathed as they always do. The senior management stays in place, the chief executive stays in place. He must have been a great negotiator and a better negotiator with his own future than with his company's money to buy these wretched diaries.
For Magnus Linklater and the journalists at the Sunday Times, things never felt quite the same again. I think it was a morbid curiosity on the part of our readers to how their favourite newspaper had got involved in this mess. And the circulation, of course, ironically, did hold up reasonably well for the next few Sundays. But I think something...
crucial was lost. You know, we were a paper that were very pleased with ourselves. A lot of our rivals, particularly the observer, were sort of rubbing their hands at our discomfiture and with some justification. So yes, something was lost.
Today, the saga of the Hitler Diaries remains a cautionary tale in the history of journalism. A prime example of what happens when a desire to attain a great scoop blinds people to the truth.
Next time on Forbidden History. In southern France, two treasure hunters are pursuing a new lead in their 20-year search for the remains of the saint Mary Magdalene. We think now we've pinpointed exactly the lost resting place of Mary Magdalene.
Over 2,000 years ago, Mary was the first witness to the resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection is what defines Christianity. And who is sent to witness that momentous event? Mary Magdalene. However, she continues to be one of the church's most disputed subjects: prostitute, devout disciple, or the wife of Jesus. If we find Mary Magdalene, we will rewrite history.
We join the search in Finding Mary Magdalene. Forbidden History was a Like a Shot Entertainment production. Produced by Matt Bone. Executive Producers Henry Scott, Steve Gillum, and Danny O'Brien. Edit and sound design by James McGee and Liam Clayton for Aerophone Limited. ♪