Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  Nine days later, his confidence appeared to be vindicated. On Thursday 15 January, after an interval of more than seven weeks, Jakob Tiefenthaeler at last rang back. Herr Fischer, he reported, was interested in Heidemann and Walde’s offer and had authorized him to pass on his telephone number. It was 07152 41981. The reporter noted it down. He could hardly contain his impatience. ‘I remember that Herr Heidemann was in a real hurry to end the conversation,’ recalled Tiefenthaeler. ‘He thanked me and promised to keep in touch.’

  Heidemann turned in triumph to Walde. ‘I have the number.’

  A man’s voice, gruff and heavily accented, answered the number which Heidemann dialled. ‘I have been trying to reach you for more than a year,’ Heidemann told him. He talked about his ownership of Carin II, his friendship with the old Nazis and his collection of Third Reich memorabilia, before finally coming to the point. ‘We are very interested in the diaries.’

  Fischer said that he was a dealer in militaria. He was originally from East Germany. His brother was still there – a general in the East German army. The general had been in touch with peasants in the area where Hitler’s transport plane had crashed at the end of the war. In return for money and consumer goods he had acquired from them a hoard of material which had been salvaged from the burning aircraft and hidden locally for more than thirty years. It was not simply a matter of diaries, said Fischer. There were other Hitler writings involved, including a handwritten third volume of Mein Kampf and an opera.

  An opera? Heidemann was taken aback.

  Yes, said Fischer, an opera entitled Wieland the Blacksmith which Hitler had written in his youth in collaboration with his friend August Kubizek. There were also letters and papers belonging to Hitler and original Hitler paintings. Heidemann asked about the material’s whereabouts. Some of it was in the West, said Fischer, but most of it was still in the East. He had already had offers for it from the United States.

  Heidemann repeated the proposition he had made to Tiefenthaeler: 2 million marks for the diaries and a guarantee of absolute secrecy. Fischer sounded doubtful. His brother was prepared to deal only with discreet private collectors. He would never agree to the sale of the material to a publishing company: if his involvement ever became known, his career, possibly even his life, would be endangered. Again, Heidemann promised complete confidentiality. Fischer hesitated. He could, he supposed, keep Stern’s name out of it and pass Heidemann off to his brother as a wealthy Swiss collector. Certainly, he was adamant that if they were to do business, no one else could be brought into the arrangement. He would deal only with Heidemann. This suited the reporter perfectly and by the time the conversation ended, half an hour later, the foundations of a deal had been laid.

  Heidemann and Walde now needed money and the following week was devoted to putting together a suitably tempting prospectus to obtain it. Heidemann assembled the information and photocopied the relevant extracts from Die Katacombe and Hitler’s Pilot but as usual he passed his material on to someone else to write up – on this occasion, Walde. The two men gave the project the cover name ‘The Green Vault’, after ‘Grünes Gewölbe’, the treasure chamber in Dresden Castle which housed a famous military museum. On Sunday, 24 January the document was completed. After outlining the story of the trunks full of documents, the plane crash and Hitler’s reaction to it, the prospectus went on:

  Farmers found the crates containing the documents. One man from southern Germany, who was a visitor in East Germany, managed to rescue the treasure from the farmers and safeguard it. Many years later, it was smuggled into the West. Part of the archive is still in East Germany. For around 2 million marks I could obtain 27 handwritten volumes of Hitler’s diaries, the original manuscript of Mein Kampf – so far unpublished – and an opera by the young Hitler and his friend August Kubizek, entitled Wieland der Schmied. There are also many other unpublished papers.

  The conditions are that the names of the people who brought the material out of East Germany should not be revealed and the money must be handed over to the supplier by me, personally, abroad. Part of the money has to be paid into East Germany.

  I have actually visited the place in question [Boernersdorf]. Dr Thomas Walde came with me. We were there last year. There can be no doubt about the authenticity of the material. I know personally almost all those who survived from Hitler’s bunker and I have checked the story with them. If our company thinks that the risk is too great, I suggest that I should seek out a publishing company in the United States which could put up the money and ensure that we get the German publication rights.

  The document was signed by Gerd Heidemann. It was put into a folder together with the extracts from the books of O’Donnell and Baur, and the photographs which Heidemann had taken in Boernersdorf.

  Under normal circumstances, the next step would have been for Walde and Heidemann to have taken their story to Stern’s editors. But the deception which the pair had been practising for more than six months had boxed them in. Not only would they have been accused of lying, they had no guarantee that their story would have been accepted. Koch’s attitude towards Heidemann’s Nazi fixation had not changed. Only a few days earlier, according to the reporter, Koch had called him in and instructed him to research a series about the arms race. Heidemann had tried to avoid the assignment and had broached the subject of the Hitler diaries but Koch had brushed him aside angrily: ‘You! Always with your SS topics!’ And Walde had another fear: Stern was short of sensational stories at the moment. The magazine’s aggrieved editors, he claimed later, might have ‘wasted the tale of the diaries as a quick scoop’. It is also likely, although naturally neither man has ever admitted it, that they realized the discovery of the diaries could make them a great deal of money. Why should they simply give it away to their ungrateful editors?

  Walde had already initiated Wilfried Sorge into the secret. At about noon on Tuesday, 27 January, the two journalists visited him in his office to show him their ‘Green Vault’ dossier. They told him that they needed 200,000 marks as a deposit to secure the first volumes. Sorge promised to see what he could do.

  Four hours later Heidemann and Walde were summoned up to the offices of Gruner and Jahr on the ninth floor of the Stern building. Sorge had shown the folder to his immediate superior, Dr Jan Hensmann, the company’s deputy managing director. Hensmann was enthusiastic and at once telephoned the firm’s managing director, Manfred Fischer, to ask if he could spare a few minutes. ‘Heidemann has found something,’ said Hensmann. ‘We need to talk about it.’ Full of curiosity, Fischer made his way to Hensmann’s office.

  Five men took their places in the room for the first of what would eventually prove to be dozens of conferences on the diaries, extending over a period of more than two years. Heidemann and Walde were the journalists present; Hensmann was the financial expert; Sorge, the salesman; Manfred Fischer, the dynamic executive whose love of instant decision making was to start the whole calamity.

  The dossier was handed to Fischer. He read it, fascinated, and began asking questions. ‘Heidemann’, he recalled, ‘explained that many of the documents were in the hands of a highly placed officer in the East German army. The books had to be smuggled into the West by secret and illegal means. No names could be revealed in order not to jeopardize the informants.’ Fischer asked what Henri Nannen thought of it all. Heidemann described Nannen’s derogatory remarks in the Stern canteen; he talked of his ‘difficulties’ with Peter Koch; neither of them knew anything about it, nor should they be told. Walde pitched in to support Heidemann. Fischer was impressed by his manner of calm assurance; Walde, he said later, added a ‘seal of authority’ to the story.

  Things might have gone very differently for Stern if at this point Fischer had insisted that the magazine’s editors be let in on the secret. But Fischer was a supremely self-assured character. He had reason to be. At forty-seven he was the favourite protégé of the mighty Reinhard Mohn. Mohn controlled 88.9 per cent of Bertelsmann AG, the West Ge
rman printing and publishing conglomerate with an annual turnover of almost $2 billion. Bertelsmann in its turn owned 74.9 per cent of Gruner and Jahr. Fischer was expected to take over the running of the entire Bertelsmann empire in the next few months. If Heidemann and Walde wanted to keep the discovery of the diaries secret from their editors for a while, he was not the kind of man to shirk responsibility for that decision. He was flattered that two such experienced journalists should turn to him. Personally, he did not blame them for being reluctant to trust Koch – Fischer did not like the Stern editor either: he was too abrasive and much too left wing for his liking. Fischer was excited at the prospect of obtaining Hitler’s diaries. It would do him no harm to arrive at Bertelsmann with a reputation as the man who had engineered the biggest publishing coup of the decade. He postponed his next appointment and asked Walde and Heidemann how much they needed.

  It was eventually agreed that Heidemann would offer, on Gruner and Jahr’s behalf, 85,000 marks for each of the 27 volumes. The company would also be willing to pay up to 200,000 marks for the third volume of Mein Kampf and 500,000 marks for the remainder of the archive, including the pictures. Heidemann said that he needed 200,000 marks as a deposit. Ideally, he would like to fly down to Stuttgart that night. Fine, replied Fischer, he should have the money at once. He summoned the company’s financial secretary, Peter Kuehsel.

  Kuehsel, an accountant in his forties, had been with the firm for only three weeks. He wandered into the office and was suddenly ordered by Fischer to produce 200,000 marks in cash – immediately. It was after 6.30 p.m. and Kuehsel had been on the point of going home. He protested that all the banks were closed. ‘Get the money,’ said Fischer, and with a parting injunction to Heidemann to keep him fully informed, he departed for a reception being held by one of Gruner and Jahr’s consumer magazines.

  ‘I didn’t know what the money was for,’ Kuehsel said afterwards. ‘It wasn’t necessary for me to know. According to the company’s internal rules, Dr Fischer could authorize payment.’ The only bank he could think of which might still be open was the Deutsche Bank at Hamburg airport; he rang and checked; they were. Heidemann, Sorge, Kuehsel and a representative of the company’s legal department piled into a car and drove off into the night.

  At the bank, a bemused cashier handed over 200,000 marks in 100-, 500- and 1000-mark notes. ‘Herr Heidemann gave me a receipt,’ said Kuehsel, ‘and put the money into his briefcase.’ Heidemann had booked himself on to the final flight out of Hamburg for Stuttgart. According to Kuehsel: ‘We took Herr Heidemann to the departure hall. I told him he was carrying a lot of money and he had to be careful.’ In addition to the cash, Heidemann had also taken the precaution of packing what he hoped would be his trump card in persuading Fischer to hand over the diaries – the pride of his collection, the full dress uniform of Hermann Goering.

  Heidemann was now playing the part he relished most. Settled into his seat on flight LH949, a suitcase containing 200,000 marks at his side, he took off for Stuttgart on a secret mission to buy Adolf Hitler’s diaries.

  At Stuttgart airport, Heidemann hired a car and drove into the city to the International Hotel. He rang Gina to let her know he would not be coming home that evening and went to bed.

  The following morning, using the address given to him by Tiefenthaeler, Heidemann drove to Fischer’s shop at number 20 Aspergstrasse. The building was four storeys high, a solid, red brick affair, part of a terrace on a steep hill. Fischer’s shop had a pair of windows at the front, heavily shuttered. Heidemann rang the bell. There was no reply; the place was deserted. He tried to peer through the windows at the back, but they too had heavy metal bars and lace curtains.

  Heidemann waited in his car in the bitter January cold all morning with only the money and Goering’s uniform for company. In the afternoon he decided to try to find Fischer’s home. From the area code prefixing Fischer’s telephone number, he worked out that his house must be in the Leonberg area, about ten miles west of the centre of Stuttgart. Heidemann drove through the darkening countryside, through neat fields and brightly lit villages, until, at about 7 p.m., he reached the tiny hamlet of Ditzingen. He drove past a row of small houses, parked by a phone box and rang Fischer’s number. ‘It’s Heidemann,’ he said, when Fischer answered, ‘from Stern.’ Fischer asked him what the weather was like in Hamburg. ‘I’m not in Hamburg,’ replied Heidemann. ‘I’m five minutes away from your house.’ Fischer gave him his address – it was literally only across the street – and moments later, Heidemann was ringing the doorbell of one of the small houses he had just passed.

  The door opened to reveal a short, round-faced man with a bald head and drooping moustache.

  NINE

  IN KONRAD PAUL Kujau, alias Konrad Fischer, alias Peter Fischer, alias Heinz Fischer, alias Doctor Fischer, alias Doctor Kujau, alias ‘The Professor’, alias ‘The General’, known to his many friends as Conny, Gerd Heidemann had at last met his match: someone whose talent for inventing stories was equal to his own capacity for believing them.

  Konrad Kujau, who began by forging luncheon vouchers and who ended up responsible for the biggest fraud in publishing history, was born on 27 June 1938 in the Saxon town of Loebau in what is now East Germany. He had three sisters and a brother; of the five children, he was the third eldest. His father, Richard Kujau, was a shoemaker. Unlike Heidemann, whose background was relatively apolitical, Conny was reared in a typically working-class, pro-Nazi household. Richard Kujau was an active supporter of the Nazis from 1933 onwards and his beliefs rubbed off on his son: seven years after the end of the war, at the age of fourteen, Conny was to be found painting an enormous swastika on his grandmother’s kitchen wall.

  Kujau’s childhood was overshadowed by the poverty which descended on his family after his father was killed in 1944. His mother was unable to support the family and they had to be sent away to various children’s homes. Conny, the brightest in the family, did well at school but was too poor to stay on beyond his sixteenth birthday. In September 1954 he became an apprentice locksmith, a position he held for less than a year. Then came a succession of temporary jobs, none of them lasting more than a few weeks, as a textile worker, a building-site labourer, a painter, and finally as a waiter in the Loebau Youth Club. In 1957 a warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with the disappearance of the Youth Club’s microphone. Shortly before dawn on 7 June 1957, Kujau fled to the West.

  He made his way first to the home of his uncle, Paul Bellmann, in West Berlin. But Bellmann had no room for his troublesome, nineteen-year-old nephew, and Kujau found himself in the first of a series of refugee camps. Rootless, alone, with no family to fall back on, the young Kujau was eventually resettled in Vaihingen, on the outskirts of Stuttgart. He lived in a succession of homes for single men and drifted into a world of casual labour and petty crime. His biography is written in his police record. In November 1959 he was arrested for stealing tobacco from a local cooperative and fined eighty marks. In 1960, together with an accomplice, he broke into a storeroom and stole four cases of cognac. He made so much noise he woke up two nightwatchmen who pursued and caught him. The police found he was carrying an air pistol, a small revolver and a knuckleduster. A court in Stuttgart found him guilty of serious theft and he went to prison for nine months. In August 1961, he was in trouble again, this time for stealing four crates of pears and a crate of apples whilst employed as a labourer for a fruit merchant; again, he spent a short period in prison. Six months later, working as a cook in a Stuttgart bar, he was arrested after a fight with his employer.

  It was at this time that Kujau met and fell in love with a waitress at the same establishment, a homely girl named Edith Lieblang. Edith, like Conny, was plump, in her twenties, and a refugee from East Germany: she had worked as a salesgirl and was training to be a nurse when she decided to cross into the West in April 1961, a few months before the erection of the Berlin Wall. She came to seek her fortune and found Conny Kujau, upon whom, for a tim
e, she seems to have been a steadying influence. In the summer of 1962 he rented premises in Plochingen, fifteen miles outside Stuttgart, and opened the Pelican Dance Bar. ‘For the first time,’ he claimed later, ‘I began to make money.’ He also began to rewrite his personal history.

  To call Kujau a compulsive liar would be to underrate him. It would not do justice to the sheer exuberant scale of his deceptions. In 1962 he told people his surname was ‘Fischer’ and asked them to call him ‘Peter’. He made himself two years older, by changing his date of birth to March 1936. He altered his place of birth from Loebau to Goerlitz. He painted a touching but sadly fictitious picture of his childhood: separated from his parents during the bombing of Dresden, he had, he said, been brought up in an orphanage until his mother found him with the help of the Red Cross in 1951. He had not been a waiter in the Loebau Youth Club but an ‘organization manager’. He had attended the Dresden Academy of Art. He had been persecuted by the communists because his family was not working class. He had fled to the West to avoid conscription into the East German army. He had worked as a commercial artist in an advertising agency. There was no particular reason for most of these lies: Kujau simply liked telling stories.

  By 1963 Kujau was once again in financial trouble. He gave up his dance bar and returned to Stuttgart to work as a waiter in a beer cellar. He soon resumed his old ways and for the first time his police record shows a conviction for forgery. He counterfeited twenty-seven marks’ worth of luncheon vouchers and was sentenced to five days in prison. According to the court records, Kujau – who was tried under the name Fischer – had added some new stories to his repertoire: he now claimed to have been born in June 1935, so adding yet another year to his age; he also pretended he was married.