Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  In the year that saw his first conviction for forgery, Kujau persuaded the long-suffering Edith Lieblang to put up the money for his latest money-making scheme: window cleaning. He now had the distinction of having two criminal records, one under the name of Fischer, the other as Kujau. As Kujau he was actually supposed to be in jail, serving time under an old suspended sentence. The company therefore had to be registered in Edith’s name as the Lieblang Cleaning Company, with the slogan, ‘Guaranteed Clean as a Housewife’. Although the firm eventually picked up contracts from a large Stuttgart department store, a chain of fast-food restaurants and South German Television, Kujau and Lieblang initially did not make much money from the business. For seven years they could not afford to buy a flat together and continued to live apart, Edith working part time as a textile worker and as a waitress in a coffee shop.

  In March 1968 the police carried out a routine check at the Pension Eisele, Kujau’s lodgings in Alfdorferstrasse. Kujau was registered as a cook and waiter named Peter Fischer from Guerlitz. He told the police that he was a resident of Berlin and gave them his uncle’s address. Unfortunately he was carrying papers which gave a different name (Konrad Fischer), a different address (Stuttgart) and a different date of birth. He was arrested. At the police station he gave a third version of events. His name, he said, was Peter Konrad Fischer, of no fixed address. He had given a false name because he was in fact a deserter from the East German army: he had escaped to the West in 1963 after training as a lieutenant in chemical warfare at the Rosa Luxemburg officer academy. A few hours later, he changed his story again: now he had come to West Germany immediately after leaving school in order to evade military service. He confused his interrogators in Stuttgart as he was subsequently to confuse journalists and the Hamburg police in 1983, by appearing to give precise details which only hours of investigation would later establish to be false – in this case that he had entered West Germany using a friend’s passport made out in the name of Harald Fuchs. Finally, his fingerprints proved that he was none of the people he said he was: he was the same old Konrad Kujau, conman and petty thief, who was wanted for evading a suspended jail sentence. Still protesting his innocence, he was taken away to Stuttgart’s Stanheim Prison.

  In the late 1960s, following Kujau’s release from Stanheim Prison, the Lieblang Cleaning Company began to flourish. By 1971 it had half a dozen employees and was making an annual profit of 124,000 marks. Kujau and Edith bought a flat together in Schmieden, near Stuttgart, and Edith became Conny’s common law wife. In 1970, the couple returned to East Germany for a visit to Loebau. Kujau now had a new idea for making money, one which was far more in tune with his private interests than cleaning people’s windows. Since childhood he had been obsessed with militaria – guns, medals, uniforms – especially from the Nazi era. There was a flourishing demand for such objects in the West, and in the East, in the attics and junk shops of communist Germany, there was a ready supply. They were also cheap: on the black market, the western deutschmark was worth five of its eastern counterpart. Through his relatives in Loebau, Kujau let it be known that he was interested in buying military memorabilia for hard cash. Carefully worded advertisements were placed by his family on his behalf in East German newspapers: ‘Wanted, for purposes of research – old toys, helmets, jugs, pipes, dolls, etc.’ Kujau claimed to have been ‘swamped’ with relics as a result. It was an illegal trade. The East German government had introduced legislation to protect the state’s ‘cultural heritage’, forbidding the unlicensed export of objects made before 1945. Kujau and Lieblang had to smuggle their merchandise over the frontier. Normally, the border guards did not bother to search them. It was not until 1979 that Kujau was stopped trying to carry out a sabre; Lieblang was also caught on one run and had her consignment confiscated.

  Kujau at this time cut a curious figure, simultaneously comic and sinister. He was only in his thirties but his thinning hair, bulging waistline and old-fashioned clothes made him look much older. He loved weapons of all kinds. Guns and swords brought back from East Germany decorated the walls of his house. According to his employees, he frequently wore a pistol which, after an evening’s consumption of his favourite drink of vodka and orange, he would fire into the air at random. Mostly he would shoot off a few rounds in a field by the Schmieden railway station, but he had been known to take potshots at bottles in his favourite bar. On 13 February 1973 he lay in wait outside the Balzac night club in Stuttgart for a man who had allegedly been slashing the tyres of vans belonging to the cleaning company. At 4 a.m., roaring drunk, he leapt out brandishing a loaded machine-gun. The man ran off. In the darkness and confusion, Kujau blundered into a doorway where he came face to face with a prostitute. The woman screamed. The owner of the night club and a waiter heard the commotion, overpowered Kujau and summoned the police. He told them his name was Lieblang. When the police raided his flat they found a machine-gun, a double-barrelled shotgun, three air pistols, three rifles and two revolvers. He confessed to having given a false name, apologized for being drunk and was let off with a fine.

  By 1974, Kujau’s militaria was taking up most of the couple’s home and Edith’s attitude became threatening. According to Kujau she told him: ‘Either that goes out of the window or we separate.’ Kujau then began renting the shop in Aspergstrasse, filling its fifty square metres of floor space with his collection. It became the venue for long drinking sessions at which Kujau would entertain some of his friends: collectors with strong heads and simple minds like the local policeman, Ulli Blaschke, who is occasionally supposed to have acted as Kujau’s bodyguard; the post office official, Siegmund Schaich, a collector of military drinking jugs; and Alfons Drittenthaler, a blacksmith from the nearby town of Burlafingen. ‘The President of Police came several times,’ boasted Kujau. ‘Sometimes a prostitute would sit next to the State Prosecutor. It would go on until late at night.’ Another regular visitor was Wolfgang Schulze, a resident of Miami, who was Kujau’s agent in the United States, dealing on his behalf with the extensive network of American collectors.

  Business was conducted both by barter and by cash. Drittenthaler, for example, gave Kujau a nineteenth-century grenadier’s helmet in exchange for 3000 marks and a reservist’s beer mug; on another occasion, in a straight swap, he obtained a set of mugs from Kujau in return for three uniforms. Drittenthaler described Kujau’s collection as ‘very large and valuable’. It included an almost complete set of Third Reich decorations, 150 helmets, 50 uniforms, 30 flags and, according to Kujau, the largest collection of military jugs in West Germany. ‘He told me that the majority of his things came from East Germany,’ said Drittenthaler. ‘He said that he had a brother there who was a general.’ Using this flourishing business as a cover, Kujau was now able to exploit to the full what he had discovered to be his greatest and most lucrative skill: forgery.

  By his own account, Kujau first discovered his latent artistic talent at the age of five when his next door neighbour in Loebau, a ‘Professor Linder’, taught him how to draw. From childhood, painting was his main hobby. In Stuttgart, in the early 1960s, he began to sell a few canvases. He discovered that there was an especially large market for pictures depicting battle scenes; he claims to have painted his first in 1962: ‘They were simply torn out of my hands.’ He developed a technique of putting his customers into the centre of famous scenes – one client was painted sitting in a staff car next to Field Marshal Rommel – and these paintings, according to him, could fetch as much as 2000 marks, ‘a lot of money in those days’. It was in 1963 that Kujau applied his talent to copying out luncheon vouchers, his first known act of forgery. How he graduated from this to larger frauds is unclear. At his trial in 1984 he told a typically colourful story of how his talent was first spotted by the legendary Nazi intelligence officer and head of the West German secret service, Reinhard Gehlen. Kujau claimed that Gehlen gave him forty pages of handwriting and signatures to copy out in 1970 and thereafter hired him to do a number of freelance jobs. G
ehlen is dead and the story impossible to check – which no doubt explains why Kujau told it.

  What is clear is that in the 1970s Kujau began introducing forgeries into the genuine material he was smuggling out of East Germany. The Hamburg police later filled two rooms at their headquarters with examples of his handiwork. To an authentic First World War helmet he attached a faked note, supposedly signed by Rudolf Hess, stating that it had been worn by Hitler in 1917. To an ancient jacket, waistcoat and top hat he added an ‘authentication’ stating that it was the dress suit Hitler wore to the opening of the Reichstag in 1933. ‘When I had completed a piece,’ bragged Kujau after his arrest in 1983, ‘I framed it and hung it on the wall. People went crazy about them.’ He passed off a Knight’s Cross, one of Nazi Germany’s highest decorations, as having once belonged to Field Marshal Keitel. He could execute a passable imitation of the handwriting of Bormann, Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Keitel, Goering, Goebbels and Himmler. The forgeries themselves were invariably crude. Kujau used modern paper. He created headed stationery simply by using Letraset. He aged documents by pouring tea over them. But he guessed, rightly, that his customers would never take them to experts to check. Public display of Nazi memorabilia was illegal and collections were generally kept, a guilty secret, behind locked doors.

  At some stage, Kujau even executed an outstandingly clumsy forgery of the agreement signed by Hitler and Chamberlain at Munich. Spelling and grammar were not Kujau’s strong suits, even in German; when, as in this case, he tried to forge something in English, the results were farcical:

  We regard the areement signet last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another againe.

  We are resolved that method of consultation shall be the method adopted to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries, and we are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe.

  When it came to Hitler, Kujau had even more opportunities for forgery: not only could he copy Hitler’s handwriting, he could also forge his paintings.

  In 1960, the Marquess of Bath had paid £600 for two Hitler watercolours auctioned at Sotheby’s: The Parliament and Ringstrasse, Vienna and A View of the Karlskirche, Vienna. It was the first step on the way to accumulating what eventually would be the world’s largest private collection of Hitler’s art. By 1971 he had forty-eight paintings in his ‘Hitler Room’ at Longleat; by 1983 he had sixty. Lord Bath acquired the pictures for posterity and confessed to a certain ‘admiration’ for the Nazi leader: ‘Hitler did a hell of a lot for his country,’ he explained. Other collectors followed Bath’s example. Billy F. Price, owner of Price Compressors of Houston, Texas, built up a private exhibition of twenty-four paintings, housed behind bullet-proof glass in his company’s boardroom. The cost of the paintings escalated as the demand grew. By the mid-1970s they were fetching over £5000 (15,000 marks) apiece.

  The paintings’ sole attraction was that they were by Hitler; their intrinsic merit was negligible. Hitler took a layman’s view of modern art: Impressionists, Expressionists, Cubists and Dadaists were ‘scribblers, canvas scrawlers, mental defectives or cultural Neanderthals’; once in power, he banned their work. (When someone demonstrated to him that one of the outlawed painters, Franz Marc, was capable of producing ‘traditional’ pictures, Hitler was genuinely puzzled. ‘He could even draw properly,’ he commented, ‘so why didn’t he do it?’) Hitler himself was a painter of such meagre talent that he rarely attempted to depict human beings; he confined himself to stilted pictures of buildings and landscapes. Even to Kujau, a painter of limited ability, their technical poverty made them easy to copy. The other advantage, for a potential forger, was the scale of the Führer’s output. Whatever Hitler lacked in artistic merit he made up for in industry. He is estimated to have produced between 2000 and 3000 drawings, sketches, watercolours and oils.

  Kujau was not far behind, turning out fakes literally by the hundred. He added to their plausibility using his favourite trick of attaching a forged letter or certificate confirming their authenticity. On the back of a large painting of German infantrymen in Flanders in 1918 Kujau wrote, in Hitler’s handwriting: ‘I painted this picture in memory of the comrades who fell in the field.’ Next to this he pasted a note supposedly signed by a Nazi official: ‘This work was created by the Führer and Reichschancellor Adolf Hitler in the year 1934.’ Close inspection of the painting reveals Lance-Corporal Adolf Hitler standing in the midst of the battle clutching a hand grenade. Another of Kujau’s efforts, Nude on Green Background, was passed off as a painting by Hitler of his niece, Geli Raubel. ‘Picture remains in flat. Adolf Hitler,’ reads a scrawled note. ‘Geli sat as a model for this for over twenty days.’ Kujau earned tens of thousands of marks for such forgeries. He did not even have to go looking for customers: furtive, wealthy, and eager to believe, they came looking for him.

  TEN

  FRITZ STIEFEL, FORTY-SEVEN years old, owner of a flourishing engineering works, first noticed Kujau’s shop in Aspergstrasse in 1975 as he was driving past it. The windows were full of military memorabilia. Stiefel was a collector himself. He pulled up outside and rang the bell. The shop was deserted. He came twice more but on each occasion there was nobody there. Then one day he happened to be passing when a small, fat man appeared outside cleaning the windows. ‘I spoke to him,’ recalled Stiefel. ‘He introduced himself to me as Fischer.’ He was taken inside and shown around the Aspergstrasse collection. He bought a Nazi decoration for 650 marks. Before long, seduced by Kujau’s patter, he had become the shop’s best customer.

  Stiefel collected militaria of all types, but his specialist interest was in documents and autographed photographs. He was amazed by Herr Fischer’s ability to produce these. ‘I assumed that he must have really good connections. He certainly gave me that impression. He told me often of his journeys to East Germany. He said he had relatives there.’ Stiefel’s gullibility was matched only by his willingness to spend money. Kujau could scarcely believe his luck. ‘He always got excited when he saw something new,’ he said later. ‘If I’d told him I’d got Hitler’s underpants he’d have got equally worked up.’ In six years, according to the Hamburg state prosecutor, Stiefel spent approximately 250,000 marks in Kujau’s shop. He bought 160 drawings, oil paintings and watercolours supposedly by Hitler, along with eighty handwritten poems, speech notes, letters and manuscripts. Stiefel’s obsession led him into fraud. He transferred 180,000 marks from his company’s accounts to the Lieblang Cleaning Company, allegedly to meet ‘cleaning costs’ but actually to pay for Hitler memorabilia. As a result, he was eventually forced to repay over 120,000 marks to the German tax authorities.

  In return for this outlay, Stiefel acquired one of the largest collections of fakes in West Germany. His ‘Hitler’ pictures ranged from a design for Hitler’s parents’ tomb, dated 1907, to a portrait of Eva Braun at the age of twenty-four. Some of the paintings were drawn from Kujau’s fervid imagination (for example, a series of cartoons purportedly drawn by Hitler for his regimental newspaper in 1916); others were copies of existing works. One female nude executed in chalk signed ‘Adolf Hitler’ and dated 1933 was a copy of a drawing by Erhard Amadeus Dier. Another, entitled Female Nude, Chubby, Fraulein E. Braun was a poor imitation of Julius Engelhard’s Bathing in the Bergsee: when Kujau persuaded Stiefel to buy it, he actually showed him a copy of the Engelhard painting and, with characteristic cheek, accused Hitler of plagiarism. Kujau also sold Stiefel a leather box, lined with silk, which he had bought at Stuttgart railway station, containing 233 handwritten pages of the ‘original manuscript’ of Mein Kampf. Kujau had simply copied it, verbatim, from the published book. On the title page he wrote, also in Hitler’s hand: ‘The Struggle of the Times, or The Struggle or My Struggle. Which title impresses more? Adolf Hitler.’

  Kujau subsequently claimed that he copied out the Mein Kampf manuscr
ipt as a means of practising Hitler’s handwriting and there can be no question but that he became extraordinarily proficient at it. He slipped in and out of other people’s handwriting as he did his various pseudonyms and biographies, with complete ease. It is difficult to say with precision when he first hit on the idea of writing a Hitler diary. Kujau’s American agent, Wolfgang Schulze, told Gitta Sereny of the Sunday Times that he handled ‘unbound’ sheets of Hitler writing supplied by his client as early as 1976. According to Kujau it was in 1978 that he sat down and began typing out a chronology of Hitler’s daily life, using an official Nazi Party yearbook for 1935. Having done that he decided to see how it would look in Hitler’s handwriting.

  In the cellar of his and Edith’s new home in Ditzingen were some school notebooks, bought for a few marks in a shop in East Berlin. Kujau had originally intended using them to keep a catalogue of his collection. Now he took one out, dipped his pen in a pot of black ink, and started to write. When the ink ran out, he switched to a pencil. ‘It was easy,’ he said later. As a finishing touch, he stuck some imitation metal initials in gothic script on the cover. The initials were bought by Kujau in a department store, were made of plastic in Hong Kong, and were in fact ‘FH’, not ‘AH’ as Kujau had thought. It was, like all his forgeries, slipshod and homemade. It would not have withstood an hour’s expert examination.