Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  Making an excuse that he had to go out for a while, Irving left Priesack’s apartment and found a neighbouring telephone office. ‘I checked all the phone books and found that the area code was for Waiblingen, and the number was for one Fritz Stiefel, whose address I thus obtained.’

  The search took Irving several hours. By the time he returned at 5.30 p.m., Priesack had already finished entertaining another visitor. Wolf Rudiger Hess, son of Rudolf Hess, had called to inspect the letter supposedly sent by his father to Hitler in May 1941. ‘He had roundly denounced the handwriting as a forgery,’ noted Irving. ‘If that is faked, what else might not be too?’

  Promising to try to arrange a publisher for him, Irving managed to persuade Priesack to part with his precious folders.

  Next morning, Irving left Munich for Stuttgart. He caught a train to Waiblingen and marched, unannounced, up to Fritz Stiefel’s front door. ‘Reluctantly, he appeared,’ recalled Irving, ‘and reluctantly invited me in.’ The historian explained that he had not telephoned because ‘one never knew who was listening in’. Stiefel said that if he had phoned him, he would have told him there was no point in coming. ‘He approved my method of gaining entry this way and congratulated me.’ To thaw the atmosphere further, Irving produced from his inside pocket one of his most valuable possessions: one of Adolf Hitler’s monogrammed teaspoons from the Berghof. Whenever Irving was researching in Germany, he carried it with him, a talisman to charm reluctant old Nazis into helping him. ‘That spoon’, says Irving, ‘has opened a lot of doors.’ Stiefel examined it and then went and fetched one of his own to show Irving.

  Having compared cutlery the two men settled to business. Irving asked about the Hitler diaries and Stiefel – as Heidemann had predicted – proceeded to lie. A local dealer, he said, had been to see him a few years earlier and shown him a diary. He had kept it for one or two weeks and then given it back. Irving asked if there was any way of finding out where the other volumes were. Stiefel ‘answered that he’d heard they’d all been sold to an American’. The industrialist would not reveal the American’s name, nor would he identify the diaries’ supplier.

  All Irving’s hard work and cunning appeared to have been in vain. His only consolation was that he had managed to get hold of Priesack’s photocopies.

  On Tuesday 21 December he flew back to London. He rang Alan Samson, his publisher at Macmillan, and told him about the diaries. Samson was interested and they arranged an appointment for the following day.

  Irving did not begin a detailed examination of the Priesack material until 8.30 the next morning. He sat in his first-floor study, pulled out his own folder of authenticated Hitler writing and then began indexing Priesack’s papers ‘to try to get an impression of their value’.

  Whatever allegations may be levelled at Irving as an historian – and there have been many – there is no doubting his ability to sniff out original documents. Over the past twenty years he had become only too familiar with the scale of the trade in forgeries. He had himself almost been fooled by a faked ‘diary’ of the German intelligence chief, Wilhelm Canaris. He therefore approached Priesack’s papers critically – and almost at once he began finding discrepancies. The writing of words like ‘Deutsch’, ‘Nation’ and ‘NSDAP’ which recurred regularly varied in style from document to document. The most damning piece of evidence as far as he was concerned was a letter purporting to have been written by Goering in 1944. The word ‘Reichsmarschall’ in the printed letter-heading was misspelt ‘Reichsmarsall’. ‘By lunchtime,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘I was unfortunately satisfied that the Priesack collection is stuffed with fake documents.’ He cancelled his appointment with Macmillan and rang Priesack. ‘There are such huge variances,’ he told him, ‘that the documents cannot be genuine.’ Priesack, according to Irving, ‘gasped’. If Stiefel’s documents were fakes, how reliable was the rest of the businessman’s memorabilia? At that moment, one of the largest printing companies in Italy was busy producing several thousand copies of Billy Price’s book, Adolf Hitler as Painter and Draughtsman, which was full of pictures from Stiefel’s collection.

  ‘Does this mean’, asked Priesack, ‘that the watercolours are also forged? They come from the same source.’

  Irving replied that he was no art expert. He could not answer that question. He did however say that in his opinion ‘the entire story about East German involvement’ was ‘part of an elaborate Schwindel to prevent the purchasers from showing their acquisitions around…. I urged him to advise Fritz Stiefel to buy nothing more from this source.’

  According to Irving’s diary, Priesack was fawning in his gratitude. There were those, he said, who believed that Irving should be given the title ‘doctor’. He disagreed: in Germany, the name ‘David Irving’ was honour enough. To which Irving, angry at having wasted his time, and weary of this tiresome old man, added in his diary the single word: schmarm.

  But if Irving’s visit to Germany had done little to restore his own fortunes, it did at least bring profit to August Priesack.

  So far, using Kujau to pressure Fritz Stiefel into keeping quiet, Heidemann had been able to contain the damage done by Priesack’s disclosure. Now, the reporter acted to seal the leak altogether. Hard on the heels of David Irving, Heidemann travelled down to Munich to see Priesack. He offered him 30,000 marks in cash for his archive – a sum which Priesack, scraping a living on a school teacher’s pension, was happy to accept. ‘This is worth a lot to me,’ Heidemann told him. ‘Now I will own everything Stiefel has.’ He did not mention Stern’s diaries: Priesack assumed that he and Stiefel were simply rival collectors. Anyway, the reason for the offer was of less interest to him at that moment than the 500- and 1000-mark notes his visitor now pulled out of his briefcase. If Heidemann wanted to throw his money about buying up photocopies, who was he to complain?

  TWENTY

  NINETEEN EIGHTY-THREE WAS going to be a big year for Gerd Heidemann and he and Gina were determined to greet it in style. At a cost of more than 5000 marks, the couple flew to New York to attend the annual New Year’s Eve Ball at the Waldorf Astoria.

  As 1982 came to an end, Gerd Heidemann’s behaviour was – if anything – even odder than usual. Two-and-a-half years after his honeymoon visit to South America, he was once more obsessed by Martin Bormann, gripped as if by a bout of some recurrent tropical fever. He was utterly convinced by Medard Klapper’s stories that Bormann was still alive, presiding over a circle of old Nazis, shuttling between various countries in Europe and the Middle East. Klapper gave Heidemann Bormann’s telephone number in Spain and Bormann’s Spanish cover name, ‘Martin di Calde Villa’. He showed him a house in Zurich where the ‘Bormann Group’ had its headquarters and allowed Heidemann to photograph the building. He was always on the point of taking the reporter to meet Bormann – only to have to tell him, regretfully, a few days later, that ‘Martin’ couldn’t make the appointment. Heidemann commissioned one of his oldest colleagues, a photographer named Helmut Jabusch to fly to Zurich to take pictures of ‘one of the most prominent Nazis’: he even booked airline tickets, but once again, the assignment fell through.

  In November 1982, Klapper gave Heidemann six Polaroid photographs of an old man whom he claimed was Bormann. The reporter paid him 25,000 marks for the pictures which he then began showing to colleagues. He pointed out to Felix Schmidt that the man in the photograph – who wore, as Schmidt recalled, ‘a Basque cap’ – had a birth mark on the left side of his forehead, exactly as Bormann had. According to Schmidt: ‘Heidemann explained that it was possible to make contact with Bormann. Everything had to go through a middleman but he was sure he would meet Bormann shortly, either in Zurich or in Cairo. The Nazis who surrounded Bormann were going to allow him to meet him. Heidemann always spoke of Bormann as “Martin”.’ Schmidt was incredulous: not least, because it was Stern that had actually proved that Bormann was dead. He began to have doubts about Heidemann’s mental health and confided his worries to Peter Koch. Koch shook h
is head. ‘With Heidemann,’ he said, ‘anything’s possible.’ Heidemann sent one of the photographs to Max Frei-Sulzer, who was commissioned to investigate it for fingerprints. The versatile Frei-Sulzer reported back on 21 November that he could not reach a positive conclusion: ‘Unfortunately, at the critical place there are several prints on top of one another which cannot be separated. The others are so fragmented, there is no question of being able to evaluate them.’ There was only one clear print, said Frei-Sulzer: its owner was unknown.

  His colleagues at Stern treated Heidemann’s behaviour at this time as if it were no more than a minor eccentricity. It does not seem to have occurred to any of them that a man capable of such obvious self-delusion over Martin Bormnn might be equally unreliable on other matters. Leo Pesch recalled that Heidemann now seldom came into the office. When he did so, it was to show them the photograph and to ‘talk very intently about Bormann’. Pesch and Walde regarded it as a ‘half-crazy story’ and used to have ‘teasing conversations’ with him about it. It was another example of Heidemann showing off, trying to convince people of his importance. ‘My impression was that Heidemann had lost more and more contact with reality through his success,’ Pesch said afterwards. ‘In my view, Heidemann had a great deal of vanity. Again and again, quite unprompted, he would tell colleagues stories about the diaries and about Martin Bormann.’ The general view was that funny old Heidemann was up to his usual tricks; as long as it didn’t interfere with his real work, the best thing was to humour him. ‘Our main concern’, admitted Walde, ‘was that Heidemann might be diverted by this myth about Bormann from the task of obtaining the diaries.’

  Was there a connection between the two stories? Heidemann certainly acted as though there were. Whenever he came across a flattering reference to Bormann in the diaries, he photocopied it and gave it to Klapper to pass on to Bormann. Klapper reported back that ‘Martin’ was so pleased, he had hung an enlargement of one extract on his study wall in Madrid. Heidemann also talked about Bormann to Kujau. During one of these conversations, the forger told Heidemann that his East German brother could obtain Hitler’s gold party insignia, allegedly given to Bormann at the end of the war. Heidemann reported this to Klapper who subsequently passed on ‘Martin’s’ confirmation that the story was indeed correct. Heidemann told Kujau and shortly afterwards, a reference to the decoration appeared in the final volume of the diaries.

  Further evidence of possible collusion between Kujau and Klapper surfaced at the beginning of December 1982. Every reference in the Hess special volume was being checked methodically against published sources to make certain it contained no errors. The name of one SS captain, supposedly appointed by Hitler to watch over Hess, proved to be almost indecipherable. Even Wilfried Sorge was called in to give an opinion. Lautman? Lausserman? Eventually, the consensus was that the name was Laackman. Because Walde and Pesch could find no mention of the name in any of their reference books, they asked Josef Henke of the Bundesarchiv to undertake a search on their behalf in the closed records of the Berlin Document Centre. Three weeks later, Henke sent them thirty photocopied pages of SS Captain Anton Laackman’s military record. Heidemann also asked Klapper to check with Bormann. In January, Klapper returned with three original pages from Laackman’s personnel file which he told Heidemann he had removed from Bormann’s office in Spain. There was no question but that the documents were authentic. Once again, the Bormann story and the Hitler diaries appeared to be substantiating one another.

  Naturally, the Laackman papers did not come from Bormann. They were stolen, at Klapper’s request, along with other Nazi documents, by a corrupt employee of the West German state archives named Rainer Hess. But Heidemann was not aware of that. For him, the production of the papers was the clinching proof that Bormann was still alive.

  Months later, after the diaries were exposed as forgeries, the Sunday Times used this episode as the basis for its assertion that ‘Klapper played a pivotal role – perhaps the central role – in the diary fraud.’

  The kindest thing that can be said about the Sunday Times investigation is that it overstated its case. If Laackman’s name had not appeared in any book, and Kujau could have forged the diary entry only on the basis of documents supplied by Klapper, the evidence that the two men were working together to trick Heidemann would be conclusive. But Laackman’s name does appear in a book. It occurs – as the Sunday Times was forced to admit – on page 221 of the Nazi Party’s Yearbook for 1941: police discovered it, carefully marked by Kujau, when they raided his home in 1983. Moreover, the Hess volume was forged by Kujau in 1981. If the planting of Laackman’s name was part of a carefully laid plot, it is hard to see how he could have known fourteen months in advance that Stern would fail to spot the reference in the 1941 Yearbook and ask Klapper to obtain the documents.

  It is possible there was a link between Kujau and Klapper. The fact that both men, proven liars, deny knowing one another, is no proof to the contrary. But if they were working together, they have covered their tracks with great care. The only place in which the Bormann story, the hunt for secret Nazi treasure and the discovery of Hitler’s diaries all came together with any certainty was in the overwrought imagination of Gerd Heidemann.

  Now that the Plan 3 had been completed, sale of the syndication rights could begin in earnest. On Wednesday 5 January, Manfred Fischer turned over control of the safe-deposit box in Zurich to Dr Jan Hensmann, deputy managing director of Gruner and Jahr. The following day, Hensmann, Wilfried Sorge and Gerd Schulte-Hillen, accompanied by Olaf Paeschke representing Bertelsmann, flew back to New York for a second round of negotiations with Bantam Books.

  Knowing the extent of the market for books on the Second World War, Bantam was enthusiastic about the project. Plan 3, based on new writings by Hitler, with its revelation that the Führer authorized Hess’s peace mission, would make headlines all over the world. If the hardback edition appeared that autumn, the paperback could tie in with Hess’s ninetieth birthday in April 1984. But once again, the discussions foundered. Bantam’s President, Louis Wolfe, wanted to involve expert historians in the project. He also demanded extensive guarantees of compensation should the book’s authenticity be called into question – an open-ended commitment which the Germans were reluctant to make. A more serious problem concerned newspaper rights. Bantam was prepared to offer $50,000, but their visitors were insistent on retaining syndication rights for themselves. Wolfe ‘found it difficult to grasp what Schulte-Hillen and Hensmann actually wanted’. He was not aware that Plan 3 was regarded in Hamburg merely as a trial balloon for a much bigger scoop. Wolfe could not understand it. He thought that ‘the whole thing was being handled in an amateurish way’.

  While the businessmen were arguing in the United States, David Irving was preparing to speak to a packed meeting in West Germany. At noon on 9 January, 2000 supporters of the DVU jammed into one of Munich’s enormous beer cellars to listen to Irving speak at a memorial meeting for Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the highly decorated fighter pilot who had lived in exile in Brazil and Paraguay, an unrepentant admirer of Adolf Hitler until the end of his life. ‘I spoke first,’ noted Irving, ‘and was interrupted by a huge roar of applause as I called the Bonn politicians Charakterschweine for not allowing military representation at the Rudel funeral.’

  At the end of the meeting, Irving drove across town to see August Priesack to return his Hitler documents. The material was so riddled with fakes, he told him, he was not going to waste any more time trying to sort it out. He showed Priesack the misspelt Goering notepaper. ‘He indicated by his manner that he had already noticed that, but did not consider it important. At this I mildly exploded: “If even the printed letter head of the second most important man in Germany contains a printing error, how can the document be anything other than a fake?” He implied that in 1944 even Goering would be happy to have headed notepaper, printing error or not. I did not even bother to discuss that remark.’ Priesack said that he thought he should contact Gerd
Heidemann. ‘Why contact him?’ asked Irving. ‘It is quite obvious from these documents that they are fakes.’ He told Priesack that he suspected Fritz Stiefel had a hand in the forgeries. Priesack flushed and insisted that was not the case. ‘Throughout the half hour conversation he kept putting his hand on my shoulder,’ noted Irving, who was as fastidious as the Führer about physical contact. ‘At one stage he even held my hand, which was not pleasant.’

  Priesack accompanied Irving out to his car. ‘I don’t suppose I shall be seeing you again?’ he said. ‘He seemed sad about that,’ recalled Irving in his diary, ‘though not at all about the prospect of the money he had lost.’ (Irving did not know that Priesack’s apparent stoicism was that of a man who had sold his collection – fakes and all – to Heidemann for 30,000 marks.) The historian drove off in a bad mood. He, at any rate, had lost money. Even allowing for the expenses paid to him by Langen Mueller he reckoned he had spent 2000 marks he could ill afford. ‘But’, he wrote that evening, ‘I do not regret that as it would have been much worse if I had proceeded any further before realizing that his files of documents were largely forgeries.’

  ‘I suspect’, he added, ‘that Heidemann has also been tricked.’

  The following day in New York the negotiations between Gruner and Jahr and Bantam Books finally broke down. In their hotel suite that evening, the Germans discussed what they should do next. The English language market was largely a mystery to them. Clearly, if they were to exploit their property to the full, they would need some professional advice. Sticking to their original model of the Kissinger memoirs, they decided to enlist the help of Kissinger’s agent, Marvin Josephson. Josephson was the head of International Creative Management (ICM), the largest artistic agency in the world. Josephson did not handle their business personally. Instead, the Stern men were referred to Lynn Nesbit, Senior Vice President of ICM, whom they were told was the company’s expert on magazine rights.