Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  According to Ms Nesbit, at a meeting with Sorge, she undertook to handle ‘the North American serial rights to a document called Plan 3’, based on original, unpublished notes written by Adolf Hitler. She did not bother to check its authenticity herself. Sorge told her that Stern had a series of expert reports which proved that the Hitler material was genuine. The magazine would be willing to show these reports to potential purchasers. ‘The word “diary” was never mentioned to me,’ she recalled. If she had known she was actually representing sixty volumes of Hitler’s diaries, she would have been ‘much more sceptical’:

  It seemed totally plausible that a 4000-word [sic] document could have been hidden all these years. Stern has a reputation for reliability and they were putting their own reputation on the boards with this. If it had been just a person with no journalistic credibility and nothing at stake, I would have been much more suspicious.

  Sorge was insistent that the material should be offered only to ‘reputable’ organizations. Time, Newsweek and the New York Times were the obvious candidates. Ms Nesbit promised to arrange a series of meetings at which Sorge could meet potential clients. Her tentative estimate of the market value of Plan 3 in the United States was $250,000.

  The next week in Hamburg was a busy one for Gerd Heidemann. On Tuesday 18 January he finally signed the revised contract, drafted in October, finalized in December, guaranteeing him 36 per cent of the syndication revenue once the company had cleared its costs. This immediately entitled him to claim 300,000 marks – the balance owing on his ‘compensation’ settlement of 1.5 million. On Wednesday, he withdrew 150,000 marks in cash from the Adolphsplatz bank, telling Sorge he needed it for the next batch of diaries. On Saturday he was in Munich with Gina, at the invitation of August Priesack, for the launching party of Billy F. Price’s book, Adolf Hitler as Painter and Draughtsman.

  For Mr Price, millionaire compressor manufacturer and connoisseur of the Führer’s art, Saturday 22 January was a great day. He had already spent at least $100,000 on producing his book and to celebrate its publication he spared no expense. A room was booked at the Four Seasons, one of the most expensive hotels in Munich. There was plenty of fine wine and food. The guest list read like a Berghof reception.

  There was Frau Henriette Hoffmann von Schirach – daughter of Hitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann and widow of Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth and Gauleiter of Vienna. When she was a young girl, Hitler had taught Henriette to play the piano; when she was a bride, he had been best man at her wedding. She was suing the United States Government for the return of two Hitler paintings, allegedly stolen from her house at the end of the war and now hanging in the National Army museum in Washington. Price was paying her legal fees.

  There was Frau Gerda Christian, most dedicated of Hitler’s secretaries. Next to her was her old colleague, Christa Schroeder, 75 years old and ill with a kidney complaint. She had helped Price with his book and sold him some pictures from her own collection. In return, Price was paying her medical bills.

  There was Frau Schmidt-Ehmen, wife of one of Hitler’s favourite sculptors, and Eva Wagner, descendant of his favourite composer. There was Peter Jahn, the Viennese ‘art expert’, who had worked with Priesack cataloguing Hitler’s paintings in the 1930s and who had helped the Marquess of Bath acquire much of his collection. There was one of Hitler’s doctors. There was Bormann’s adjutant….

  Price moved among them, proud and prosperous, in a dark three-piece suit, signing copies of his book. He realized, he said later, that the only reason most of his guests wanted to know him was that he was rich – ‘but what the hell?’ He felt he was performing a service to history by gathering together Hitler’s art. What he did not know was that of the 725 pictures in his book, at least 170 were the work of Konrad Kujau. At one point, Fritz Stiefel – who had supplied the pictures to Price – approached the Texan and asked him actually to autograph a copy of the book for his ‘good friend Conny Fischer’. But for some reason, Price never signed the book. ‘God’, he declared afterwards, with revivalist fervour, ‘stayed mah hand.’

  For Gerd and Gina Heidemann, the reception was filled with familiar faces and when the time came to leave, a tipsy Frau Heidemann thanked their host for ‘a wonderful party’. Gerd Heidemann invited Price to come to Hamburg to see his own collection of Hitler’s art. He confided to his fellow devotee that he had ‘something big’ himself coming out in a few months’ time. ‘He couldn’t tell me what it was,’ recalled Price, ‘and I didn’t question him too much about it.’

  A few days after the party, Price took up Heidemann’s offer and visited him at his home in the Elbchaussee. The Texan had met plenty of Hitler obsessives, but seldom anyone as far gone as Heidemann: ‘Priesack’s in love with Hitler. But Heidemann’s more in love with Hitler than anyone I’ve ever met in my life.’ He was impressed by much of the reporter’s collection, but even he – who had been taken in by Stiefel’s pictures – found some of it ‘ridiculously fake’. Heidemann showed him one painting (admittedly, one of Kujau’s more exuberant efforts) which almost made him burst out laughing: a portrait, supposedly by Hitler, of King Farouk of Egypt. Price was still shaking his head about the episode a year later. ‘Hell, man. King Farouk. No way would I accept that.’

  Another foreign visitor entertained by Heidemann in the two Elbchaussee apartments at this time was Gitta Sereny of the Sunday Times.

  According to David Irving, he had warned the Sunday Times in a telephone call on 30 December that the material he had seen was ‘dangerously polluted with fakes’. But the newspaper was not inclined to take his word for anything, let alone the authenticity of Adolf Hitler’s diaries. They decided to send a reporter of their own to make contact with Heidemann, and Gitta Sereny was the obvious choice. Brought up in Austria before the war, she was trilingual in English, French and German, and a regular contributor on Nazi subjects. In 1974 she had written Into that Darkness, an examination of Franz Stangl, Commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp. She was also, as it happened, a personal enemy of Irving’s, having published a damning attack on Hitler’s War in the Sunday Times when it first appeared in 1977.

  Over the course of two days, Heidemann and Sereny spoke for about eight hours. He took her on a tour of his archive. She found his collection ‘breathtaking’. Filed away, protected by clear plastic covers, was a series of what appeared to be ‘extraordinary’ documents, including the original of Hitler’s order to liquidate the Soviet commissars. He showed her a letter from Karl Wolff in which the general appointed him his literary heir and executor. He showed her his library of negatives from the Hoffmann photographic archive. The walls of the Heidemanns’ two flats were crammed with Hitler paintings. ‘I was stunned,’ she recalled, ‘absolutely stunned.’

  I had seen examples of Hitler’s painting before at Albert Speer’s. These things looked exactly the same. There were about three dozen hanging round the Heidemanns’ bed. I said: ‘Jesus Christ, doesn’t this stuff give you nightmares?’ Gina said: ‘Oh no, we couldn’t possibly sleep without them.’

  Heidemann told Sereny that he was making regular, clandestine trips to East Germany. He assured her that the Hitler diaries existed. He was not, however, prepared to say whether they were in his possession. Although Heidemann struck her as a man obsessed by the Nazis, characterized by ‘an extraordinary political and intellectual naïvety’, she believed he was telling the truth. If anyone could obtain the diaries, he could.

  Inadvertently, despite his concern not to give anything away, Heidemann also provided her with a clue to the origin of the diaries’ trail. He mentioned Professor Eberhard Jaeckel as an historian who knew something about the East German material. From her hotel in Hamburg, Sereny telephoned Jaeckel who confirmed that some years previously he had seen something: not a diary exactly, but a ‘yearbook’. Sereny asked him if he thought it was authentic. He said it was ‘interesting’. He would not go any further on the telephone. ‘Come down to Stu
ttgart,’ he said. Sereny asked if he could introduce her to the person who obtained the diary. Jaeckel replied that if she came down, it might be possible for them to go and see some people. Sereny telephoned Magnus Linklater in the Sunday Times office with this exciting news. But to her amazement, he refused to authorize a trip to south Germany. The paper’s new owner, Rupert Murdoch, had demanded that the editorial department reduce its costs: the Sunday Times was gripped by what Sereny later called ‘a rabid economy drive’. Even in sending her to Hamburg for two nights, Linklater had risked incurring the wrath of the editor, Frank Giles. She had to return to London at once.

  If the Sunday Times had not decided on this false economy, the events of the next three months would probably have developed very differently. Sereny would have met Jaeckel and learned of the forgeries printed in his book of Hitler’s writings. She would probably have met Stiefel. She might even have met ‘Herr Fischer’. ‘I could have stopped the whole goddam thing right there,’ she complained later. As it was, the Sunday Times passed up one of the few remaining chances of uncovering the hoax. The impending fiasco, swollen by the profligacy of West Germany’s journalism, was abetted by the parsimony of Great Britain’s.

  TWENTY-ONE

  ON WEDNESDAY 16 FEBRUARY, Wilfried Sorge arrived in the international departure lounge of Hamburg airport to catch a flight to Denmark. It was almost two and a half years since that stroll in the Black Forest when Walde had first told him of the hunt for Hitler’s diaries. Now, with a copy of Plan 3 in his luggage, he was about to depart on the first stage of a three-week odyssey to sell the story to the world. In terms of his career, Sorge – like Walde and Heidemann – had a great deal staked on the Hitler diaries. To have been entrusted with such an important mission, six weeks short of his fortieth birthday, was a clear sign of the young executive’s growing stature within the company. Gruner and Jahr were counting upon him. Schulte-Hillen personally was watching the way he handled things.

  Sorge was well equipped for his mission. Immaculately tailored, endlessly charming, permanently tanned, he was the epitome of expense-account smoothness. The strategy which he was about to put into action had been agreed in Hamburg after consultations with Bertelsmann and ICM. A list of foreign companies had been compiled to whom the Hess story would be offered. In some countries – the United States and Spain for example – several news organizations would be approached at the same time, in order to encourage competition and push up the price. In others, such as France and Italy, Sorge would deal with one company exclusively.

  Sorge flew first to Copenhagen for discussions with Bertelsmann’s agent in Scandinavia. From there he caught a transatlantic flight to New York. Lynn Nesbit had arranged three interviews for him. At the offices of Newsweek he met the magazine’s editor-in-chief, William Broyles, and its managing editor, Maynard Parker. Peter Koch had mentioned the project to Parker during a visit to America shortly before Christmas. At the time he had been rebuked for his indiscretion, but Sorge found that the notion of publishing original Hitler material had taken hold at Newsweek. Broyles and Parker told him they were very interested and would probably be submitting an offer. At Time, the response of William Mador, former Bonn correspondent, also sounded promising. The only person who did not seem enthusiastic was the woman who represented the New York Times. After a few days in the United States, Sorge flew back to Europe – to Amsterdam, where he discussed the prospects for Holland and Belgium with the Bertelsmann people. Then it was on to France, to make a sales pitch to Paris Match. From there, Sorge flew south to Madrid to see representatives from the magazine Cambio 16 and the newspaper El Pais. Leaving Spain, he headed east: first to Milan for a meeting with the publishing group Mondadori, then on again for the longest leg of the journey so far – to Tokyo, and the ancient mysteries of the Far Eastern market….

  It was during one lunchtime the following week, while Sorge was midway through his sales trip, that Heidemann met Henri Nannen and Peter Koch in the street near the Stern building. They passed on some devastating news. It had been decided to abandon the current publishing plan in favour of launching the scoop with the story of the diaries’ discovery. Heidemann hurried back to the special office to tell Leo Pesch and Thomas Walde. In the afternoon, Heidemann and Walde went over to see Koch to find out what was going on.

  Neither Koch nor Schmidt had ever been happy with the idea of starting with the serialization of the Hess scoop. It might make sense commercially, but from a journalistic point of view it was ridiculous. The sensation was in the fact of the diaries’ existence, not in the single revelation of Hitler’s knowledge of Hess’s flight, buried in the biographical detail of Plan 3. Alone, Koch and Schmidt had been unable to convince Schulte-Hillen and the Stern management. But now they had a powerful ally. Henri Nannen had taken the manuscript of Plan 3 home to read over Christmas. ‘I was amazed to find that it was simply the Hess story with Hitler quotations in it,’ he recalled. He gave the book to a girlfriend for her opinion. She was forty-two. What did she think her generation would make of it? ‘She found the story interesting, but she didn’t appreciate its historical importance, and she didn’t grasp at all that she was looking at part of a sensational find of Hitler’s diaries.’ When Nannen returned from his holiday in January he told Schulte-Hillen that he was in danger of squandering his investment by being overcautious: ‘If one had Hitler diaries, one should start the story with this announcement, and with the story of the find.’ Henri Nannen was one of the most successful journalists in West Germany. Schulte-Hillen listened to him with respect. He endorsed Nannen’s decision.

  The meeting in Koch’s office that afternoon was noisy. Heidemann was horrified by the new idea. He returned to his old argument that premature publication would endanger lives and jeopardize the supply of the remaining diaries. Koch was sarcastic: the reporter had already spent more than two years bringing in the books; how many more were there? Schmidt and Gillhausen also arrived to add their support to Koch. Schmidt was worried that if they delayed much longer, David Irving or some rival organization would obtain photocopies of the diaries. Gillhausen – the most junior of the editors, but nevertheless respected as a man with a ‘nose’ for a good story – added his opinion. ‘His feeling’, recalled Walde, ‘was that the newsworthy part came in three little paragraphs before the end. The whole story should be published the other way round, starting with the story of the find.’

  Walde shared Heidemann’s fears. He also had two additional concerns: he did not want to see his book swamped by the controversy which would be aroused by the announcement of the diaries’ discovery; and secondly, he wanted to write the story of the find himself – something which would be impossible if he had to prepare extracts from the diaries as well. Suddenly, he saw his dreams of becoming an authority on Hitler disappearing into the maw of Stern’s accelerating timetable. But Koch had been pushed around by his own staff for long enough. According to Walde he ‘threatened’ him. He said that ‘he would take the work on the diaries out of my hands if I persisted in obstructing publication by my “inflexible” behaviour’.

  ‘Despite my huge reservations about whether publication was possible in the time allowed,’ said Walde, ‘I gave in. That was my big mistake.’

  Walde had one particularly good reason for being alarmed by the decision to speed up publication. Although the company had obtained three reports authenticating the handwriting of its Hitler archive, no part of it had yet been subjected to forensic tests. If he had contacted a freelance chemical analyst, these could have been performed in a matter of days. Walde’s mistake had been to rely upon the West German Federal Police, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA). On 5 July 1982, under the auspices of the Bundesarchiv, the BKA had been sent the originals of the material studied by the handwriting experts – the Hess statement and the Horthy telegram – with a request that they conduct tests to determine the age of the paper. Later, they had also been sent the various signed Hitler photographs and the Kleist document. N
othing happened. Despite occasional reminders from Walde, the BKA forensic experts continued to concentrate on their official police work. In December, Stern had asked for their request to be given ‘the highest priority’. Still nothing had been done. Now the unpleasant meeting with Koch galvanized the history department into making a new approach, this time enlisting the help of the Bundesarchiv. On Tuesday 1 March, Leo Pesch telexed Dr Oldenhage, pleading with him to contact Stern as quickly as possible: ‘We have some urgent deadline problems regarding the expert reports.’

  On Friday 4 March, Wilfried Sorge, jet-lagged in his bedroom in a hotel in Tokyo, was telephoned by Peter Hess, Gruner and Jahr’s publishing director, and summoned back to Hamburg. ‘What’s happened?’ he asked. ‘The whole publishing concept has been changed,’ he was told: he must return immediately ‘in order to pitch the sales strategy in line with the new plan’. Sorge was bitter at this news. In the space of a single telephone call, thousands of miles of air travel and days of meetings and planning had been ruined. He had no choice but to book himself on the first available flight back to Germany.

  In New York, Lynn Nesbit’s contract to sell Plan 3 was terminated. She received a fee of $10,000 for her efforts. Newsweek, which had already submitted a tentative offer of $150,000 for the serial rights to the Hess book, was told that Stern had changed its mind. From Hamburg, telexes were dispatched to all Sorge’s potential customers informing them that they ‘could no longer be offered the material’.