Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  He almost outwitted me. This smoothie Englishman…. I would have imposed quite different conditions on Mussolini and Daladier [the French prime minister], but I couldn’t do so with this cunning fox, Chamberlain.

  The entry impressed Weinberg, who nodded sagely as he read it. ‘This accords with my own theories,’ he announced.

  Half-way through the examination, a third Newsweek journalist arrived. He was Milan Kubik, the magazine’s bureau chief in Jerusalem, flown in by the Americans to inspect the Jewish angle. Broyles and Parker introduced him and explained his presence on the grounds that the magazine expected there to be ‘enormous interest’ in the Hitler diaries in Israel. Throughout the meeting, the Newsweek editors kept probing the material for information which would appeal to their American readership. At one stage, Parker asked to see the volume covering the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944, but Heidemann told him it was one of the four books which had yet to be delivered from East Germany.

  Two things, meanwhile, had struck Weinberg, who was carefully reading through the diaries. One was the fact that almost every page carried Hitler’s signature. No one in his right mind, he thought, would have risked forging hundreds of signatures; it seemed a strong argument in favour of authenticity.

  He also pointed out to Broyles and Parker that most of the diaries began with a handwritten note stating that if anything happened to him, Hitler wanted the books to be given to his sister Paula. This could pose further copyright problems, said Weinberg, strengthening the case of any heirs of Hitler who cared to argue that the diaries were actually their property. Sorge and Heidemann, already aware of the problems over copyright, looked at one another in embarrassment: that had not occurred to them, they said.

  Weinberg also wanted to know why no German scholar had been shown any of this material. Sorge replied that they were worried about leaks. He asked who Weinberg would recommend. Weinberg said he was thinking of a very reliable historian – Eberhard Jaeckel of Stuttgart. Had they heard of him? The Stern men replied that they had. ‘It was clear to me’, recalled Weinberg, ‘that they didn’t want to involve Jaeckel.’

  At 2 p.m., Weinberg’s self-imposed deadline expired and the Newsweek party had to leave. In order to obtain Weinberg’s assessment, Broyles, Parker and Kubik had to fly with him to Amsterdam. The historian admitted he was ‘astonished’ by what he had seen. He had not been able to find fault with the diaries. On balance, he inclined to the view that they were authentic.

  This was what Newsweek wanted to hear. At Amsterdam airport, Weinberg caught his flight to New York. The three Newsweek journalists boarded a flight to Hamburg to clinch the deal.

  Stern’s London office was based in Peter Wickman’s house in Barnet, miles out of town in the northernmost fringe of the capital. On Tuesday morning, as the Newsweek contingent sifted through the diaries in Zurich, Wickman’s telex machine suddenly clattered into life with an urgent message from the Gruner and Jahr headquarters. It was a contract requiring Rupert Murdoch’s agreement, offering him the British and Commonwealth rights in the Hitler diaries for $750,000. It included a 25 per cent penalty clause should News International default on the deal.

  Following Hensmann’s instructions, Wickman delivered the contract to Murdoch personally in his office in The Times building in Gray’s Inn Road. Murdoch scarcely glanced at it before handing Wickman his own version – roughly twenty pages long, drawn up by his lawyers, reiterating the terms he understood had been agreed in Switzerland on Saturday.

  Wickman made his way back up to High Barnet and began feeding the pages into a telecopier, transmitting Murdoch’s counter offer back to Hamburg.

  The next day, Wednesday 13 April, Heidemann and Barbara Dickmann continued their work on the Stern television film, driving to Herrsching, near Munich, to interview Hans Baur.

  The Baur family detested the media, even when it came in the friendly and uncritical form of Gerd Heidemann. The eighty-five-year-old ex-Nazi hobbled over to them on his wooden leg and stared at the camera with undisguised hostility. Then a former Munich policeman arrived, ‘in a state of extreme agitation’, according to Dickmann, claiming he had been summoned by Baur to protect the family. On his advice, Frau Baur went round the house taking down photographs of her husband with Hitler and packing away various Nazi mementoes. Heidemann, the Baurs and the ex-policeman then disappeared into another room while Dickmann and the crew waited to hear whether they would be allowed to film.

  After twenty minutes, the group reappeared. According to Baur, Heidemann had shown him one of the diaries: ‘a black book with a red cord and a red seal… I was of the opinion that it was Hitler’s writing.’ The camera was set up and Baur described the plane crash and Hitler’s distress.

  When the interview was over, the atmosphere relaxed. The retired policeman, who came from Luxembourg, turned out to be a collector of Nazi relics. He told Heidemann, in Dickmann’s presence, that ‘his circle of friends was almost exclusively composed of prominent ex-Nazis’. He suggested that they should ‘set up an agency for Hitler relics in Munich’. Heidemann told him about the Blood Flag and offered to sell it to him. When the time came to leave, the two men made an appointment to have dinner together.

  Listening to this coversation merely served to confirm Barbara Dickmann’s feelings about Heidemann. The man was ‘unable to distance himself professionally from the events of the Nazi era’. Although she had known him for little more than a week, she had already spent many hours with him, driving between locations. Being trapped in a car with Heidemann had not proved a pleasant experience. ‘I couldn’t avoid having to listen to his stories,’ she recalled.

  He talked to me constantly about his friend ‘Martin’. He told me incredible stories about ‘Martin’s’ life after the collapse of the Third Reich. He said that ‘Martin’ was in Switzerland, that he was being watched over by the Israeli secret service.

  Heidemann also indicated that he had original material belonging to Hitler supposedly containing the ‘ten theses’ of Hitler’s Final Solution.

  He had told her during filming in Zurich on Monday that he was trying to arrange a meeting with Bormann. Later, he showed her his set of Polaroid pictures and confided to her that he was going to meet him on 20 April, Hitler’s birthday, when he would be given important documents. (Martin subsequently cancelled the meeting.) He showed her his collection of relics: ‘several glass cases in which he had helmets, uniforms, a brown shirt, a pair of trousers, a damaged watch, weapons, drawings allegedly by Hitler, a swastika flag, a Party book of Hitler’s, his passport and all sorts of other things’.

  Dickmann was shocked by Heidemann’s behaviour. He seemed ‘euphoric’ about his access to senior Nazis, gripped by ‘sick fantasies’. Their relationship became ‘increasingly cool’. When the television team returned to Hamburg, she was worried enough to seek out Peter Koch and tell him what his reporter was up to. Koch reassured her: Heidemann always immersed himself in whatever he was researching – it was part of his technique for gaining access to circles which were normally impossible to penetrate. She could rely, said Koch, on the fact that Heidemann ‘was not a Nazi and that once he’d finished his researches he’d be normal again’.

  Meanwhile, as Heidemann and Dickmann were leaving Hans Baur in Herrsching, Rupert Murdoch’s draft contract was arriving on Jan Hensmann’s desk in Hamburg. Stern’s chief negotiator regarded it as ‘completely unacceptable’. News International had refused to improve its offer in the face of Newsweek’s bid. Hensmann decided to sign a deal with the Americans.

  Broyles, Parker and Kubik, who had arrived in Hamburg the previous night, were informed that their offer of $3 million for the American serial rights had been accepted. The Newsweek representatives were taken to the special suite of offices occupied by the diaries team. As a gesture of good faith, Peter Koch was authorized to give them the story of the find as it had been written by Wolf Thieme, together with the rough text for the first four instalments of the Stern
serialization.

  It was at this point that word came from the nearby Four Seasons Hotel that two emissaries from Rupert Murdoch – Richard Searby and Gerald Long – had arrived to discuss the News International offer. They wanted to come over to the Stern building straight away.

  Confronted by this embarrassing situation, Hensmann dispatched Wilfried Sorge to the Four Seasons. He was to tell them to go home – the deal with Murdoch was off.

  Sorge relayed the message.

  He had often seen negotiators lose their tempers, but he had never before witnessed anything to compare with the reaction of the two Murdoch men. Searby was normally smooth and urbane; Long, beetle-browed and pugnacious, looked, even in his lighter moments, as if he would enjoy nothing more than a good Victorian eviction, preferably involving widows, orphans and a tied cottage. When Sorge told them that the diaries had been sold to Newsweek, both men blew up in anger. ‘They were beside themselves with rage,’ he recalled: as close as men could come to physical violence without actually resorting to it. But despite the threats and accusations of bad faith, Sorge refused to yield.

  Later that night, after he had calmed down, Searby rang Sorge at home to ask him what the hell was going on. Privately, Sorge was beginning to have doubts himself about the way Hensmann was handling the negotiations, but in his conversation with Searby he remained loyal to his superior.

  ‘Murdoch’s people’, he recalled, ‘went away with nothing.’

  In London, Peter Wickman received another urgent communication from Hamburg. Stern wanted to use three quotations from Trevor-Roper to launch the diaries. The quotes they had in mind were, first, that the discovery of the diaries ‘was the most important historical event of the last ten years’; secondly, that ‘it was a scoop to equal Watergate’; and thirdly, that it would ‘make it necessary, at least in part, to rewrite the history of the Third Reich’. All three lines were actually the work of Peter Koch, but he instructed Wickman to ask Trevor-Roper if he would allow them to be attributed to him.

  For Wickman, this was the latest in a series of bizarre requests from Hamburg. Stern’s mania for secrecy was such that he now had to make any telephone calls connected with the diaries from a public call box in case MI6 had bugged his phone. He was also sick of having to shuttle back and forth between Hensmann and Murdoch. It was with some embarrassment that he rang Trevor-Roper and relayed Koch’s request.

  Trevor-Roper was not enthusiastic. ‘I didn’t like any of the quotes,’ he recalled, ‘and said so to Wickman.’ Nevertheless, reluctantly, he agreed to put his name to the statements that the diaries represented the most important historical discovery of the decade and a scoop of Watergate proportions. He rejected the third one about the rewriting of history – he had yet to see the promised transcript of the diaries.

  Wickman telexed Trevor-Roper’s reply to Germany.

  On the morning of Thursday 14 April, Gerd Schulte-Hillen arrived back in Hamburg from his trip to the United States. He had barely walked through the front door of his house when the telephone rang.

  It was Rupert Murdoch.

  It is a measure of Murdoch’s tenacity as a businessman, and also of his determination to secure the Hitler diaries, that even after Long and Searby had been sent back empty-handed, he still believed he could salvage his deal with Gruner and Jahr. He subjected Schulte-Hillen to an harangue about the behaviour of Jan Hensmann. He complained that he had been double-crossed, his associates insulted. What was going to be done about it?

  Schulte-Hillen apologized. He said he had only just returned from abroad.

  Murdoch wanted to know whether the negotiations could be reopened. He was now willing, he said, to pay $3.75 million for the English language world rights, matching Newsweek’s latest offer.

  Schulte-Hillen now made the first of what was to prove a succession of extremely costly mistakes. He noted Murdoch’s offer and promptly invited him to attend a new round of negotiations in Hamburg the following day. He then drove over to the Gruner and Jahr office and, overruling Hensmann’s objections, instructed him to issue a similar invitation to Newsweek.

  Broyles and Parker had made two round trips to Europe in six days. They had assumed that an agreement had been reached. Hensmann’s call to New York to tell them that the deal was off and that they had to come back a third time produced an outraged response. ‘They were not pleased,’ said Sorge. But if Newsweek wanted the diaries they had no alternative. They agreed to come.

  A few hundred yards away, in the headquarters of the diaries team, Thomas Walde was at last getting round to sending a fresh sample of the diaries for forensic analysis. Under the supervision of a Hamburg notary, blank pages had been cut out of two of the books – one was removed from the Hess volume, one from a volume covering 1933. The two sheets of paper, marked ‘Hess’ and ‘August 1933’, together with another of the Hitler documents accompanying the diaries – a draft telegram to Mussolini – were parcelled up and given to Walde’s secretary, Hannelore Schustermann, to take down to the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz. ‘It is urgent,’ wrote Walde in a covering letter to Dr Henke, ‘and a particular priority should be given to the two blank sheets. A thousand thanks and best wishes.’

  Henke, still ignorant of the diaries’ existence, forwarded the material to a forensic chemist named Arnold Rentz who lived a few miles outside Koblenz. Rentz undertook to deliver his verdict within the next week.

  Shortly before noon on Friday 15 April, representatives of Newsweek and News International arrived at the Gruner and Jahr headquarters. There was an immediate shock for the Germans. The two organizations – which Schulte-Hillen had eagerly expected to come ready to bid against one another, pushing the price still higher – arrived together. Rupert Murdoch headed the News International delegation; Mark Edmiston, President of Newsweek Inc., led the Americans. Tired of Stern’s sloppy and amateur tactics, the two men had decided to join forces. They would share the costs and split the diaries between them. The details had yet to be worked out, but considering there were supposed to be twenty-eight separate instalments, there was plenty of Hitler material to go around. Extracts of particular interest to the Americans could run in Newsweek, those relevant to Britain could go to Murdoch. The rest could be carved up between them at a later date. For now, the first priority was to end the uncertainty and reach a final agreement. Watching the supposed rivals conferring together, Sorge was deeply disappointed. They would be able to set their own price. There was no chance now that Stern would get the $3.75 million which up until yesterday had been on offer.

  The negotiations took place around the large conference table in the managing director’s office, with its imposing view out over the Elbe. Schulte-Hillen, Murdoch and Edmiston did most of the talking, turning occasionally to their advisers for clarification on particular points. The number of men present at any one time varied between ten and twenty – lawyers, journalists, accountants and executives, neatly dressed in two and three-piece suits, briefcases full of circulation figures, memoranda, balance sheets and legal opinions. For the next eleven hours they haggled over simultaneous release dates and standard extracts as if Stern was offering nothing more unusual than franchises in a new kind of fast food.

  The two biggest sources of contention were the order in which the diaries were to be serialized and the time scale over which they would be published. Edmiston maintained that the American public didn’t give a damn about Rudolf Hess and his peace mission to Britain. They wanted to know about the murder of the Jews. The whole series, as far as Newsweek was concerned, should begin with the Holocaust. Schulte-Hillen rejected that. Many of the diaries had not yet been transcribed. The only section which had been properly checked was that relating to Hess. With publication less than a month away, it was too late to change. To maximize revenue, Stern wanted to tease out the diaries for as long as possible: the only way to do that was to publish the books in chronological order. Again, Edmiston objected. As one of the Americans put it afterwards: ‘We wer
e especially bothered by the idea that Stern was trying to drag this out for almost thirty instalments. If it were 500,000 words, that’s one thing, but it’s only 50,000 words. We thought they were trying to slice the salami very thin.’

  Eventually, after some hours of discussion, the meeting began to grope towards a compromise. Perhaps the diaries could be published grouped under themes: ‘Hitler and the Jews’, ‘Hitler and his Women’, ‘Stalingrad’ and so on.

  After dinner, the conference moved on to copyright. This was the most worrying area for Stern and the company fielded three lawyers to try to handle it. Schulte-Hillen and his colleagues were acutely aware of the fact that if anyone pirated the diaries, it might well prove impossible to stop them. Indeed, if a rival organization could somehow get hold of a descendant of Hitler, they might be able to sue Gruner and Jahr for the return of the diaries. Thankfully, Stern could at least fall back on the agreement between Heidemann and the Bundesarchiv – this, they claimed, would be enough to prevent any breaches of copyright.

  Edmiston and Murdoch agreed to have their lawyers check over that aspect of the contract the following morning.

  At 10.30 p.m. the main outstanding issue was the money. Schulte-Hillen suggested they should reconvene the following day. The News International and Newsweek people shook their heads. It was essential that this was finally straightened out tonight. Schulte-Hillen again suggested a postponement. Edmiston was sarcastic. Was Schulte-Hillen, he asked, planning to fix the price on his own?

  There was an uneasy shifting around the table.

  Very well, said Schulte-Hillen. How much would they offer?

  Surprisingly, Murdoch and Edmiston had not planned to take advantage of their alliance to reduce the price. They were confident that the diaries would easily generate enough extra revenue to recoup the cost.