Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  The original offer stayed on the table, announced Edmiston. ‘We’ll stick to $3.75 million.’

  To Sorge, who had been expecting the worst, this was an enormous relief. He was therefore startled to hear Schulte-Hillen’s reply:

  ‘We no longer think that is enough. We want $4.25 million.’

  There was a moment’s pause, and then an explosion of exasperation. Both Edmiston and Murdoch said that they had never encountered such bad faith in the course of negotiations. They stood up, and like courtiers to a pair of princes, all the lawyers, journalists, accountants and executives immediately followed suit. Jackets were taken off the backs of chairs, cigarettes were stubbed out, papers were shovelled into briefcases, and in a dramatic display of contempt, the Americans, British and Australians filed out of the room without another word.

  The Stern team was left alone.

  Hensmann had slipped out earlier in the evening. Only Schulte-Hillen, Sorge and the three lawyers were left. Beneath them, the eight floors of offices and corridors were dark and deserted. Schulte-Hillen began shuffling the documents in front of him. He suggested they prepare for the following day’s talks. The other four looked at him incredulously. It was obvious to all of them there were not going to be any more talks. After a week of intensive negotiations, ‘the deal’, as the Stern Report later put it, ‘which had once seemed so certain for $3.75 million, had burst like a bubble’.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  EARLY THE NEXT morning, Schulte-Hillen and Sorge tried ringing Murdoch and Edmiston in their hotel suites. It was, as Sorge had feared, hopeless. Edmiston said that he had no further interest in the diaries: Gruner and Jahr should pretend that he was no longer in Hamburg. Murdoch refused even to come to the telephone. A few hours later, the Newsweek and News International teams flew home.

  It was a decisive turning point in the development of the diaries affair. The initiative had passed out of Stern’s hands. From self-confident salesmen they had, overnight, been reduced to anxious supplicants. There were no other potential clients to turn to who were in the same league as Murdoch and Newsweek. Time’s interest had always been lukewarm. The New York Times had turned down the Hess story within six hours of being told about it. Associated Newspapers had only offered £50,000 for Plan 3, and had made that conditional on the most stringent guarantees of authenticity. Even more worrying for the Stern men was the realization that Newsweek and Times Newspapers between them now knew an enormous amount about the diaries. Each organization had been allowed to send in an expert to read through the material; journalists from both groups had had extracts read out to them; and Newsweek had actually been handed the complete story of the find and the first four instalments of the Stern series.

  It was the thought of what Newsweek might do, with its worldwide sales of more than three million copies, which most terrified the Germans. There was nothing to stop Broyles and Parker breaking the news of the diaries’ existence and running pirated extracts. They could have their story on the news stands by Tuesday 26 April – in less than ten days’ time.

  Over the weekend, an emergency meeting of Stern’s editors and management reviewed the situation and concluded that they had only one option. Their next issue was due out on Thursday 21 April – there was no way they would be ready to run the diaries by then. The following week, 28 April, would be too late to beat Newsweek. Accordingly, they would have to change their publication date. Monday 25 April would give them the maximum amount of time, while still allowing them to head off the Americans. In the meantime, it was decided that Schulte-Hillen and Peter Koch should fly to New York to try to salvage some sort of agreement.

  On Sunday, 17 April, Hugh Trevor-Roper came south from Scotland to Cambridge, ready for the start of the University’s summer term. On Monday he was telephoned at the Peterhouse Master’s Lodge by Colin Webb of The Times who told him of the collapse of the negotiations.

  The news came as a surprise to Trevor-Roper. The Stern television people had asked him to give them an interview for their documentary. He had agreed. They had offered to come to Cambridge, but he had insisted on flying to Hamburg: he wanted to meet this ‘star reporter’ Heidemann and see what else he had in his collection. He was supposed to be going the next day. What should he do now?

  Webb said that The Times would still like him to go. Murdoch, now in New York, was confident he would soon be in a position to buy the diaries – on his terms; the Germans had nowhere else to go.

  Schulte-Hillen and Koch arrived in New York on Monday evening. They began telephoning around town, trying to speak to Newsweek and Murdoch. No one would return their calls.

  In Zurich, the diaries were removed from the Handelsbank and locked in a safe in the Schweizer Bankgesellschaft, where security was much tighter. After Murdoch’s warning about the Israeli secret service, the Germans were determined not to take any chances.

  On Tuesday, a conference of Stern’s senior editors and heads of department met to discuss their special Hitler edition. It would be the biggest in the magazine’s history: 356 pages thick, with a 48-page supplement devoted to the diaries – half in colour, half in black and white. The print run would be increased to 2.3 million copies. The expected boost in sales would cover the additional production costs, estimated at 720,000 marks. The meeting was secret. Only those staff who needed to know were to be told that Stern was about to publish Hitler’s diaries.

  Trevor-Roper came through customs at Hamburg airport on Tuesday and was met by a fat, pale man in glasses. There was a brief period of pantomime thanks to Trevor-Roper’s assumption that he was merely the chauffeur sent by Stern to collect him. Eventually, Heidemann made himself understood: he was the Bloodhound, the German equivalent of Woodward and Bernstein, the man responsible, in Trevor-Roper’s reluctant words, for ‘the greatest scoop since Watergate’. The historian apologized and said he was very pleased to meet him.

  It took fifteen minutes for Heidemann to drive Trevor-Roper from the airport to his archive in Milchstrasse. Before the television interview he wanted to show off his collection to the famous historian – it satisfied the same craving for recognition which Nannen and Schulte-Hillen had found it politic to feed. Trevor-Roper found himself conducted down a quaint, narrow street of small boutiques and art galleries, into a curiously arranged apartment. It consisted, he recalled, of four corridors laid out in the shape of a ‘hollow square’. There were no sleeping or washing facilities. Heidemann explained that he used it solely as a museum.

  Trevor-Roper found the contents ‘staggering’. There were hundreds of folders full of documents and photographs from the Third Reich. Some had been sold to Heidemann by Karl Wolff and Heinrich Hoffmann and were unquestionably authentic. There was, for example, an SS file on an expedition to Tibet organized by Himmler, part of the Reichsführer’s crackpot research into ‘Aryan bloodlines’. The file contained carbon copies of the outgoing correspondence and originals of the incoming. Trevor-Roper was in no doubt that it was genuine.

  At least two of the corridors were crammed with Nazi memorabilia. Then, turning the corner, came a section devoted to Mussolini. Finally, Heidemann conducted Trevor-Roper into an area with a few mementoes of Idi Amin. ‘Those’, he said, pointing to a pair of voluminous white cotton drawers, ‘are Idi Amin’s underpants.’

  For the first time, the former Regius Professor of Modern History began to eye his host uneasily. Until now, he had assumed that Heidemann was simply a thorough journalist. Suddenly it occurred to him that the reporter was slightly odd. He seemed to have an obsession with dictators. Trevor-Roper started to dislike him. The more he talked, the more phoney he seemed. Like Koch and Nannen before him, Trevor-Roper found himself wondering how Heidemann could afford such an obviously expensive collection.

  After this guided tour, Heidemann took his guest over to the Atlantic – one of the most imposing and luxurious hotels in Hamburg, looking out across the Alster to the Stern building. Stern had reserved Trevor-Roper a room for the night
. In another part of the hotel, the film crew was waiting. Trevor-Roper took his place in front of the camera and recorded a brief interview. Despite his personal misgivings about Heidemann, he was still convinced that the diaries were genuine and he said so. Heidemann was delighted.

  Trevor-Roper had been looking forward to a quiet meal alone with a book followed by an early night before his flight back to London. But Heidemann insisted that they dined together. He led the protesting historian into the bar.

  Heidemann ordered meals for them both and began drinking heavily. He became loquacious. Trevor-Roper experienced the sequence of emotions familiar to those who had had the misfortune to be trapped in a conversation with Heidemann: bewilderment, disbelief, distaste and an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia.

  He told Trevor-Roper that he had access to an important archive of Nazi documents which Martin Bormann had deposited in Madrid in 1938.

  Trevor-Roper pointed out that such an action by Bormann was rather unlikely – Madrid was in Republican hands in 1938.

  Perhaps it was somewhere outside Madrid, said Heidemann. Or perhaps it was 1939. Anyway, it was certainly true; he had been told the story personally – by Martin Bormann.

  Trevor-Roper smiled, assuming that Heidemann was making a joke. But the reporter was serious. He pulled out his wallet and produced a photograph. ‘This is a picture of Martin, taken recently.’

  The historian studied the photograph. It showed a man in his mid-sixties – an obvious impostor, considering that Bormann would by then have been eighty-three.

  Heidemann would not be dissuaded. Martin, he insisted, was alive and living in Switzerland….

  The evening crept by with more stories of Heidemann’s Nazi contacts, until Trevor-Roper at last felt able to make a polite excuse and escape to his bedroom.

  In retrospect it is difficulty to understand why Trevor-Roper’s uneasiness and scepticism about Heidemann did not begin now to extend to the diaries he had seen in the Swiss bank. In fact, his reaction was almost exactly the opposite. He reasoned that if he, after half a day’s acquaintance, found Heidemann unreliable, Stern, after employing him for thirty years, must surely have known what he was like and been all the more careful about checking his stories. He was under the impression that this had been done. As far as he was concerned, the diaries had been authenticated by three handwriting experts and by forensic analysis; their provenance in the Boernersdorf air crash was entirely credible; their contents had been thoroughly investigated by Stern over a period of several years; and the magazine’s editor had assured him that the supplier of the diaries was known to them and had also been checked.

  Heidemann reminded Trevor-Roper of the late Ladislas Farago, the American writer who claimed he had seen a decrepit Bormann propped up in a large bed in 1973 surrounded by Bolivian nuns. Farago had visited Trevor-Roper in Oxford and had exhibited a similar naïvety and readiness to believe whatever he was told, combined with a genuine talent for unearthing documents and information.

  With these complacent thoughts, the historian retired to his bed, his belief in the Hitler diaries unshaken.

  Murdoch’s handling of the negotiations had been masterful. By Tuesday, isolated in New York, Koch and Schulte-Hillen found themselves effectively reduced to begging the Australian to buy the syndication rights. When he finally consented to resume negotiations, he was able to dictate his own price. His original offer for the British and Commonwealth rights had been $750,000. Now, he picked them up for little more than half that sum – $400,000. The money was to be paid over the next two years. The first instalment of $200,000 was handed over on signature of the contract. (Shortly afterwards, Murdoch also acquired the American rights for a bargain price of $800,000.)

  The continuing silence from Newsweek convinced the Germans that the magazine was indeed going to steal their story. Further negotiations were useless. The pair had the feeling that they were being deliberately kept waiting around in a New York hotel in order to hold up publication in Hamburg.

  On Wednesday, Schulte-Hillen telephoned Reinhard Mohn and confessed to the Bertelsmann owner that he had made a mess of the negotiations – in his words, he had ‘over-pokered’ his hand. He also rang Hensmann and issued orders confirming that Stern would publish its scoop the following Monday. The discovery of the diaries would be announced in a statement on Friday.

  Koch and Schulte-Hillen caught the next plane back to Germany.

  In the offices of The Times and Sunday Times that Wednesday, very few people knew of the impending acquisition of the Hitler diaries. Those who did were mostly confused or apprehensive.

  Phillip Knightley had arrived back at the Sunday Times on Tuesday after four months in Australia. That night he had gone out for a drink with Eric Jacobs, the editor responsible for commissioning the long articles on the front of the paper’s Review section. He wouldn’t be requiring anything for a while, he told Knightley. He understood he was going to be running the Hitler diaries in that space.

  The next day, Knightley went in to see Magnus Linklater, the Features Editor. ‘These Hitler diaries,’ he asked, ‘they’re not the ones that David Irving put us on to in December, are they?’ Linklater said they weren’t – they’d been offered to the paper by Stern. A few minutes later, Knightley bumped into the Sunday Times editor, Frank Giles, in the lavatory. He told him he was worried about the rumours he was picking up regarding the diaries. It all sounded very suspicious.

  ‘You’re right to be cautious,’ replied Giles. ‘But don’t worry. It doesn’t concern us. Murdoch’s going to run them in The Times.’

  Knightley was still anxious. He asked if he could submit a memorandum setting out his reservations.

  By all means, said Giles, but keep it to one page. Murdoch’s attention span was notoriously short; there was no point in giving him anything longer than a few hundred words to read.

  What was nagging away at the back of Knightley’s mind was the memory of another set of wartime documents which had been bought for the Sunday Times fifteen years earlier – the diaries of Benito Mussolini. These had been offered to the Thomson Organization, at that time the owners of the Sunday Times, for £250,000. A series of expert examinations had failed to find anything wrong with them, and £100,000 had been handed over as a down payment to a Polish-born arms dealer who was acting as middle man. Further large sums had been paid out in expenses – for example, Vittorio Mussolini, the dictator’s son, had been given £3500 in cash in a brown paper bag in order to buy himself a sports car in return for agreeing to renounce his claim on the diaries. In the end, the books had turned out to be the work of an Italian woman called Amalia Panvini and her eighty-four-year-old mother, Rosa. The affair had cost Thomsons a fortune and made the Sunday Times a temporary laughing-stock in Fleet Street. Knightley – one of the few reporters left on the paper who remembered the affair – had been cautious of so-called ‘finds’ of wartime papers ever since.

  It took him the rest of Wednesday to write his memorandum. Point by point, he drew attention to the similarities between the forgery of 1968 and the ‘scoop’ of 1983. The Mussolini fiasco should have taught the Sunday Times some lessons:

  1 You cannot rely on expert authentication. Thomson engaged five experts, including the author of the standard work on Mussolini, the world’s greatest authority on paper, a famous handwriting expert, an internationally known palaeographer and an academic who authenticated the Casement Diaries. Not one expert said that they were fake.

  2 You cannot rely on people close to the subject. Vittorio Mussolini, Mussolini’s son, said that the diaries were definitely his father’s.

  3 You cannot rely on legal protection. Slaughter and May [a firm of solicitors] did the negotiations for Thomson. They did not succeed in recovering a single penny when the diaries turned out to be fakes.

  4 Beware of secrecy and being pressed to make a quick decision. The Mussolini con men were able to bring off their sting by pressing Thomson to make a quick deal. Absolut
e secrecy was essential, they said, to prevent the Italian government from stepping in. Both manoeuvres prevented proper examination of the background of the salesmen and the provenance of the diaries.

  Questions to consider:

  1 What German academic experts have seen all the diaries? Has, for instance, the Institute of Contemporary History seen them?

  2 What non-academic British experts have seen all the diaries? Has David Irving seen them?

  3 How thoroughly has the vendor explained where the diaries have been all these years and why they have surfaced now: the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler’s accession to power.

  The crux of the matter is that secrecy and speed work for the con man. To mount a proper check would protect us but would not be acceptable to the vendor. We should insist on doing our own checks and not accept the checks of any other publishing organization.

  Knightley’s intuition was subsequently proved correct in almost every detail: the authentication had been inadequate; the supposed involvement of East German officials and the fear that the copyright might not be secure had fostered a climate of secrecy, bordering on paranoia; no German historians had been allowed to see the diaries; no explanation had been given as to where the diaries had been kept for more than thirty years; and Times Newspapers had not carried out its own checks, apart from sending Trevor-Roper on his brief expedition into the Swiss bank.

  Knightley sent his memorandum to Frank Giles to be forwarded to Murdoch. He never heard another word about it. It was too late. Murdoch had bought the diaries and now his priority, like Stern’s, was to beat Newsweek into print.

  Trevor-Roper arrived home in Cambridge late on Wednesday night. He was talking to his wife in her sitting-room at about midnight when he received a transatlantic telephone call from Murdoch and Charles Douglas-Home in New York. Murdoch told him that Stern was bringing forward its publication date to Monday. News International had acquired syndication rights in the diaries. ‘I think we’ll put them in the Sunday Times,’ he said. The announcement of the discovery would be made on Friday morning, in less than thirty-six hours’ time. Douglas-Home cut in. ‘We want a piece from you for Saturday’s Times. Can you do it?’ Trevor-Roper said he thought he could, if he wrote ‘flat out’. It was agreed that the article would be picked up from Peterhouse by dispatch rider on Friday morning.