Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  Trevor-Roper and his wife left the Master’s Lodge shortly after 3.30 p.m. to join a party of Cambridge dons and their families on an excursion to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. The historian still felt fairly confident about his judgement of the diaries. But the conversation with Knightley had been vaguely disconcerting and as he settled down in his seat on the party’s private coach, somewhere in the recesses of his mind, something began to stir.

  Three thousand miles away, America was waking up to the news of the diaries’ discovery. All the major US wire services were running the Stern announcement, and across New York, in the offices of publishers, agents and newspapers, telephones were ringing with demands for information.

  At Bantam Books, Louis Wolfe confirmed to the New York Times that he had heard of the Hitler diaries. ‘An offer was made,’ he admitted, ‘but we were never sure exactly what was being offered, so it seemed much simpler to have our parent company handle it out of its group office in Munich. To the best of my knowledge no one in the United States has signed a contract to publish a book based on Hitler’s diaries.’ Wolfe’s Vice-President, Stuart Applebaum, was also fielding calls. ‘We have a great interest in the possibility of doing a book someday related to the diaries,’ he told the Washington Post, ‘but at this time we have no plans to publish one. Nor do we have any deal to do one.’

  At ICM, Lynn Nesbit struggled to answer a deluge of questions. Yes, she had been hired to represent Stern. No, she was no longer their agent. Yes, she was paid a commission. No, she wouldn’t disclose the amount….

  Almost every big American magazine found itself pressed to issue a statement. Time’s was terse (‘We have had an interest’); Life’s was baffled (‘We haven’t been involved at all; we just heard about it today’); the National Enquirer tried to pretend it was on the point of clinching a deal (‘right now we are involved in negotiations with Stern’). The longest came from Newsweek, read out by the magazine’s publicity director, Gary Gerard: ‘Newsweek does not have an agreement with Stern for publishing rights to the Adolf Hitler diaries. We are covering the story as news.’

  Newsweek’s behaviour went much further than merely ‘covering the story as news’. At a morning editorial conference it was decided to ransack the material handed over in Hamburg. Hitler would go on the cover. Inside the magazine, thirteen pages would be devoted to the diaries (as opposed to four for the week’s main story, the bombing of the US embassy in Beirut which left forty-seven dead). The advertising department was instructed to prepare an extensive publicity campaign. Full-page advertisements were taken out in six major US newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post; these were to be backed up by thirty-second television commercials in twelve American cities.

  As it happened, this was the day on which Newsweek’s nominated expert, Gerhard Weinberg, was due to fly to Germany to take up a temporary teaching post in Bonn. Maynard Parker was nevertheless determined to extract an article from him. Weinberg dismissed his last class on the campus at Chapel Hill at 11 a.m. He and his wife caught a flight to New York and at 3 p.m. were met at La Guardia airport by two Newsweek reporters and a photographer. The journalists steered the professor into a corner of the arrivals lounge and thrust a copy of Trevor-Roper’s Times article into his hands – the text had just been wired over from London. Weinberg skimmed through it: ‘doubts dissolved… satisfied documents authentic… standard accounts Hitler’s personality have to be revised… astonishing archive….’ Weinberg, who had always respected Trevor-Roper’s scholarship, was startled by the lack of equivocation. Such a ringing endorsement seemed to him ‘in itself to be a strong argument in favour of the diaries’ authenticity’. Trevor-Roper, he reasoned, must know something he didn’t. He told the Newsweek reporters that in view of the article, the diaries, in his opinion, were now more likely to be genuine than not.

  The Newsweek men still needed more information to complete their coverage. Weinberg was equally determined to catch his flight to Germany. The only solution was for one of the journalists, Steven Strasser, to fly out with him, interview him on the plane, and file a piece by telephone from Germany. The photographer stood Professor Weinberg against a wall and took a few hasty pictures. Then Weinberg, his wife, and Mr Strasser left to catch the afternoon flight to Frankfurt.

  Peter Koch’s prediction of the hostility the diaries would arouse was already coming true.

  In Stuttgart, Eberhard Jaeckel – although, like Weinberg, ‘shaken by Trevor-Roper’s position’ – declared himself ‘extremely sceptical’. He had seen a so-called ‘Hitler diary’ some years before, he said, and decided it was forged.

  ‘I have not seen their evidence, but everything speaks against it,’ Werner Maser told Reuters. ‘It smacks of pure sensationalism.’

  ‘I am extraordinary sceptical,’ announced Karl-Dietrich Bracher of Bonn University. ‘It would be a total surprise and I consider it highly unlikely.’

  A spokesman for the Federal Archives in Koblenz confirmed that they had arranged for the examination of ‘about ten pages’ of Hitler’s handwriting for Stern, but denied having authenticated any diaries.

  The loudest condemnations of all were emanating from London.

  David Irving reckoned he was due for some luck. For two years, everything had gone wrong for him. His marriage had ended in an acrimonious divorce. He was being pursued by the Inland Revenue. His political activities had collapsed due to lack of funds. He was on the point of being evicted from his flat. Most of the furniture had been taken by his wife and entire rooms were left stripped and abandoned while he was reduced to squatting in one corner. By the spring of 1983, he was in desperate need of money and a boost for his flagging career. And now, as if in answer to a prayer, Adolf Hitler came to his rescue.

  Ever since 10 a.m., when a reporter from Der Spiegel had called to tell him of Stern’s impending announcement, he had been inundated with inquiries from around the world – Reuters, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Observer, the Sunday Mirror, Bild Zeitung, Independent Radio News, the BBC…. ‘As soon as I rang off, the phone rang again,’ he noted in his diary. ‘Quite extraordinary.’ His answer to all of them was the same: the Hitler diaries were fakes, and he had the evidence to prove it.

  He was ‘shocked’ by Stern’s decision to publish. He was certain that the forgeries he had received from Priesack in December originated from the same source as Heidemann’s diaries. Thankfully, he still had photocopies of the material – letters, drawings, a few pages from the original volume for 1935 (the one Kujau had forged in 1978 and given to Fritz Stiefel). With the Hitler diaries fast becoming the hottest news story in the world, these worthless scraps had suddenly become a potential gold mine. Irving’s priority now was to make money as quickly as possible.

  In between constant interruptions from the telephone, he wrote to the Sunday Times drawing their attention to the fact that he had given them an ‘exclusive lead to these documents’ before Christmas and demanding as commission a percentage of the price paid for the diaries. He then set about marketing his information. Der Spiegel offered to pay him for his photocopies. Bild Zeitung, a mass-circulation West German paper, promised to meet his expenses and provide a fee if he would fly out to Hamburg to confront Stern at its press conference on Monday. One of the Sunday Times’s main rivals, the Observer, paid him £1000 for his help in compiling an article which derided the diaries’ authenticity; another, the Mail on Sunday, gave him £5000 for his documents and a statement that the diaries were forged.

  This was only the beginning of an extraordinary resurgence in Irving’s fortunes. No one now cared about his reputation as a right-wing maverick. Seeing their circulations threatened by the Hitler scoop, newspapers and magazines which would have treated him as a pariah twenty-four hours earlier queued up for quotes. By the end of the afternoon Irving had emerged as Stern’s most vociferous and dangerous assailant.

  At 9.30 p.m., a BBC taxi picked him up and took him to Television Centre
where he appeared in a live studio confrontation with Charles Douglas-Home. Irving waved his fakes at the camera. Douglas-Home was unperturbed. ‘I have smelt them,’ he said of the diaries. ‘I’m a minor historian and we know about the smell of old documents. They certainly smelt.’

  At that moment, sitting in the audience at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Times Newspapers’ star witness was beginning to have second thoughts. Borne along by the momentum of deadlines, midnight phone calls and departure times, infected by the pervading atmosphere of excitement and secrecy, he had scarcely had time for an hour’s calm reflection all week. Now, as the other academics and their wives concentrated on the music of Verdi’s Don Carlos, Trevor-Roper’s thoughts were elsewhere, ranging back over his experiences in Hamburg and Zurich, with one incident in particular gnawing at his mind.

  On Tuesday, Heidemann had shown him a letter, supposedly by Hitler. It was dated 1908 and addressed to a girl with whom Hitler was supposed to have been infatuated during his days in Vienna. The incident had been described by August Kubizek in The Young Hitler I Knew. In retrospect, this letter ‘disquieted’ Trevor-Roper. It fitted in ‘just a little too neatly’ with the known historical record. ‘Could this letter have been forged for this purpose?’ he wondered. And why was it with Hitler’s papers? Why wasn’t it with the girl’s? Until this moment he had taken the existence of such supplementary material, which helped to make up the sheer bulk of the archive, as an almost unanswerable argument in favour of the diaries’ authenticity. Suddenly he saw the flaw in this logic. For the first time since leaving the Swiss bank, he allowed his mind to approach the Stern find from a different angle.

  I began to consider the whole archive with the mind of a forger. How would a forger of Hitler’s diaries proceed? I decided that he would concentrate on a period when Hitler’s movements were well documented, and, outside that period, select only detached episodes for which public evidence was accessible. He would also, since his main material would be derivative or trivial, vary it where he safely could with interesting deviations. The diaries, I noted, had a discomforting correspondence with this model. They were continuous from 1932; before that there were isolated episodes; and an interesting variation was suggested in the affair of Rudolf Hess.

  Trevor-Roper had always had doubts about the Hess book: ‘That Hitler, with his political brain, should have sanctioned such a mission – it was insane.’ Now, these doubts and his reservations about the 1908 letter, began to set off a fearful chain reaction in his mind. Why hadn’t any German experts seen the material? And Heidemann – the memory of that awful evening at the Atlantic swam back into his memory – Heidemann could so easily have been deceived; ‘he was not a critical spirit’. Trevor-Roper’s confidence in his judgement began rapidly unravelling.

  ‘If at that moment,’ he said later, ‘I could have stopped the course of events, I would have done so.’

  He briefly considered groping his way out of the dimly lit auditorium to find a telephone. He rejected the idea. He knew the workings of a modern newspaper sufficiently well to appreciate that there was no chance of stopping his article now. At that moment, less than a mile away, in the print-room of Times Newspapers, twelve hours after it had been picked up from his home, 400,000 copies of it were coming off the presses.

  TWENTY-SIX

  HUGH TREVOR-ROPER ARRIVED home in Cambridge in the early hours of Saturday morning. He went to bed but was soon up again. Shortly after 7 a.m. he went down to collect the morning’s edition of The Times. The story dominated the front page:

  38 Years after Bunker suicide

  Hitler’s secret diaries to be published

  • Hitler approved the ‘peace’ flight to Scotland in 1941 by his deputy, Rudolf Hess but then declared him insane.

  • He ordered his troops not to destroy the British Expeditionary Force trapped at Dunkirk in 1940 in the hope that he could conclude a negotiated peace.

  • He thought Neville Chamberlain, whom history has judged harshly, was a skilled negotiator and admired his toughness.

  Trevor-Roper opened the paper. His own article was spread across an entire page:

  ‘When I had entered the back room in the Swiss bank, and turned the pages of those volumes, my doubts gradually dissolved. I am now satisfied they are authentic.’

  Secrets that survived the Bunker

  BY HUGH TREVOR-ROPER

  Reading the article spurred Trevor-Roper into action. At 8 a.m. he began making a series of telephone calls.

  He rang Charles Douglas-Home and told him he now had ‘some doubts’ about the authenticity of the diaries. ‘They were not doubts such that I could say I disbelieved in the diaries,’ he recalled – but they were serious reservations. Douglas-Home took the news with remarkable calmness. He told the historian that there had been a good deal of publicity on television the previous evening, with David Irving emerging as ‘prosecuting counsel’. He said that he, too, personally regretted the deal with Stern – the Germans were unpleasant to deal with, arrogant and paranoid. They still hadn’t supplied a complete transcript of the material. The conditions they had imposed were ‘insulting’. They would have to see what developed over the next few days.

  Trevor-Roper also spoke of his doubts to Colin Webb. Next, he rang Peter Wickman. Stern wanted him to attend the press conference to launch the diaries on Monday. Trevor-Roper told Wickman he would take part only if he were given an opportunity to put some questions to Gerd Heidemann beforehand. In addition, he wanted to see a typed transcript of the Hess volume. Wickman promised to see what he could do.

  One good reason for Douglas-Home’s stoicism in the face of Trevor-Roper’s sudden nervousness was the fact that he was no longer responsible for the diaries. That burden had passed on Thursday to Frank Giles at the Sunday Times. A fatal breakdown in communication now occurred. Douglas-Home believed that Trevor-Roper’s doubts were relatively minor; if they were serious, he assumed the historian would pass them on to the Sunday Times. But Trevor-Roper was relying on Douglas-Home to spread the word of his unease around Gray’s Inn Road. He did not think of calling them direct. ‘I had had no dealings with the Sunday Times myself,’ he explained. ‘I had been employed solely by The Times.’ He sat at home in Cambridge and waited for Knightley or Giles to ring him. He was ‘surprised that they didn’t call; it would seem the thing to do’.

  Meanwhile, happily ignorant of Trevor-Roper’s change of heart, the staff of the Sunday Times were racing against the paper’s deadline to do justice to a story endorsed by the historian as the greatest scoop since Watergate. Professional instincts were now overriding natural scepticism. Magnus Linklater (co-author of Hoax, the story of the faked Howard Hughes autobiography) and Paul Eddy, the head of the paper’s Insight team, were responsible for putting together the coverage. Stern would not allow them to talk to Heidemann directly. Quotations from the diaries were having to be extracted from the Germans by Anthony Terry, the Sunday Times representative in Hamburg, who translated them and telexed them to London. Even as they worked, Linklater and Eddy were conscious of how phoney they sounded. According to the telexes, Hitler had written some peculiar entries.

  [On Goebbels’s affair with a Czech actress]

  The little Dr Goebbels is up to his old tricks again with women.

  [On Himmler]

  I shall show this deceitful small animal breeder with his lust for power; this unfathomable little penny-pincher will find out what I am about.

  [On the July 1944 bomb plot]

  Ha, ha, isn’t it laughable? This scum, these loafers and good-for-nothings. These people were bunglers.

  The two journalists discussed what they should do. ‘We agreed,’ said Linklater afterwards, ‘that the honourable course would have been to have refused to touch it. But as Paul said, if we did that, we would have to resign. We both laughed about that, so we carried on – like a couple of hacks.’

  Phillip Knightley was also searching his conscience. His task was to writ
e an article setting out the reasons for the diaries’ authenticity and their importance as an historical source. ‘I agreed to do it on the understanding that my name wasn’t to be attached to it. Then someone pointed out that it would look odd if the article appeared anonymously and I was asked to reconsider.’ Knightley went off to consult John Whale, the Sunday Times’s religious correspondent, ‘a great moral force on the paper’. Knightley showed him what he had written and asked him what he should do. Whale advised him to agree to the request – he had been sufficiently detached in the piece to cover himself against the possibility that the material was fraudulent. (Only one sentence – the first – later returned to haunt Knightley: ‘Hitler’s diaries’, he wrote, ‘have been submitted to the most rigorous tests to establish their authenticity.’)

  The edition of the paper which emerged after all this agonizing was extraordinary: a testament to the skill of the journalists and the old rule that anything about the Nazis, once embellished with swastikas and pictures of Hitler, has a quality of compulsion. ‘We did a hell of a good job on it,’ said Linklater. ‘It was gripping stuff. Professionally, we were all very pleased with it.’

  Dominating the front page, spread over eight columns, headed ‘WORLD EXCLUSIVE’, was an article promising the reader ‘The secrets of Hitler’s War’. There was a superimposed picture of Gerd Heidemann holding the diaries; behind him, looking out over his shoulder, staring hypnotically at the potential purchaser, was an enormous close-up of Hitler’s face. The story spilled over on to page two and was backed up by articles on pages sixteen, seventeen and eighteen. The centre spread announced ‘HITLER’S SECRET DIARIES’ in letters almost two inches high. There were photographs of Hitler and Eva Braun, of extracts from the diaries, of Goebbels, Himmler and Bormann, of the graves in Boernersdorf and of Heidemann solemnly holding up the salvaged window from the crashed plane. ‘Look at that,’ said Brian MacArthur, the deputy editor, when the first proofs arrived in the newsroom. ‘You will never see another front page like that as long as you live. It is sensational.’