Frank Giles presided over this rearguard action with his customary diffluence. When the Sunday Times journalists in London expressed their concern about the affair and asked him to address a union meeting, he turned them down. He told them he was going away on holiday to Corfu. ‘Even if I were here,’ he added, ‘I must tell you that I do not think that this matter is appropriate for the chapel.’ Publication of the diaries would go ahead in his absence, he informed the editorial conference, and would stop only if the diaries were conclusively proved to be forgeries.
On Sunday, the paper appeared with a somewhat more muted front page than it had presented the previous week:
Hitler’s Diaries – the trail from the hayloft
Stern challenges David Irving
‘No shred of doubt,’ says Heidemann
The editor of the Sunday Times then left the country.
David Irving spent the day sending out invoices to newspapers and magazines, billing them for his work attacking the diaries’ authenticity. Shortly before noon, a reporter from the Daily Express rang to ask if it was true that he was suing the Sunday Times for failing to pay him his commission for putting them on to the Hitler diaries. ‘Not suing,’ replied Irving, ‘just asking.’ He then told him to ‘hold on to his hat’ and gave him what he modestly described as ‘the story of the day’: that he now believed the diaries were genuine.
The Express ran the story in its early editions, and at 11 p.m. a sub-editor from The Times rang to ask if the report in the Express was correct. Irving said it was.
The Times immediately put it on its front page.
The following morning, as The Times in Britain announced Irving’s belief that the diaries were genuine, Der Spiegel appeared in Germany carrying his assertion that they were fakes. ‘Hitler’s Diary: Find or Forgery?’ was the title on the magazine’s cover; the contents left little doubt of Der Spiegel’s opinion as to the correct answer. It was a devastating assault, attacking the Stern scoop for ‘bad German, bad punctuation and banality’. Der Spiegel’s reporters had tracked down the SS man who discovered the Boernersdorf crash and using his testimony they picked Heidemann’s research apart. The Junkers’ fuselage had been made of metal, not canvas, as Stern had claimed; the plane had ploughed straight into the ground, not ended up on its roof; gold bars, pistols and ammunition had been salvaged, but no papers. In contrast to the carefully cultivated image of ‘the Bloodhound’ which Stern’s public relations department had built up of Heidemann, the reporter was depicted as an obsessive friend of old Nazis, whose discovery had been inadequately checked and blown up into an international sensation. ‘If it all goes wrong,’ Peter Koch was quoted as saying, ‘the editors will charter Heidemann’s boat, sail it to Helgoland and pull out the plugs.’ Much of the information had been provided by Irving and the centrepiece of the attack was a reproduction of a page from his fake diary.
Der Spiegel’s attack was bad enough news for one day, but worse was to come when the company’s lawyer, Dr Hagen, arrived at the Bundesarchiv.
Josef Henke had handed the three diary volumes given to him after the Stern press conference to the Federal Institute for Forensic Investigation in Berlin. On Monday, he was able to give Hagen the scientists’ preliminary findings. All three volumes contained traces of polyamid 6, a synthetic textile invented in 1938 but not manufactured in bulk until 1943. The binding of the Hess special volume – supposedly written in 1941 – included polyester which had not been made until 1953. Ultraviolet light had also shown up fluorescent material in the paper. These results had yet to be confirmed in writing, said Henke, but Stern’s scoop was beginning to look extremely dubious. In addition, although the archive’s researchers had had time for only a brief check of the diaries’ written content, they had already found a couple of textual errors: two laws relating to agriculture and student organizations were not passed on the dates given in the diaries.
Hagen hurried back to Hamburg to pass on this information.
At about 6 p.m. Schulte-Hillen convened a crisis meeting in his office on the ninth floor of the Stern building. Wilfried Sorge did not attend (he was on holiday in Italy), nor did Koch, who was in the United States preparing his media campaign, but all the other leading figures in the affair were present: Jan Hensmann, Felix Schmidt, Rolf Gillhausen, Henri Nannen, Gerd Heidemann and Thomas Walde.
As Hagen reported the Bundesarchiv’s findings an atmosphere of barely suppressed panic spread through the room. Only Heidemann seemed unmoved, sitting wrapped in his own private world as the others began shouting at him. Felix Schmidt was enraged by his calmness. How could he sit there, he demanded, and act as if none of this concerned him? It was imperative that he reveal the name of his source; otherwise, publication of the diaries should be stopped. Heidemann remained silent. ‘You either belong in a madhouse or a prison,’ Nannen told him. He added that in his opinion, the magazine’s editors could not be allowed ‘to dangle like this any longer’.
Schulte-Hillen now spoke up, and for the first time he addressed Heidemann sharply: he wanted to speak to the reporter alone – immediately. The two men left the room.
Before the emergency meeting began, the managing director had been approached in private by Felix Schmidt who had suggested that Heidemann might be keeping the identity of his supplier secret because he had stolen some of the money. As far as Schmidt was concerned, that no longer mattered: the important thing was to find out whether the diaries were genuine. He had pleaded with Schulte-Hillen to try once more to persuade Heidemann to tell him the whole story, if necessary by promising him ‘that if he has pocketed some of the money, it will not be held against him’.
In another office, away from the others, Schulte-Hillen confronted Heidemann. ‘I asked him to tell me the whole story,’ he recalled, ‘leaving nothing out.’ Heidemann, reluctantly, agreed. According to Schulte-Hillen:
Heidemann told me that the south German collector was called Fischer. This was the first time I had heard the name. Herr Fischer was supposed to have a sister in East Germany who was married to a museum director called Krebs. For a long time, Frau Krebs had been putting advertisements in East German newspapers asking for militaria. One day, an old man from the Boernersdorf area had contacted Frau Krebs and asked if she was interested in handwritten documents belonging to Adolf Hitler. Frau Krebs had been so taken aback by this offer that she had told her brother, an army general….
At last, Heidemann was telling Schulte-Hillen the truth – or, at least, the truth as he had been given it by Kujau. ‘General Fischer’ had been to see the old man and obtained the names of peasants in the Boernersdorf area who had hidden material salvaged from the plane crash. The documents turned out to be the Hitler diaries. The general had kept them hidden for some years, before offering them for sale through his brother in south Germany. Heidemann said that at least three other communist generals were involved in smuggling them out of the East, including one from the Ministry of State Security; he added that he knew their names. ‘I asked him to tell me them,’ recalled Schulte-Hillen. ‘He said he would have to check in his archive, then he could show me them in writing.’
Heidemann disappeared for two hours and returned at about 11 p.m. His ‘evidence’ turned out to be two letters addressed to an East German general, whose name had been blacked out. Schulte-Hillen was disappointed. ‘What am I supposed to make of this?’ he asked. The letters proved nothing. Heidemann said he was sorry, but ‘the originals were in a safe place to which he had no access’.
Schulte-Hillen reported back to the group assembled in his office. The story of the diaries’ discovery, as Heidemann had explained it, seemed plausible to him. But he still did not have a full account, and given Heidemann’s insistence that it was a matter of life and death for people in East Germany, he did not feel able to put any more pressure on the reporter.
What has frequently – and accurately – been described as a ‘bunker mentality’ now descended on the headquarters of Stern. Surroun
ded by enemies, cut off from reality, the leaders of the magazine began deploying phantom divisions in a frantic attempt to stave off the impending disaster.
Surely they could somehow prove that paper whitener had been in use before the war? Henri Nannen spent the night reading through chemistry books. In an old dictionary he came across a pre-war entry for a substance called ‘blankit’. Wolf Thieme spoke to a contact of his in the Bayer chemical company who told him that the paper whitener ‘blankophor’ might have been used on an experimental basis in the 1930s. Early on Tuesday morning, Hans Shuh, the head of Stern’s business section, was summoned to Nannen’s office and instructed to write a detailed article on the history of the paper industry. Meanwhile, a statement, resonant with hollow bravado, was issued to the news agencies, signed jointly by Nannen, Schmidt and Schulte-Hillen:
For a week Stern has been accused, with ever-increasing shrillness, of publishing forged Hitler diaries. Professor Werner Maser spoke in detail of an East German forgery factory near Potsdam. In spite of repeated demands, Maser could not provide any proof of this.
Professor Broszat, the director of the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, demanded that all the diaries be laid before an international historical commission. Stern immediately turned down this demand. Historians, like doctors, diverge in their diagnoses. One day the English historian Trevor-Roper confirms the authenticity of the diary and the next day doubts it. The writer David Irving behaves in an opposite manner.
But at least doctors are bound by an oath of confidentiality. Historians, it is now clear, are under no such obligation. Laying all the documents before an historical commission would, as Henri Nannen, Stern’s publisher, has pointed out, compromise the exclusivity of the material.
Even the handwriting and forensic tests, commissioned by Stern before publication from well-known experts, have been misinterpreted by the press, television and radio, and partly pronounced false. Certain newspapers have not hesitated even to raise political suspicions about Stern’s editors.
But this discussion concerns material from recent history of extreme delicacy. Stern has therefore, despite its opinion, taken into account Professor Broszat’s demand, and will allow an immediate inspection of the material by experts from West Germany, Switzerland and the United States.
Until these tests, carried out on the broadest basis by highly responsible bodies, have been completed and yielded a clear result, the chief editors, publisher and printer of Stern believe that any further discussion will serve no purpose.
Heidemann and Schmidt promptly withdrew from a discussion programme on Austrian television which they were scheduled to take part in that night.
As a first step in this new process of verification, the Bundesarchiv was informed that more diaries would be made available for a full textual and chemical analysis. Only one condition was attached: if the diaries proved to be forgeries, Stern was to be informed well in advance of any public announcement – at least the magazine would be able to run the story of its own folly as an exclusive.
On Wednesday 4 May accompanied by a company manager and a lawyer, Leo Pesch arrived in Zurich and removed fifteen volumes of the Hitler diaries from the bank vault. The group split up. The manager went direct to Koblenz to hand over four books to the Bundesarchiv for a check on the contents. Pesch and the lawyer drove to the Swiss forensic laboratories in St Gallen and gave the scientists eleven diaries for microscopic examination.
On the same day, from Hamburg, Gerd Heidemann set off on a two-day trip to Bavaria. He planned to visit a former employee of the Berghof now living in an old people’s home near Berchtesgaden – she would swear, he was sure, to having seen Hitler write a diary. He told Walde that he would also stop off at an old printing works in Miesbach, south of Munich. The factory had at one time been run by the SS and he was certain he could obtain enough samples of pre-war paper to prove that whitener had been in use in the 1930s. And then there was Hitler’s chauffeur’s girlfriend – she would swear that Erich Kempka had told her before he died that Hitler used to write notes in the back of his Mercedes.
They must all trust him, said Heidemann. Everything would be fine.
In America, Peter Koch, supported by Wolf Hess, had embarked on what Newsweek described as a ‘media blitz’, with invitations to appear on Good Morning America, The CBS Morning News, The Today Show and Nightline. He gave a long interview to the Washington Post whose reporters were impressed by the confidence of this ‘balding, trim man, sunburned from an outing at Jones beach over the weekend’. He was in combative mood. ‘I expected the uproar,’ he told another group of journalists, ‘and expected that many incompetent people would denounce the diaries as fakes. This is because every other publishing house will envy our story and every historian will envy us.’
One man following Koch’s publicity tour with interest was Kenneth Rendell, a forty-year-old handwriting expert based in Boston. Rendell had been retained by Newsweek when the magazine was bidding for the diaries at the beginning of April. ‘Anticipating my imminent departure for Zurich,’ Rendell recalled, ‘I organized about a hundred samples of authentic Hitler writing, researched scientific tests that might date the material and prepared myself for a sizeable challenge.’ Then, to his disappointment, the deal with Newsweek had fallen through, and he had been forced to watch the affair unfold from America. Koch’s visit, bearing diaries from 1932 and 1945, gave him an opportunity to have a look at the material at first hand.
Rendell caught up with Koch at the Manhattan studios of CBS at breakfast time on Wednesday, as Koch was preparing for his appearance on the Morning News. Koch knew of Rendell’s reputation and had no objections to letting him look at the diaries. Repeatedly interrupted by technicians, Rendell began his examination on the studio floor. ‘Even at first glance,’ he wrote later, ‘everything looked wrong.’ The paper was of poor quality, the ink looked modern, none of the writing was blotted (‘a sloppiness I didn’t expect from Hitler’), and the signatures seemed to him to be ‘terrible renditions’. His immediate reaction was that both diaries were forged – the 1945 volume especially was a ‘fiasco’.
At the end of the broadcast, Koch invited the American expert to continue his analysis in Stern’s New York office that afternoon. Rendell arrived with an assistant, an 80-power microscope and a dossier of genuine Hitler writing. The microscope showed ‘no examples of tracing or other glaring technical errors’, so Rendell tried a different technique. At his request, the Stern staff photocopied the twenty-two pages of the 1932 diary. ‘We began,’ he recalled, ‘the tedious process of snipping out all of the capital letters and pasting them on sheets of paper. In all we assembled separate collections of twenty-one letters, and an additional assortment of numbers. We compared the diary characters with authentic characters we had pasted up earlier….’
At 9 p.m., Rendell broke off his examination for the night. ‘It doesn’t look good,’ he warned Koch.
Across the Atlantic, in Koblenz, the President of the Bundesarchiv, Hans Booms, had been given four of the diaries by the Stern lawyer. He took them home with him to read. He was shocked by the content, but not in the way he had expected: it was indescribably dull. At midnight he turned to his wife. ‘I don’t care whether they are real or forged,’ he told her. ‘They are so boring, so totally meaningless, it hardly makes any difference.’
TWENTY-NINE
THE NEXT MORNING, 5 May, Stern appeared carrying the second instalment of its serialization of the diaries. The magazine, which had reverted to its normal habit of publishing on Thursday, devoted its cover and thirty-four inside pages to the story of Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland. Hitler was quoted as describing the Duke of Windsor in an entry for 1937 as ‘a glowing National Socialist’; Winston Churchill was dismissed in 1939 as ‘the greatest poisoner in London’. The issue was also notable for a ranting editorial by Peter Koch, written before he left for America, entitled ‘the Falsifiers’, smearing Stern’s critics as part of an internat
ional conspiracy founded upon envy. Irving and Maser were historians without reputations to lose; so too, now, was Eberhard Jaeckel for daring to criticize the magazine’s scoop. As for Trevor-Roper, Koch hinted that he had changed his mind partly because of his wartime connection with British intelligence. They were all contemptible. Stern welcomed the abuse of such people. ‘More enemies,’ wrote Koch, ‘more honour.’
It was a masterpiece of mistiming, for at that moment, disaster was racing towards Stern from at least five different directions: from Koblenz, where Booms had handed over the diaries to a team of scholars to check for errors; from the forensic laboratories in Berlin which had taken samples of material from three of the diaries; from the police laboratories in Wiesbaden, whose scientists had now been handed those three volumes and were running their own tests; from the forensic institute in St Gallen; and from New York, where, at 10 a.m., Kenneth Rendell had resumed his handwriting investigation.
Within three hours, Rendell was in a position to prove what he had suspected the moment he saw the diaries. The capital letters E, H and K in the 1932. volume had striking dissimilarities to the same letters in authentic examples of Hitler’s writing. ‘Koch was stunned when he saw my evidence laid out on a conference table,’ recalled Rendell. ‘This type of systematic analysis was unimpeachable.’ He wanted to know how the American could have concluded they were fakes so quickly, when three other handwriting experts had been convinced the diaries were genuine. ‘He had the impression’, said Rendell, ‘that all of the comparison documents provided by his magazine had come from the German Federal Archives. But I showed him that a careful reading of the authentication reports indicated that most examples were from the dossier of Stern and its reporter Gerd Heidemann.’
Selling Hitler Page 33
