Hitler Diaries

Hitler Diaries, a 60-volume set of diaries, attributed to Adolf Hitler, at the center of one of the greatest hoaxes of modern times. The diaries had actually been produced between 1981–83 by forger Konrad Kujau, who posed as a Stuttgart antiques dealer named Konrad Fischer, and who had previously forged and sold paintings also purportedly by Hitler. Believing the diaries were authentic—rescued from a plane that had crashed in East Germany at the end of the war and subsequently hidden away in a hayloft—the West German magazine Stern had bought the volumes for some $3.7 million in 1983 and then sold serial rights to various news outlets, including to Rupert Murdoch’s London Sunday Times for more than one million dollars. Embarrassingly, the Sunday Times had also, in 1968, spent a quarter million dollars trying to buy the “Mussolini Diaries,” which also proved to be forgeries.

On April 25, 1983, with its cover announcing “Hitler’s Diaries Discovered,” Stern anticipated demand with an extra two million copies. Simultaneously in London, the Sunday Times rushed into print at the order of Murdoch, despite the misgivings of the paper’s editor, Frank Giles. As well, even as the diaries were being published, however, their veracity was being questioned by the very historians who had authenticated them. None of the experts suffered more than Hugh Trevor-Roper, whose authorship of The Last Days of Hitler (1947) had brought him fame, fortune, and immense academic prestige. Although initially skeptical upon hearing of the diaries, his skepticism had melted upon seeing the sheer volume of discovered material and accepting Stern’s proclamation that the diaries’ paper had been chemically tested (which had not occurred), and so he declared his belief in the volumes’ authenticity. But by April 25, Trevor-Roper’s skepticism was aroused once again, especially after learning that Stern, despite its claims, really did not know the identity of the East German source supplying the volumes. Reporters at the news conference announcing the “discovery” were also highly skeptical. So with suspicion skyrocketing, and facing possible charges of illegally circulating Nazi propaganda, Stern submitted three of the volumes to federal West German agencies for examination, whereupon the diaries were definitively proclaimed fake. Hitler’s purported signature was not accurate, the paper and ink were postwar productions, the bindings had been artificially “aged” with tea, the entries were filled with Hitler’s known stylistic clichés, they referred to “facts” that simply were not available to the dictator, and they were riddled with factual errors. The forger had even mistakenly affixed the initials “FH” on the diary covers instead of “AH,” having been confused by the elaborate Gothic initials that he used. Moreover, former German officers who had served as aides to Hitler attested that Hitler did not keep a diary to begin with and, especially at the end of the war, would not have had time to do so, to say nothing of the fact that after the bombing assassination attempt on his life in 1944 Hitler had effectively lost the use of his writing hand.

Stern’s credibility was severely damaged by the scandal, and two of its top two editors were forced to resign. Murdoch’s Times had an editorial shakeup as well, with Giles being forced to resign, and demanded its money back from the German magazine. Trever-Roper’s reputation was permanently tainted by the scandal. Kujau, the forger, along with the Stern reporter, Gerd Heidemann, who had brokered the deal and skimmed money from Stern’s payment that was due to the forger, were both arrested, found guilty of theft and fraud, and sentenced to four and a half years in prison. Kujau confessed to the hoax, even proving his guilt by composing his confession in the style of Hitler’s handwriting.

Upon his release from prison after serving three years of his sentence, Kujau, who died in 2000, opened a gallery in Stuttgart that sold his “genuine forgeries” of paintings by Hitler, Rembrandt, Dali, Monet, Van Gogh, and other masters. He signed the paintings in both his name and in the name of the original artist, and the works sold for tens of thousands of dollars. So popular were his reproductions that counterfeit Kujaus of Kujau’s fakes soon hit the market.

Only in 2012 did Murdoch admit his error in pressing to publish the diaries, saying, “It was a major mistake and one I shall have to live with for the rest of my life.” In 2013, coincidentally the 30th anniversary of the scandal, Stern donated the Hitler diaries to the German Federal Archives, a spokesperson for which noted, perhaps wryly, “These documents are of great significance to past history and the history of the press.”