Hitler's Diaries: Real or Fake?

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

West Germany's Stern battles skeptics and former allies

Though word of the story had spread for several days, the blood-red banner headline was startling. Proclaimed West Germany's raffish picture magazine Stern: HITLER'S DIARIES DISCOVERED. To trumpet its acquisition of 62 volumes dated from 1932 to 1945, the entire span of Hitler's Third Reich, Stern (circ. 1.87 million) summoned more than 200 print and television reporters from around the world to its art deco headquarters in Hamburg. There, at a self-congratulatory three-hour press conference, Editor in Chief Peter Koch announced: "I am 100% convinced that Hitler wrote every single word in those books."

At first Koch seemed to have a group of estimable allies: the London Sunday Times, whose parent News Corporation bought (for an estimated $400,000) publication rights to the diaries within much of the British Commonwealth; eminent historians including Hugh Trevor-Roper, a Hitler scholar and Times director, who said he was "satisfied that the documents are authentic"; and Newsweek, which voiced some skepticism but took the find seriously enough to report it in a 13-page cover story.

Almost from the moment the press conference began, however, Stern's claim of authenticity for the diaries was questioned by historians and derided by the press, most notably in Britain. The London Standard said that it had acquired "exclusive rights to the diaries of Genghis Khan," while the Daily Mirror gibed, "The secret diaries of Hitler's secret lover, Eva Braun, have been found in a secret compartment of her secret handbag." Joshed the New York Times in a gently doubting editorial: "We would not be a bit surprised to pass a bookstand one day soon and see something entitled Not the Hitler Diaries, perhaps written by Clifford Irving."

Although it gave the diaries cover treatment, Newsweek had backed away from purchasing North American rights to them. TIME inspected the diaries and turned them down, primarily because there was insufficient time to conduct its own investigation into their authenticity. A subheadline on Newsweek's cover asked ARE THEY GENUINE? and the magazine devoted several paragraphs of its story to quoting disbelievers. In advertising for the story in 30-sec. television commercials in twelve cities, however, Newsweek omitted that cautionary line entirely. In full-page ads in six major U.S. newspapers, any doubts the magazine may have had were limited to a question buried in the fifth paragraph: "Are they real?" Said Newsweek Editor Maynard Parker, who supervised the package: "The advertising department had earlier deadlines than ours, but I do not feel that the ads misrepresent what is in the magazine."

Aggravating the controversy was Stern's angry charge that Newsweek, after withdrawing a bid to publish the diaries, had unethically broken an agreement to keep secret the material that had been shown to Parker and a paid historical consultant in a Zurich bank vault. The major leak: the content of passages about Hitler's attitude toward Jews and the Holocaust, which Newsweek assessed, but which Stern had not planned to publish until next year. Said Stern's Koch: "That was a nice dirty trick. We would like to sue. We were cheated, and I guarantee Newsweek will regret what they did." By week's end, however, Koch conceded that Stern was not sure that its signed agreements were enforceable. Parker acknowledged that portions of the disputed story came from interviews with Newsweek's consultant at the Zurich sessions, Professor Gerhard Weinberg of the University of North Carolina. Said Parker: "No one said to us in the vault, 'Do not take notes.' I never saw Weinberg sign anything." Weinberg admits that he pledged his secrecy and was interviewed for the Newsweek story, but denies taking notes.

The turbulent week for Stern and the diaries began with a scuffle at the Hamburg press conference: idiosyncratic British Historian David Irving asked a "question" in which he labeled the diaries "pure fabrications" and charged that the diaries' ink had not been subjected to chemical tests. As photographers jostled each other to get pictures of Irving, who started his own miniconference, Stern security aides led him away while he shouted, "Ink! Ink! Ink!" Irving, a Hitler biographer with professed "ultrarightist" political views, conceded he had been hired as a consultant by another publication, Bild am Sonntag (circ. 2.6 million).

Far more damaging to Stern than Irving's melodramatic outburst were the quieter disclaimers made by two historians who had been invited to the conference to authenticate the diaries. Weinberg, though he had tentatively judged the documents to be real, called on Stern to bring in handwriting analysts and teams of scholars to check the diaries page by page. Cambridge Don Trevor-Roper, who was sent to Berlin by the British government in 1945 to verify the circumstances of Hitler's death and who wrote the definitive account of the Fuehrer's final days, retreated, more or less gracefully, from his early approval. He explained that his endorsement was based substantially upon the sheer mass of the material, including letters, personal papers, and paintings and drawings said to be by Hitler's own hand. Supporting that evidence was his belief that the Stern editors had established a direct connection between the archive and the April 1945 crash of a plane that is reported by eyewitnesses to have been carrying Hitler's personal documents. Said Trevor-Roper: "I must have misunderstood: the link between the airplane and the archive is not absolutely established. Therefore, we must rely on the evidence of the contents of the documents, which have not been fully checked." Two days later, in a BBC radio interview, Trevor-Roper declared, "I am now convinced that some documents in that collection were forgeries." At week's end he said of the entire cache, "They are forgeries until the opposite is proven."

By then, a host of experts in varied fields had raised key questions about the documents' authenticity. The four main grounds for skepticism:

> There is no known mention of Hitler's ever keeping a diary. His closest aides reported many times that he rarely wrote anything himself; indeed he dictated most personal letters. Said James O'Donnell, author of The Bunker, an account of Hitler's final days: "It is beyond possibility that Hitler would have kept diaries without any of his secretaries, valets and military assistants knowing about it."

> To some graphology experts, the penmanship in sample diary pages that were made available seems to lack the bold sweep of Hitler's hand and to understate some of his characteristic quirks, like curling the end of each line down and to the right (see box). Said Charles Hamilton, a noted New York City autograph dealer and author of a forthcoming book called Autographs of the Third Reich: "The genuine writing is full of power and force. In the diary samples that I saw, all the letters shake, as though they were drawn, not written."

> Hitler suffered from a progressive and intermittently acute palsy of both hands, and after 1943 was observed writing only in pencil, not ink as in the diaries. Moreover, he was injured in a July 20, 1944, bombing attempt on his life, and both of his forearms were swollen and swathed in bandages or compresses; yet the diaries include an entry apparently written that day. Historian Irving, in his new translation of The Secret Diaries of Hitler's Doctor, to be published next month, quotes Physician Theo Morell as saying, in a representative entry from Oct. 30,1944, "The Fuehrer confided in me that after this renewed attack of pain the trembling in his leg and hands was much more violent." Pulitzer-Prizewinning Historian John Toland concurred with Irving's disbelief. Said Toland: "Witnesses refer to 'Hitler's right hand, which is useless.' "

> The documents seem too humble and haphazard for Hitler: the bindings vary, only one of the covers is embossed with the gold letters AH, and most are bound in black imitation leather. Scoffs Nicolaus von Below, Hitler's Luftwaffe adjutant: "Imitation leather? For Hitler there was real leather or nothing."

In addition, three historians claimed last week that they had been shown, months or years ago, apparently spurious Hitler-related items that they now contend came from Stern's supposedly top-secret discovery. Joachim Fest, writer of book and film biographies of Hitler and a co-publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, says, "A not insignificant part of what I was shown was convincing, but doubt won out." Irving said he had seen what he calls a forged letter, supposedly written to Hitler by his Deputy Chancellor Rudolf Hess. Professor Eberhard Jaeckel of Stuttgart University lost interest in the materials he was shown when a verse, supposedly written in Hitler's own hand in 1916, turned out to have been authored by Nazi Poet Herybert Menzel in 1936.

Stern Editor Koch, who flew to the U.S. to defend the Hitler diaries' authenticity, waved aside all objections to what he called "the journalistic scoop of the post-World War II period." But he admitted that his magazine had relied for verification almost entirely on the assertions of Reporter Gerd Heidemann, 51, a 31-year veteran of Stern who claims he uncovered the diaries after a four-year search through East and West Germany, Spain and South America.

Heidemann's tale began on the morning of April 21,1945, at a Schonwalde airstrip, seven miles from Hitler's bunker in Berlin. After a frenzied scene of chaos that delayed top-priority military flights, ten airplanes carrying staff members and cargo from Hitler's last command post took off for Salzburg. Nine made the trip safely; the tenth, flying in radio silence for security reasons, crashed. At least two people who were on the scene believe that the downed plane carried Hitler's personal papers. According to the Nazi leader's personal pilot, Hans Baur, the Fuehrer was enraged when he learned of the crash: "That was to be my testimony for posterity." Heidemann, by routine checking on the grave sites of former military aides, learned that the pilot was buried in Bornersdorf, near Dresden, in what is now East Germany. There Heidemann found the grave, the crash site and, he says, evidence that at least some of the cargo may have survived.

From that point, however, Heidemann's story becomes murky. He will not say where or when he located the documents, how he obtained them, who had harbored them and where, or how he proved to himself that they were genuine. In a video documentary that Stern showed at its press conference, Heidemann made a strange error: he said he went to South America at the beginning of the 1980s, among other reasons, to look for Hitler's former secretary Martin Bormann. But Bormann had been declared dead in 1973 after his remains were found in West Berlin and identified partly through reporting by Heidemann's former Stern colleague Jochen von Lang. Heidemann was unavailable to explain the apparent discrepancy; he has declined all requests for interviews. Most troubling to fellow journalists, Heidemann refused to disclose his sources, even on a confidential basis, to his editors at Stem. But Editor Koch professed to have no worries. Said he: "We have every reason to trust Heidemann thoroughly."

Heidemann joined Stern in 1951, just three years after it was founded. A photographer turned self-styled investigative reporter, Heidemann found the reclusive mystery writer B. Traven (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) in Mexico and former Gestapo Official Klaus Barbie in Bolivia. But he is far from a star in Hamburg, West Germany's de facto journalistic capital. Says one fellow reporter: "He is a perfectly ordinary reporter, perhaps a little gullible but otherwise bland." Heidemann has one colorful trait: a passion for Nazi memorabilia. He sold his house in Hamburg a decade ago to buy a yacht that formerly belonged to Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Goering, then used it for entertaining aging former Nazi officials. Several years ago Heidemann bought letters purportedly exchanged between Mussolini and Churchill, but he withdrew them from planned publication when told that they were forgeries.

Heidemann has insisted that disclosure of his sources might endanger their lives. If they happen to be in East Germany, and if the diaries are authentic, the argument is persuasive: the East Berlin government would not be expected to look kindly on the smuggling out of materials of such historic, and commercial, value. Oddly, however, when NBC Reporter Jim Bittermann sought permission to go to Bornersdorf last week to follow Heidemann's story, he and his camera crew got a surprise: there were no delays, no red tape, and no supervision by officials when they interviewed residents. The townspeople offered conflicting and inconclusive recollections of the crash. Said Bittermann: "At least as curious as the villagers' stories is why the East German government wanted them told."

If the diaries are fraudulent, there is no shortage of theories about who produced them and why. Money would be motive enough. The market in Hitleriana is booming: an ordinary Hitler signature on a Wehrmacht officer's commission papers sells for $600 in the U.S.

But most of those who postulated that the Hitler diaries are fake believe the motive would have been political. The most common theory, voiced by Jaeckel and Historian Werner Maser: the diaries may have been produced in an alleged Nazi memorabilia "forgery factory" in Potsdam, East Germany, for cash and for advancement of Soviet political aims. The two major "revelations" in the first installment of the diaries published by Stern are that Hitler approved Deputy Chancellor Hess's 1941 trip to Britain to propose a treaty and that he let the British escape at Dunkirk in hopes of persuading them to make a separate peace. Both claims have been forcefully challenged by historians, who noted that on the very day that Hess arrived to propose a German-British pact, Hitler's Luftwaffe planes bombed London's Houses of Parliament. The revisionist versions in the diaries coincide with the Soviet version of World War II: an untrustworthy Britain, more at ease with fascism than with Communism, primed to betray its alliance with Stalin. On Saturday, however, the Soviet news agency TASS dismissed the diaries as "a dirty falsification" designed to promote fascism.

The clamor for verification will surely continue until Stern opens the Hitler archive to detailed, patient analysis by scholars. Then, aided by the published record, historians would be able to reach a clearer idea of how much the 62 volumes could contribute to the historical record. If the diaries are authentic, their provenance has been tainted by Stern's mishandling of their verification. Asked to believe the all but impossible and denied the opportunity for proof, academics and most of the press rightly balked. Trevor-Roper summed up, more in sorrow than in anger: "As a historian, I regret that the normal process of historical verification has been subordinated, perhaps necessarily, to the requirements of a journalistic scoop."

--By William A. Henry III.

Reported by Gary Lee/Hamburg and Melissa Ludtke/New York

With reporting by Gary Lee/Hamburg, Melissa Ludtke/New York This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.