Hitler Diaries

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In April 1983, the German news magazine Stern published extracts from what purported to be the diaries of Adolf Hitler, known as the Hitler Diaries, which were subsequently exposed as forgeries. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books as well as two "special issues" about Rudolf Hess' flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945.

Journalist Gerd Heidemann claimed to have discovered them, and submitted them to be reviewed by a number of experts in World War II history, notably the historians Hugh Trevor-Roper, Eberhard Jäckel and Gerhard Weinberg. At a press conference on April 25, 1983, the diaries were declared by these experts to be authentic. Even though they had not yet been properly examined by scientists, Trevor-Roper endorsed the diaries thus:

"I am now satisfied that the documents are authentic; that the history of their wanderings since 1945 is true; and that the standard accounts of Hitler's writing habits, of his personality and, even, perhaps, of some public events, may in consequence have to be revised"

Trevor-Roper was at that time a director of Times Newspapers, and although he denied acting dishonestly, there was a clear conflict of interests, because The Sunday Times had already paid a substantial sum for the rights to serialise the diaries in the UK.

Heidemann claimed to have received the diaries from East Germany, smuggled out by a Dr. Fischer. The diaries were claimed to be part of a consignment of documents recovered from an aircraft crash in Börnersdorf near Dresden in April 1945.

However within two weeks the Hitler Diaries were revealed as being "grotesquely superficial fakes" made on modern paper using modern ink and full of historical inaccuracies, the most obvious of which might have been the fact that the monogram on the title page read 'FH' instead of 'AH' (for Adolf Hitler) - even though in the old German typeface those letters looked strikingly similar. The content had been largely copied from a book of Hitler's speeches with additional 'personal' comments.

As a reaction, Stern editors Peter Koch and Felix Schmidt declared the end of their work with the magazine. The episode was much ridiculed in the UK media (particularly by the Sunday Times' rival newspapers), and historian Hugh Trevor-Roper's reputation was seriously damaged.

The diaries were actually written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger of Hitler's works. Both he and Heidemann went to trial in 1985 and were each sentenced to 42 months in prison.

In 1991 a television mini-series based on the Robert Harris book of the affair called Selling Hitler was produced for the British television channel ITV. A 1992 film by German director Helmut Dietl called Schtonk!, featuring fictional characterizations, mirrored many of the events.