Hitler Diaries

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"Hitler's Diaries Discovered" (Stern)

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's 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. Some point out that the most obvious fakery was the monogram on the title page reading 'FH' instead of 'AH' (for Adolf Hitler) - even though in the old German typeface those letters looked strikingly similar. However, 'FH' could conceivably stand for "Führerhauptquartier" ("Führer Headquarters"). 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 resigned from 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. Both he and Heidemann went to trial in 1985 and were each sentenced to 42 months in prison.

[edit] Reception in popular culture

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In 1991, Selling Hitler, a television mini-series based on the book of the same name by Robert Harris, was produced for the British television channel ITV. It was directed by Alastair Reid and starred Jonathan Pryce as Heidemann, Alexei Sayle as Kujau, Tom Baker as Stern editor Manfred Fischer, Alan Bennett as Trevor-Roper, Roger Lloyd Pack as David Irving, Richard Wilson as Henri Nannen and Barry Humphries as Rupert Murdoch.

A 1992 film by German director Helmut Dietl called Schtonk!, featuring fictional characterizations, mirrored many of the events.

In The Simpsons episode, "Lisa the Iconoclast," a museum curator calls the town founder's confessions to be "just as fake as the Howard Hughes will, the Hitler Diaries, or the Emancipation Retraction." (The third hoax being a joke.)

Berke Breathed's comic strip Bloom County satirized the incident by having Opus create The Elvis Diaries, the supposed lost diaries of the late Elvis Presley, after being pressured by Milo Bloom in order to gain funds for the Bloom County political party. A panel of fellow comic strip characters (including Dagwood Bumstead) declared them authentic, shouting in unison: "It's the real McCoy!". The diaries were eventually declared fraudulent after experts discovered they were written on "official Dukes of Hazzard stationary."

In the novel Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett describe the fictional prophecy book around which the novel's story revolves, "The Nice and Accurate Prophecies made the Hitler Diaries look, well, like a bunch of forgeries."

In the novel The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, Adrian becomes ecstatic at the news of the "find" (ironically reported in a newspaper page that was going to be used to clean up his dog's excrement) and ends up betting with Pandora that the diaries are genuine. Naturally he loses, claims he will save the newspaper for the original purpose and is saddened by not getting the chance to find out "what maniacs eat for breakfast and how they behave in private".

In the video game Castle Wolfenstein the Hitler Diaries are among the objects the player can find hidden in boxes. The player is immediately informed that the diaries are forgeries and they are automatically discarded.