Hitler Diaries

The Hitler Diaries were a series of sixty volumes of journals purportedly written by Adolf Hitler, but forged by Konrad Kujau between 1981 and 1983. The diaries were purchased in 1983 for 9.3 million Deutsche Marks by the West German news magazine Stern, which sold serialisation rights to several news organisations. One of the publications involved was The Sunday Times, who asked their independent director, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, to authenticate the diaries; he did so, pronouncing them genuine. At the press conference to announce the publication, Trevor-Roper announced that on reflection he had changed his mind, and other historians also raised questions concerning their validity. Rigorous forensic analysis, which had not been performed previously, quickly confirmed that the diaries were fakes.
Kujau, born and raised in East Germany, had a history of petty crime and deception. In the mid-1970s he began selling Nazi memorabilia which he had smuggled from the East, but found he could raise the prices by forging additional authentication details to associate ordinary souvenirs to the Nazi leaders. He began forging paintings by Hitler and an increasing number of notes, poems and letters, until he produced his first diary in the mid-to-late 1970s. The West German journalist with Stern who "discovered" the diaries and was involved in their purchase was Gerd Heidemann, who had an obsession with the Nazis. When Stern started buying the diaries, Heidemann stole a significant proportion of the money.
Kujau and Heidemann spent time in prison for their parts in the fraud, and several newspaper editors lost their jobs. The story of the scandal was the basis for the films Selling Hitler for the British channel ITV, the German film Schtonk!, and the television series Faking Hitler.

Background

Operation Seraglio

On 20 April 1945—Adolf Hitler's 56th birthday—Soviet troops were on the verge of taking Berlin and the Western Allies had already taken several German cities. Hitler's private secretary, Martin Bormann, initiated Operation Seraglio, a plan to evacuate the key and favoured members of Hitler's entourage from the Berlin bunker where they were based, the Führerbunker, to an Alpine command centre near Berchtesgaden—Hitler's retreat in southern Germany. Ten aeroplanes flew out from Gatow airfield under the overall command of General Hans Baur, Hitler's personal pilot. The final flight out was a Junkers Ju 352 transport plane, piloted by Major Friedrich Gundlfinger—on board were ten heavy chests under the supervision of Hitler's personal valet, Sergeant Wilhelm Arndt. The aeroplane crashed into the Heidenholz Forest, near the Czechoslovak border.
Some of the more useful parts of Gundlfinger's aeroplane were appropriated by locals before the police and SS cordoned off the crash site. When Baur told Hitler what had happened, the German leader expressed grief at the loss of Arndt, one of his most favoured servants, and added: "I entrusted him with extremely valuable documents which would show posterity the truth of my actions!" Apart from this quoted sentence, there is no indication of what was in the boxes. The last of the crash's two survivors died in April 1980, and Bormann had died after leaving the Berlin bunker following Hitler's suicide on 30 April 1945. In the decades following the war, the possibility of a hidden cache of private papers belonging to Hitler became, according to the journalist Robert Harris, a "tantalizing state of affairs was to provide the perfect scenario for forgery".

Konrad Kujau

was born in 1938 in Löbau, near Dresden, in what would become East Germany. His parents, a shoemaker and his wife, had both joined the Nazi Party in 1933. The boy grew up believing in the Nazi ideals and idolising Hitler; Germany's defeat and Hitler's suicide in 1945 did not temper his enthusiasm for the Nazi cause. He held a series of menial jobs until 1957, when a warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with the theft of a microphone from the Löbau Youth Club. He fled to Stuttgart, West Germany, and soon drifted into temporary work and petty crime. After running a dance bar during the early 1960s with his girlfriend, Edith Lieblang—whom he later married—Kujau began to create a fictional background for himself. He told people that his real name was Peter Fischer, changed his date of birth by two years, and altered the story of his time in East Germany. By 1963 the bar had begun to suffer financial difficulties, and Kujau started his career as a counterfeiter, forging 27 Deutsche Marks' worth of luncheon vouchers; he was caught and sentenced to five days in prison. On his release he and his wife formed the Lieblang Cleaning Company, although it provided little income for them. In March 1968, at a routine check at Kujau's lodgings, the police established he was living under a false identity and he was sent to Stuttgart's Stammheim Prison.
In 1970 Kujau visited his family in East Germany and discovered that many of the locals held Nazi memorabilia, contrary to the laws of the communist government. He saw an opportunity to buy the material cheaply on the black market, and make a profit in the West, where the increasing demand among Stuttgart collectors was raising memorabilia prices up to ten times the amount he would pay. The trade was illegal in East Germany, and the export of what were deemed items of cultural heritage was banned. Among the items smuggled out of East Germany were weapons.
In 1974 Kujau rented a shop into which he placed his Nazi memorabilia; the outlet also became the venue for late-night drinking sessions with friends and fellow collectors, including Wolfgang Schulze, who lived in the US and became Kujau's agent there. Kujau inflated the value of items in his shop by forging additional authentication details—for example a genuine First World War helmet, worth a few marks, became considerably more valuable after Kujau forged a note indicating that Hitler had worn it at Ypres in late October 1914. In addition to notes by Hitler, he produced documents supposedly handwritten by Bormann, Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels. He forged passable imitations of his subjects' genuine handwriting, but the rest of the work was crude: Kujau used modern stationery such as Letraset to create letterheads, and he tried to make his products look suitably old by pouring tea over them. Mistakes in spelling or grammar were relatively common, particularly when he forged in English; a supposed copy of the 1938 Munich Agreement between Hitler and Neville Chamberlain read, in part:

We regard the areement signet last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another againe.

In the mid-to-late 1970s Kujau, an able amateur artist, turned to producing paintings which he claimed were by Hitler, who had been an amateur artist as a young man. Having found a market for his forged works, Kujau created Hitler paintings depicting subjects his buyers expressed interest in, such as cartoons, nudes and men in action—all subjects that Hitler never painted, nor would want to paint, according to Charles Hamilton, a handwriting expert and author of books on forgery. These paintings were often accompanied by small notes, purportedly from Hitler. The paintings were profitable for Kujau. To explain his access to the memorabilia he invented several sources in East Germany, including a former Nazi general, the bribable director of a museum and his own brother, whom he re-invented as a general in the East German army.
Having found success in passing off his forged notes as those of Hitler, Kujau grew more ambitious and copied, by hand, the text from both volumes of Mein Kampf, even though the originals had been completed by typewriter. Kujau also produced an introduction to a third volume of the work. He sold these manuscripts to one of his regular customers, Fritz Stiefel, a collector of Nazi memorabilia who accepted them and many other Kujau products as genuine. Kujau also began forging a series of war poems by Hitler, which were so amateurish that Kujau later conceded that "a fourteen-year-old collector would have recognised it as a forgery".

Gerd Heidemann

was born in Hamburg in 1931. During the rise of Hitler his parents remained apolitical, but Heidemann, like many other young boys, joined the Hitler Youth. After the war he trained as an electrician, and pursued an interest in photography. He began working in a photographic laboratory and became a freelance photographer for the Deutsche Presse-Agentur and Keystone news agencies, as well as some local Hamburg newspapers. He had his first work published in Stern in 1951 and four years later joined the paper as a full-time member of staff. From 1961 he covered wars and hostilities across Africa and the Middle East; he became obsessed with these conflicts and other stories on which he worked, such as the search for the identity of the German writer B. Traven. Although he was an excellent researcher—his colleagues called him der Spürhund, the Bloodhound—he would not know when to stop investigating, which led to other writers having to finish the stories from large quantities of notes.
In January 1973, on behalf of Stern, Heidemann photographed the Carin II, a yacht that formerly belonged to Göring. The boat was in a poor state of repair and expensive to maintain, but Heidemann took a mortgage on his Hamburg flat and purchased it. While researching the history of the yacht, Heidemann interviewed Göring's daughter, Edda, after which the couple began an affair. Through this relationship and his ownership of the boat he was introduced to a circle of former Nazis. He began to hold parties on the Carin II, with the former SS generals Karl Wolff and Wilhelm Mohnke as the guests of honour. Wolff and Mohnke were witnesses at Heidemann's wedding to his third wife in 1979; the couple went on honeymoon to South America accompanied by Wolff, where they met more ex-Nazis, including Walter Rauff and Klaus Barbie, who were both wanted in the West for war crimes.
The purchase of the yacht caused Heidemann financial problems, and in 1976 he agreed terms with Gruner + Jahr, Sterns parent company, to produce a book based on the conversations he was having with the former soldiers and SS men. When the book went unwritten—the material provided by the former SS officers was not sufficiently interesting or verifiable for publication—Heidemann borrowed increasingly large sums from his employers to pay for the boat's upkeep. In June 1978 he advertised the boat for sale, asking 1.1 million DMs; he received no offers. Mohnke recommended that Heidemann speak to Jakob Tiefenthaeler, a Nazi memorabilia collector and a former member of the SS. Tiefenthaeler was not in a position to buy the yacht, but was happy to act as an agent; his endeavours did not produce a sale. Realising Heidemann's financial circumstances, Tiefenthaeler provided him with names of other collectors in the Stuttgart area. The journalist made a trip to the south of Germany and met Stiefel, who purchased some of Göring's effects.