The fake diaries of Adolf Hitler, which sparked outrage when they were published as genuine 40 years ago, are to be displayed for public viewing at the national archives in Germany.
The counterfeit journals were published by Germany’s Stern magazine and sold around the world, including for serialisation in the Sunday Times. They will be handed to the state for preservation, Bertelsmann publishing house which owns them, said.
In 1983, the magazine, published by Hamburg-based Gruner + Jahr, caused an international sensation after releasing excerpts from the 60-volume diaries, despite early misgivings about their authenticity.
The diaries were later found to be forged after forensic analysis of the subject matter, as well as the ink and paper on which they were written. This triggered a humiliating admission by Stern a week after publication that it had been fooled by the seller into buying them for 9.3m deutschmarks.
Rupert Murdoch, as owner of the Sunday Times, was personally involved in the international bidding war to secure the rights, flying to Zurich to strike the deal. He later told the 2012 Leveson inquiry he would never live down the error. He said: “It was a massive mistake I made and I will have to live with it for the rest of my life.”
Michael Hollmann, president of Germany’s federal archives, described the diaries as “a shameless attempt to give the brutal crimes of National Socialism a human veneer, which struck a chord in 1980’s society.” The diaries will be on permanent display in the city of Koblenz, in western Germany, and be available to academics and the general public in accordance with the law.
Among the “revelations” in the diaries were descriptions of the Nazi leader’s halitosis and flatulence, and throwaway remarks about his girlfriend Eva Braun’s puppies. They also included expressions of exasperation towards “the English” and then prime minister Winston Churchill, as well as references indicating Hitler’s apparent lack of knowledge of persecution of the Jews, and his praise of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin for having purged his officer corps.
Photograph: Thomas Grimm/AP
The diaries were produced by Konrad Kujau, a petty criminal who had started out as a counterfeiter by faking luncheon vouchers. He went on to have a successful career as a forger of Nazi memorabilia, including paintings he said had been created by Hitler. Kujau wrote the dairies between 1981 and 1983, selling them to the West German journalist Gerd Heidemann, who was known for his obsession with Nazi artefacts. Both men spent time behind bars for their roles in the fraud and a number of newspaper editors lost their jobs over the scandal.
The reputation of English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who specialised in Nazi history and was an independent director of the Times, was damaged after he declared the works to be authentic. Writing in the Times in April 1983, he said he believed that the accounts of some historic events might even have to be revised as a result of the diaries. But at the press conference to advertise their publication, Trevor-Roper said he was no longer convinced they were genuine. Other historians had also expressed their doubts about them.
One of the reasons the diaries were widely believed to be authentic was the fact they were so extensive. Trevor-Roper later said: “Who, I asked myself, would forge sixty volumes when six would have served his purpose?”
When he later backtracked, an editorial in the Guardian praised him for showing “moral courage” by admitting his mistake.
Among the early doubters was the Holocaust denier David Irving, who asked how Hitler had managed to write his diary after his arm had been injured in the unsuccessful 20 July 1944 plot to kill him. Another doubter said it was a puzzle that Hitler, who had suffered from palsy and wrote in pencil as a result, had penned the diaries in ink.
The Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in German has been given the task of examining the documents and their reception in detail. Bertelsmann publishing house said it hopes to achieve the “most objective picture” of them as possible. It particularly wants to understand how they were taken so seriously that they ended up being published in Stern, the leading current affairs magazine at that time.
Part of the investigation will include examining Stern’s founder, Henri Nannen, who launched the magazine in 1948, and was one of its editor in chiefs until 1983. Last year, fresh light was thrown on the role he played in the Nazi era, which was more involved than previously believed. An investigative documentary by German broadcaster NDR pinpointed the role of Nannen, who died in 1996, in the distribution of antisemitic leaflets during the second world war.
As a result of the investigation, Germany’s renowned Nannen prize for journalism was last year renamed Stern prize. It is due to be awarded this week under its new name for the second time.
Kujau’s handwriting, in old gothic script, resembled Hitler’s, but he was exposed by several historical mistakes and crude methods such as using tea to make the documents appear aged, and in at least once instance, using poor English. He started on the project in the 1970s, inspired by the fact that he was able to command high prices for other forged items of Nazi memorabilia, including letters and poems. He had convinced buyers that the items had been in the possession of leading Nazis. Kujau expressed surprise at the gullibility of his buyers, including the journalist Heidemann, and he thought that they were desperate to believe the items were real.
Heidemann’s jail term was linked to him stealing a large amount of the diary fee and pocketing it for himself.
Last month, the forged diaries were published in full by the German publisher März and posted online by the broadcaster NDR.
