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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 Führer'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."