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Stern Editor Koch, who flew to the U.S. to defend the Hitler diaries' authenticity, waved aside all objections to what he called "the journalistic scoop of the post-World War II period." But he admitted that his magazine had relied for verification almost entirely on the assertions of Reporter Gerd Heidemann, 51, a 31-year veteran of Stern who claims he uncovered the diaries after a four-year search through East and West Germany, Spain and South America.
Heidemann's tale began on the morning of April 21,1945, at a Schonwalde airstrip, seven miles from Hitler's bunker in Berlin. After a frenzied scene of chaos that delayed top-priority military flights, ten airplanes carrying staff members and cargo from Hitler's last command post took off for Salzburg. Nine made the trip safely; the tenth, flying in radio silence for security reasons, crashed. At least two people who were on the scene believe that the downed plane carried Hitler's personal papers. According to the Nazi leader's personal pilot, Hans Baur, the Führer was enraged when he learned of the crash: "That was to be my testimony for posterity." Heidemann, by routine checking on the grave sites of former military aides, learned that the pilot was buried in Bornersdorf, near Dresden, in what is now East Germany. There Heidemann found the grave, the crash site and, he says, evidence that at least some of the cargo may have survived.
From that point, however, Heidemann's story becomes murky. He will not say where or when he located the documents, how he obtained them, who had harbored them and where, or how he proved to himself that they were genuine. In a video documentary that Stern showed at its press conference, Heidemann made a strange error: he said he went to South America at the beginning of the 1980s, among other reasons, to look for Hitler's former secretary Martin Bormann. But Bormann had been declared dead in 1973 after his remains were found in West Berlin and identified partly through reporting by Heidemann's former Stern colleague Jochen von Lang. Heidemann was unavailable to explain the apparent discrepancy; he has declined all requests for interviews. Most troubling to fellow journalists, Heidemann refused to disclose his sources, even on a confidential basis, to his editors at Stem. But Editor Koch professed to have no worries. Said he: "We have every reason to trust Heidemann thoroughly."
Heidemann joined Stern in 1951, just three years after it was founded. A photographer turned self-styled investigative reporter, Heidemann found the reclusive mystery writer B. Traven (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) in Mexico and former Gestapo Official Klaus Barbie in Bolivia. But he is far from a star in Hamburg, West Germany's de facto journalistic capital. Says one fellow reporter: "He is a perfectly ordinary reporter, perhaps a little gullible but otherwise bland." Heidemann has one colorful trait: a passion for Nazi memorabilia. He sold his house in Hamburg a decade ago to buy a yacht that formerly belonged to Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Göring, then used it for entertaining aging former Nazi officials. Several years ago Heidemann bought letters purportedly exchanged between Mussolini and Churchill, but he withdrew them from planned publication when told that they were forgeries.