Hitler's Forged Diaries

(2 of 11)

so many years. They had been recovered, Heidemann claimed, from the crash of an airplane near Dresden on April 21, 1945. It was one of ten aircraft carrying Hitler's staff and priority cargo from the bunker in Berlin where he killed himself nine days later. The diaries, remarkably preserved, had been pulled from the wreckage, reported Heidemann, and concealed in a nearby hayloft.

Historians and Hitler biographers quickly assailed the diaries as unbelievable. Hitler never liked to keep his own notes, they said. He dictated his thoughts to secretaries. The testimony of aides and servants revealed no knowledge that he kept a diary and indicated that his daily schedule left precious little time for private jottings. His right hand trembled from progressively acute palsy and, after a 1944 assassination attempt, his arm was at least temporarily incapacitated by bomb wounds.

Stern stuck stubbornly to its story. The magazine's claims drew heavily on the reputation of Cambridge Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (The Last Days of Hitler), a director of the Times Newspapers Ltd. He examined some of the books in a Swiss bank and wrote:

"When I turned the pages of those volumes, my doubts gradually dissolved. I am now satisfied they are authentic." He said he was prepared "to stake my reputation" on their authenticity. Newsweek Consultant Gerhard Weinberg of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill went to the same bank vault and reported that "my preliminary feeling was that they looked genuine." But he had reservations and said that much more study would be needed to be certain.

The criticism of Stern's claims rose rather than abated. Trevor-Roper developed second thoughts. "I must have misunderstood," he said. "The link between the airplane and the archive is not absolutely established." Finally, he added: "I am now convinced that some documents in that collection were forgeries."

Alarmed editorial employees of the magazine gathered in Stern's modern concrete office building in Hamburg. They grilled their top executives about the source of the diaries during a tease two-hour meeeting. "First we publish, then we authenticate!" protested one angry journalist. The magazine's editorial board relented slightly, ordering that some of the volumes be sent to experts at WestGermany's Federal Archives in Coblenz.

Stern's Editor in Chief Peter Koch refused to retreat. He flew to New York, carrying the first and last volumes in the series. He displayed them on national TV, defending them as genuine. Koch airily told American reporters: "I expected the uproar and expected that many incompetent people would denounce the diaries as fakes. This is because every other publishing house will envy our story and every historian will envy us."

Stern's presses rolled on with the first installment of the diaries, a segment ostensibly showing that Hitler had approved the celebrated solo flight of his trusted deputy Rudolf Hess to England as war raged in 1941. Next day, Stern's great coup was blitzed.

West Germany's Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann announced in a terse statement that "the Federal Archive is convinced that documents they were given did not come from Hitler's hand, but were produced in the postwar period."