(5 of 11)
Heidemann, with his wife Gina at his side, was quizzed by Stern executives in one session that ended at 3:15 in the morning. Emerging, she said about the collapse of Stern's publishing plans, "It's terrible. But no matter what happens, we will always believe in the diaries." She charged that the West German officials who had declared the books fraudulent were really trying to "suppress the truth." She and her husband have friends among former Nazi officers. When they were married, two former Nazi generals served as official witnesses. "It would have been a joy to tell the reality about the Führer," she said.
The forgery had been detected, but the pursuit of the perpetrators and their motives would certainly continue. The financial profits clearly had to be a powerful incentive for such a reckless project. A desire to create some sympathy for the entire Nazi movement and to humanize Hitler seemed likely aims too. But the sad saga of the truly incredible diaries raised troubling questions about how such an implausible scheme had been taken so seriously, however briefly. The mere appearance of the volumes should have warned even the most gullible observer: all 62 books precisely alike, despite their span of 13 years; all their pages unstained, unworn, although they were claimed to be up to half a century old; their materials cheap, though ostensibly purchased by a ruler who loved richly bound books and could well afford the best.
For all the ignominy and chagrin suffered by Stern and the other participating publications, they could take some solace from the fact that they are not the first to be burned. In this century alone, there have been at least three comparable publishing sensations, each highly hyped and then discredited amid an international uproar.
The first, in 1928, led the staid Atlantic Monthly to produce a series of articles on "Lincoln the Lover," based on a cache of newly found letters: three ostensibly from Abraham Lincoln to Ann Rutledge, two from her to him and four written by Lincoln about her. The correspondence all too neatly verified the unsubstantiated legend that in their early twenties Lincoln and Rutledge had been sweethearts. Looking back after Rutledge had died in 1835, Lincoln in an 1848 letter to John Calhoun, an Illinois acquaintance, allegedly wrote: "Like a ray of sunshine and as brief—she flooded my life, and at times like today when I traverse past paths I see this picture before me—fever burning the light from her dear eyes, urging me to fight for the right."
The Atlantic editor who accepted this schmaltz as authentic was Ellery Sedgwick, then 56. One of the most respected men of letters of his day, he was married to a Cabot and had graduated from Groton and Harvard. The conspirator who befuddled his judgment was Wilma Frances Minor, then 42, an attractive former actress and a columnist for the San Diego Union. She claimed that the letters had been handed down through the family