Condemnation and a new suspect in the Hitler diary fraud
Doubts about authenticity are over, but debate about how and why the faked Adolf Hitler diaries came to be published has grown ever more bitter. Two top editors have resigned from Stem, the West German photo weekly that purveyed the forgeries; the reporter who acquired the 62 volumes for the magazine was dismissed and sued for fraud; the Nazi memento dealer who allegedly supplied the diaries and who was suspected of fabricating them surrendered to police in Hamburg. After devoting 80 pages in two previous issues to Hitler, Stern offered a one-page apology to readers. On the cover of the magazine was a cherubic infant. Yet if the picture subliminally hinted at a rebirth of the magazine's self-respect, the image was premature.
Journalistic and ethical standards at Stern and other publications that ballyhooed the Hitler diaries were denounced with new force last week on both sides of the Atlantic, perhaps nowhere more fiercely than within Stern itself. Much of the 210-member editorial staff was obsessed with investigating the diaries fiasco. Others sought only to place the embarrassment behind them. Many called for the resignation of Henri Nannen, 69, who has been Stern's publisher since the magazine was founded in 1948. Others hinted that blame extends high into Stern's parent corporation, Gruner & Jahr, and even into the holding company, Bertelsmann AG, a publishing conglomerate (1982 sales: $2.4 billion) that includes Bantam Books in the U.S.
To deflect the discontent, Nannen named two outsiders, Business Journalist Johannes Gross and Television Executive Peter Scholl-Latour, as co-publishers and editors in chief. The magazine's management also returned $200,000 that had been paid by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for British and Commonwealth publication rights. The placatory efforts backfired. In a statement, some 200 editorial employees labeled the episode "a severe blow against 35 years of Stern credibility." About 100 staffers staged a sit-in at Stern's offices to protest the hiring of Gross and Scholl-Latour because their jobs would merge business and editorial control and because they supposedly would not sustain the magazine's liberal tradition.
In West Germany, leading journalists belittled Stern. Said Lothar Loewe, director of West Berlin's TV station SFB: "The whole affair is the result of checkbook journalism, of which Stern is the worst offender." In a front-page editorial in Hamburg's prestigious weekly newspaper Die Zeit, Editor Theo Sommer said, "When lightweights are combined with heavy money, the controlling responsibilities in journalism are easily lost."
Criticism also hit, with less force, at publications that obtained rights to the diaries, including the London Sunday Times and the magazines Paris Match in France and Panorama in Italy, or that proclaimed the volumes a historic find, as Newsweek did in a May 2 cover story ("Hitler's Secret Diaries").