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Stern's management had accepted Heidemann's tales, and his purchases, with an amazing lack of skepticism or even normal caution. As its editors conceded last week, the magazine took possession of the first diaries more than two years ago. Yet Stern waited until after publication to subject the documents to the routine chemical tests that proved them fakes. Stern did consult handwriting experts, but the "authentic" Hitler artifacts supplied to the analysts for crosschecking may also have been forgeries: they were obtained from Heidemann's personal collection and thus, possibly, from Fischer. In self-defense, Heidemann repeatedly emphasized his editors' carelessness. Said he: "I only delivered the diaries. What the publishers and the editorial board do with them is not my business."
The affair of the faked diaries has raised grave questions of journalistic duty. Stern's staff concluded, in a dictum that had unique emotional force in West Germany, though less practical application elsewhere: "Even if the diaries were genuine, publication in Stern should have been forbidden in consideration of the victims of Nazi power." In the U.S., historians and social scientists labeled the diaries legitimate news, if authentic, but condemned some coverage as sensational. Concluded Yale University Psychohistorian Robert Jay Lifton: "In the melodrama unfolding before us, responsibility to history or to profound moral questions was lost in the intensity of commercial competition."
—By William A. Henry III. Reported by Gary Lee/Bonn