right|thumbnail|alt=The front cover of Stern magazine. The image is of three black notebooks; on the top book are the gold letters FH in gothic script. The Stern logo—an irregular six-pointed white star on a red background is in the top left of the cover, next to the word "stern". At the bottom are the words in German "Hitlers Tagebücher endeckt" ("Hitler's diaries discovered").|"Hitler's diaries discovered". [[Stern (magazine)|Sterns front page on 28 April 1983]]

The Hitler Diaries () were a series of sixty volumes of journals purportedly written by Adolf Hitler, but forged by Konrad Kujau between 1981 and 1983. The diaries were purchased in 1983 for 9.3 million Deutsche Marks (£2.3 million or $3.7 million) by the West German news magazine Stern, which sold serialisation rights to several news organisations. One of the publications involved was The Sunday Times, who asked their independent director, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, to authenticate the diaries; he did so, pronouncing them genuine. At the press conference to announce the publication, Trevor-Roper announced that on reflection he had changed his mind, and other historians also raised questions concerning their validity. Rigorous forensic analysis, which had not been performed previously, quickly confirmed that the diaries were fakes.

Kujau, born and raised in East Germany, had a history of petty crime and deception. In the mid-1970s he began selling Nazi memorabilia which he had smuggled from the East, but found he could raise the prices by forging additional authentication details to associate ordinary souvenirs to the Nazi leaders. He began forging paintings by Hitler and an increasing number of notes, poems and letters, until he produced his first diary in the mid-to-late 1970s. The West German journalist with Stern who "discovered" the diaries and was involved in their purchase was Gerd Heidemann, who had an obsession with the Nazis. When Stern started buying the diaries, Heidemann stole a significant proportion of the money.

Kujau and Heidemann spent time in prison for their parts in the fraud, and several newspaper editors lost their jobs. The story of the scandal was the basis for the films Selling Hitler (1991) for the British channel ITV, the German film Schtonk! (1992), and the television series Faking Hitler (2021).

Background

Operation Seraglio

thumb|left|upright|alt=A black-and-white photograph of the head and shoulders of a man in his mid-forties, looking to the right of the viewer. He is wearing a Second World War German military uniform.|General [[Hans Baur, Hitler's personal pilot]]

On 20 April 1945—Adolf Hitler's 56th birthday—Soviet troops were on the verge of taking Berlin and the Western Allies had already taken several German cities. Hitler's private secretary, Martin Bormann, initiated Operation Seraglio, a plan to evacuate the key and favoured members of Hitler's entourage from the Berlin bunker where they were based, the Führerbunker, to an Alpine command centre near Berchtesgaden—Hitler's retreat in southern Germany. Ten aeroplanes flew out from Gatow airfield under the overall command of General Hans Baur, Hitler's personal pilot. The final flight out was a Junkers Ju 352 transport plane, piloted by Major Friedrich Gundlfinger—on board were ten heavy chests under the supervision of Hitler's personal valet, Sergeant Wilhelm Arndt. The aeroplane crashed into the Heidenholz Forest, near the Czechoslovak border.

Some of the more useful parts of Gundlfinger's aeroplane were appropriated by locals before the police and SS cordoned off the crash site. When Baur told Hitler what had happened, the German leader expressed grief at the loss of Arndt, one of his most favoured servants, and added: "I entrusted him with extremely valuable documents which would show posterity the truth of my actions!" Apart from this quoted sentence, there is no indication of what was in the boxes. The last of the crash's two survivors died in April 1980, and Bormann had died after leaving the Berlin bunker following Hitler's suicide on 30 April 1945. In the decades following the war, the possibility of a hidden cache of private papers belonging to Hitler became, according to the journalist Robert Harris, a "tantalizing state of affairs [that] was to provide the perfect scenario for forgery".

Konrad Kujau

Konrad Kujau was born in 1938 in Löbau, near Dresden, in what would become East Germany. His parents, a shoemaker and his wife, had both joined the Nazi Party in 1933. The boy grew up believing in the Nazi ideals and idolising Hitler; Germany's defeat and Hitler's suicide in 1945 did not temper his enthusiasm for the Nazi cause. He held a series of menial jobs until 1957, when a warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with the theft of a microphone from the Löbau Youth Club. He fled to Stuttgart, West Germany, and soon drifted into temporary work and petty crime. After running a dance bar during the early 1960s with his girlfriend, Edith Lieblang—whom he later married—Kujau began to create a fictional background for himself. He told people that his real name was Peter Fischer, changed his date of birth by two years, and altered the story of his time in East Germany. By 1963 the bar had begun to suffer financial difficulties, and Kujau started his career as a counterfeiter, forging 27 Deutsche Marks' (DM) worth of luncheon vouchers; he was caught and sentenced to five days in prison. On his release he and his wife formed the Lieblang Cleaning Company, although it provided little income for them. In March 1968, at a routine check at Kujau's lodgings, the police established he was living under a false identity and he was sent to Stuttgart's Stammheim Prison.

thumb|alt=A man in his fifties, balding and portly, is shown smiling to the left of the camera.|[[Konrad Kujau in 1992]]

In 1970 Kujau visited his family in East Germany and discovered that many of the locals had Nazi memorabilia, contrary to the laws of the communist government. He saw an opportunity to buy the material cheaply on the black market, and make a profit in the West, where the increasing demand among Stuttgart collectors was raising memorabilia prices up to ten times the amount he would pay. The trade was illegal in East Germany, and the export of what were deemed items of cultural heritage was banned. Among the items smuggled out of East Germany were weapons. These turned out to be forgeries undertaken by an Italian mother and daughter, Amalia and Rosa Panvini. One of the Sunday Times journalists involved in the story, Brian MacArthur, later explained why so many experienced journalists and businessmen "were so gullible" about the authenticity of the diaries:

<blockquote>...&nbsp; the discovery of the Hitler diaries offered so tempting a scoop that we all wanted to believe they were genuine. Once hoist with a deal, moreover, we had to go on believing in their authenticity until they were convincingly demonstrated as forgeries.&nbsp;... The few of us who were in on the secret fed in the adrenalin: we were going to write the most stunning scoop of our careers.

See also

  • Conversations with Hitler, a book by Hermann Rauschning

Notes and references

Notes

References

Sources

  • Norddeutscher Rundfunk's text database of the hoax diaries