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»Stern« reporter Gerd Heidemann presents the forged Hitler diaries (1983)
Photo: A2677 Chris Pohlert/dpa
In the spring of 1983, one of the biggest media scandals in the Federal Republic occurred: The »Stern« presented the alleged diaries of Adolf Hitler - which soon turned out to be forgeries.
Now, almost 40 years later, the Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) is publishing the complete 60 volumes of the forgery on its website.
The books were once made by the art forger Konrad Kujau.
The "Stern" reporter Gerd Heidemann bought the recordings on behalf of his publisher.
They were supposed to be published gradually, which did not happen after the forgery was uncovered.
However, the NDR did not get the originals that the »Stern« used as a basis at the time, but resorted to copies.
According to a report in Die Zeit, these come from the estate of the British historian Gitta Sereny and from lawyers who were involved in the proceedings following the scandal.
The volumes now published by the NDR are accompanied by a scientific commentary by the political scientist Hajo Funke, as the broadcaster announced.
For the first time, the intention of the falsification to reinterpret and play down the history of the Nazis becomes "fully clear".
The work was not just a forgery to dupe the "Stern" but an attempt to rehabilitate Adolf Hitler.
In fact, this thesis has been published several times in the past, most notably by the historian Sereny.
"These diaries are an expression of Holocaust denial," said Funke now.
"They wanted to absolve Hitler of the worst crimes of the Nazis." The central narrative of the forged diaries is that Hitler allegedly knew nothing about the Holocaust.
The historian Heike Görtemaker said that the "fictitious Hitler" in the diaries had nothing to do with the "violent crimes of National Socialism."
"Kujau invents a positive Hitler figure here."
In numerous places, the forged "diaries" tell how Hitler tried to find a benevolent solution for the Jews.
At a time when the Holocaust had long been unleashed, the fictitious Hitler wrote that the Jews should be persuaded to emigrate quickly - or they should be found a "safe area in the occupied territories".
New technologies, new research possibilities
However, comparable quotations were already found in the works published in 1983, which quickly led to the historical nonsense being exposed as such.
Shortly after the alleged coup by his competitor, Rudolf Augstein suspected a falsification and wrote in SPIEGEL a few days after the Stern was published: "If someone wanted to falsify the Führer's experiences based on the events: He wouldn't have it any better, but he wouldn't have it any clumsier either can pull through.
Forging has long ceased to be an art.« And further: »So it goes without saying that Hitler wanted to find a place in the East for his beloved Jews, 'where these Jews can support themselves'.
Yes, we are supposed to believe all that.”
As early as the 1980s, Gitta Sereny formulated the thesis that there was a historical revisionist interest behind the diaries.
In 2002, for example, she wrote in an article for the "Tagesspiegel": One recognizes "continuous lines of political insight and, above all, the repeated attempt to demonstrate that Hitler was not a fanatical anti-Semite and was not involved in the decisions to carry out the genocide."
New technical developments also enabled the NDR to pursue this thesis further: According to the broadcaster, the handwriting of the forged diaries could now be made legible and researchable with the help of artificial intelligence.
It turns out that none of the terms related to the Holocaust appear.
Keywords like "final solution" or "gas chamber" were completely absent.
Kujau's connections to a right-wing extremist environment also indicate this intention: according to the NDR, the forger was "deeperly involved in a neo-Nazi environment than previously known".
According to NDR information, the original volumes of the forged diaries are locked in a safe belonging to the Hamburg publisher Gruner + Jahr.
In fact, in 2013, in consultation with the Federal Archives in Koblenz, the »Stern« announced that it wanted to hand over the diaries there: »We don’t want to push that away, we want to deal with it appropriately and, above all, objectively«, said Dominik Wichmann, editor-in-chief at the time.
But it did not get to that.
According to the Federal Archives, Gruner + Jahr wanted to deposit the forgeries as permanent loans, so they would have remained his property.
The Koblenz authority avoids such solutions.
The archivists want to have the last word when decisions are made about access to papers or their presentation in exhibitions.
The project then fell silent, also because the historical value of the forged Hitler diaries is manageable.
With a view to the Nazi era, they are a "source for nothing," says Michael Hollmann, President of the Federal Archives.
Hollmann sees in them, above all, evidence of the "German desire to be offered a human Hitler."
According to the archive, Gruner + Jahr then announced in 2016 that they did not want to hand over the documents after all.
reasons were not given
According to the NDR, the "star" does not respond to a request from the broadcaster about the new research.
The originals of the diaries were never released to the public to "prevent abuse".
bbr/klw/AFP
