Hitler's false diaries: the entire volumes of one of the biggest journalistic scandals in history are published

On April 25, 1983, the German magazine

called the world's media to a press conference to announce an extraordinary discovery: its star reporter had discovered Adolf Hitler's personal diaries and was preparing to publish their contents.

There were dozens of volumes, supposedly lost in a plane crash at the end of April 1945 that someone had suddenly decided to bring to light.

The sensational exclusive went around the world.

Photos of the journalist, Gerd Heidemann, holding up the notebooks were published in media around the globe.

More information

The scandal of Hitler's diaries cost 'Stern' 1,140 million pesetas

Already then those images could have inspired some suspicion.

The initials engraved on the cover of the notebooks were not AH, but FH, because, as it turned out later, the forger who made them confused the two Gothic letters.

only published two installments: in just two weeks the diaries were proven to be false.

He had written them at top speed by a forger and petty criminal who frequented neo-Nazi circles named Konrad Kujau.

The scandal almost ended the magazine, founded in 1948 in Hamburg and which had 1.8 million readers.

Image of one of Hitler's fake diaries displayed at the Stern headquarters in Hamburg in 2018 during the celebration of Journalism Day.

picture alliance (picture alliance via Getty Image)

One of the biggest journalistic frauds of the 20th century returns to the present day on the 40th anniversary of the first installment of the series in Stern

which he titled in large red letters "Hitler's diaries discovered".

The NDR public television has digitized the notebooks and has published their full content, with a search engine that allows you to check day by day and by keyword what the Nazi dictator supposedly recorded.

Curiously, there is no trace of the words Auschwitz, or

(extermination of the Jews).

The texts have been contextualized with the help of historians and political scientists, who reveal that

it was not only a story of greed and prestige, but also of obscure political and revisionist interests.

“Daily newspapers are the closest people have come to rehabilitating Adolf Hitler,” says John Goetz, an NDR investigative journalist who has led the project.

“Historians had not been able to understand what was there.

Nobody had been able to read the newspapers, ”he adds in a telephone conversation with EL PAÍS.

Until now, only a few verbatim quotes were known because

– and other outlets to which he sold the rights, such as

in the United Kingdom – stopped publication and the originals never left the Gruner+Jahr publisher's safe.

Goetz has recovered its content thanks to the copies that are preserved in the judicial summary of the case and has published

(März), a 672-page edition annotated by historians Heike B. Görtemaker and Hajo Funke.

Mixing intimate musings with political slogans and current facts, the fake diaries depict a strangely peace-loving and statesmanlike Hitler who was unaware of what was happening to the Jews.

Following NDR's analysis, the phrase with which

publicized his discovery — "The history of the Third Reich will have to be largely rewritten" — takes on new meaning.

The authors of the forgery wanted readers to believe that Hitler was unaware of the genocide.

“It is a key moment of Holocaust revisionism in German history that has hitherto been misunderstood,” Goetz notes.

Cover of Stern magazine with the exclusive of Hitler's diaries.

On July 31, 1941, when the genocide had already begun, the fake Hitler writes that Jews must be persuaded to emigrate quickly or "seek a safe area in the occupied territories where they can feed and fend for themselves."

The entry of January 20, 1942, the day the Wannsee conference was held that organized the deportation of all Europe's Jews for their subsequent extermination, makes your hair stand on end.

“I await the reports of the conference on the Jewish question.

We must find a place in the East where these Jews can support themselves, ”he insists.

It is not just the alleged ignorance of the Holocaust.

The fake Hitler is also against racial laws, against book burning, he asks the military to treat the Poles well... According to the newspapers, he is not responsible for any of the Nazi crimes.

It is impossible not to wonder how the editors of the magazine could have read it, believed it, and published it.

ego and greed

Ego, greed, blindness to the possibility of giving an exclusive with worldwide impact... The details of the process are fascinating.

The weekly

published in 2013 the story of Felix Schmidt, the only one of the three editors in chief of the magazine at that time who was still alive (he is currently 88 years old).

Star journalist Gerd Heidemann, nicknamed The Hound, was the talk of the newsroom because of his Nazi allegiances, recalls Schmidt.

He collected Third Reich memorabilia and had bought and restored—going deep into debt—Göring's yacht, where he hosted parties with former SS officers.

Heidemann bypassed the editors-in-chief and sold the story directly to the group's managers in 1981. The newspapers, he said, were traveling with the dictator's other belongings on a plane that crashed on April 21, 1945, a few days before Hitler's resignation. committed suicide in the Berlin bunker besieged by the Red Army.

The accident happened.

Farmers in the area (then in the German Democratic Republic) had collected them and a high-ranking GDR officer had kept them for decades.

He couldn't reveal his name because he was in danger.

Safeguarding the identity of his source was a final condition.

Schmidt acknowledged that he was dazzled by Heidemann's story, which included spy movie scenes such as the exchange to physically get the volumes.

He said that he and his source threw the money, first, and the newspapers, from window to window of two moving cars while traveling on a highway in the GDR.

The magazine commissioned two historians to verify its content and calligraphic experts to confirm that it was the dictator's handwriting, in a process that lasted almost two years and was kept strictly secret.

English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, famous for his hit

, did the same for

.

But as Robert Harris recounts in his essay

, he barely spent a couple of hours examining the original volumes - which he did not understand because of the convoluted Gothic handwriting and because he could read German with difficulty - and he found himself pressured to give a verdict without being able to study carefully. carefully the transcripts.

Kujau forged 60 volumes, ranging from 1932 to 1945, for which the magazine spent 9.3 million marks.

Both he and Heidemann were sentenced to several years in jail for fraud.

It turned out that the journalist had kept 4.4 million marks from the magazine that never reached Kujau, although it is generally considered that he did not participate in the fixing and strongly believed that the newspapers were good.

The Federal Archives and the Federal Criminal Police Office (BPK) determined in a matter of days that those notebooks were a forgery, and "quite crude", they added.

For starters, the role was post World War II.

Kujau had copied pages of Hitler's speeches and history books like the Max Domarus anthology and embellished them with banal notes on everyday life and his coexistence with Eva Braun.

“Eva says I have bad breath again.

She is from my stomach, ”writes the fake Hitler on December 2, 1940. He had aged the paper by wetting it with tea.

Konrad Kujau, the forger of Hitler's diaries, in 1996, during the presentation of the book 'The secret diaries of Konrad Kujau', in which he describes how he came up with the fraud.

Werner Baum (Getty)

The shocking story of one of the first global

has fueled various works of fiction, such as the 1992 satirical film

, depicting Kujau as a greedy but harmless forger, or the

2021 miniseries

. , became a famous character, a regular on TV shows.

For years he dedicated himself to painting forgeries of famous paintings, which he signed with his name and sold with some success.

“He has been considered a likeable and intelligent guy who, like a modern German Robin Hood, laughed at powerful people out of millions of euros.

We liked that story,” says Goetz.

The full publication of the newspapers allows us to see him as the dangerous revisionist Nazi that he was.

And she sheds light on her time, the early eighties, almost four decades after the end of the war: “Germany is famous for being a country that has known how to deal exemplarily with its fascist past, but this episode shows that, at least in 1983, That was still not true."

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