The Sunday Times top brass could have paid closer attention, says Jonathan Sale DIARY OF A


denier who knocked around with ex-Nazis (to use that prefix very loosely). “Would you,” Irving asked, “like me to research


HITLER HOAX


T


he Führer would have been furious had he somehow foreseen it: the Hitler Diaries hoax was the gift that went on giving. Forty years ago, it was the biggest


media story in town, inspiring countless articles, a non-fiction book by novelist Robert Harris and an unmissable (particularly to journalists) television series with Barry Humphreys playing Rupert Murdoch, Jonathan Price as duped reporter Gerd Heidemann and Alexei Sayle as Konrad Kujau, the forger who turned out bogus documents on an almost while-you-wait basis. Yet it was no joke to the poor journalists of


The Sunday Times and The Times, who were lumbered with a forgery taken as gospel truth by the less professional staff on the German news magazine Stern. The dodgy diaries surfaced recently when


German public broadcaster NDR put them all online. They turned out to be absurdly anodyne: Eva Braun has got a couple of puppies; Hitler has bad breath. They were so lacking in unpleasant details like, well, gas chambers, that an early theory, now revived, is that they were a PR plot by neo-Nazis to whitewash Hitler’s posthumous reputation. By contrast, Radio Moscow declared that the CIA was in fact behind the creation of these memoirs. Against this, it could be said that the forger of the Führer fantasy was the sole creator, interested only in the cash they brought him, and was totally without convictions (apart from, of course, his own for fraud). Either way, the faked Führer jottings were far less gripping than the storm their publication created.


18 | theJournalist “On The Sunday Times, we had picked up word


that Hitler was alleged to have left behind not the Hitler Diaries but some documents,” recalls the then features editor Magnus Linklater. Later the editor of The Scotsman, he is still exasperated after the passage of 40 years. This rumour turned out to relate to alleged


diaries and, in December 1982, it reached Linklater in the shape of an offer from ‘the dreaded David Irving’, the far right Holocaust


The forger of fascist artefacts


KONRAD KUJAU was the forger who dashed off and sold Hitler’s diaries to Stern, the German news magazine that sold the syndication rights to Murdoch for The Sunday Times. A window cleaner and


petty crook, Kujau started out forging luncheon vouchers and ended up forging the diaries of Adolf Hitler A compulsive liar, he was a collector – and forger – of Fascist artefacts, which he smuggled from


East to West Germany. They were often accompanied by letters of authentication from eminent (and safely dead) Nazis; these were forged too. After a while, he put


the word about that he could get his hands on the hitherto unknown diaries allegedly written by the Führer. This reached the


eager ears of an obsessive collector of Nazi memorabilia named Gerd


it?” In view of Irving’s ‘toxic reputation’, Linklater replied, “We’ll stand back from that.” A much better researcher was Gitta Sereny, the


paper’s go-to expert on the Nazi nightmare. She flew to Hamburg, where she spoke – on the phone – to a professor who had seen ‘an interesting yearbook’ and could introduce her to some equally interesting people. These contacts could well have blown the gaff on the forgery by revealing the official Nazi publications from which much of the info in the diaries had actually been copied. Sadly, these informed folk were in Stuttgart and the ‘rabid economy drive’ of the paper’s new owner, Rupert Murdoch, ruled out the frittering away of another airline ticket to visit them. “If The Sunday Times had not decided onthis false economy, the events of the next three months might have been very different”, acccording to Robert Harris, who was to join The Sunday Times much later. His factual Selling Hitler begins like a PG Wodehouse story: “On April Fool’s Day 1983, the distinguished British historian Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, first Baron Dacre of Glanton (no, not a relation of Paul – Ed) was telephoned at his country home in Scotland by the Assistant Editor of The Times, Mr Colin Webb.” Yes, April 1. It was as if the calendar was trying to warn him. The former Oxford history professor


Heidemann, a staffer on Stern. Going behind the back


of a highly sceptical editor, the gullible Heidemann persuaded a handful of equally gullible executives to hand over a cool nine


million marks as a payment to Kujau. The forger, who had


deceived Heidemann big time, was furious that the journalist would turn out to have kept much of the nine million in cash for himself. The set of 60-plus


diaries took time to cobble together. After all, Kujau had to wait for the ink to dry, not to mention the tea he poured over them to give a suitably antique look. When his wheeze


was rumbled, Murdoch got his money back from Stern. Plus The Sunday Times put on 60,000 readers.


1985 SHUTTERSTOCK


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