On April 20, 1945, while the stooped and shuffling Adolf Hitler, reticent to celebrate his birthday, received his usual regimen of injections and presided over a war conference in which he came to grips with his dire situation, Operation Seraglio was elsewhere underway. This operation was what many had been looking forward to, an evacuation of numerous members of Hitler’s entourage from the bunker, bound for Berchtesgaden. Aside from some evacuees, the operation was also packing up and flying out a fortune in valuables and a library’s worth of government documents. Around ten heavy trunks were carried out of the bunker and loaded onto a truck that day, and the convoy made their way to an airfield north of Berlin, dodging Allied air strikes along the way. These trunks with their mysterious contents were loaded onto a waiting plane, along with sixteen passengers. But their flight was doomed. No one knows exactly what struck them. Whether it was friendly fire from German anti-aircraft guns or an American fighter pilot who took them down, down indeed they went, crashing near the border of Czechoslovakia, outside a village called Boernersdorf. Villagers ran to the scene to find the transport burning and to hear the screams of one occupant inside. According to Hans Baur, Hitler’s pilot and one witness to his eventual suicide, when he informed Hitler of the disappearance of this flight, Hitler grew pale and appeared greatly disturbed, saying, “In that plane were all my private archives, that I had intended as a testament to posterity. It is a catastrophe!” After the fall of Berlin, the US Counter-Intelligence Corps, or CIC, searched for such private archives and documents, all of which would have great historical value. Some of these already resided in Berchtesgaden, at Hitler’s vacation residence, the Berghof, including Hitler’s love letters to Eva Braun, which had been hidden in a cave by Nazis. Eva had ordered them to be posthumously burnt, but instead a certain SS captain kept them. Additional correspondence stolen by this individual included letters between Hitler and Himmler. Despite the CIC catching wind of this document hoard and raiding the SS captain’s family home, they never recovered either set of letters. Afterward, rumors of the existence of Hitler’s personal diaries cropped up, and when the CIC investigated, they always considered it a possibility that the documents they were chasing were actually his letters to Eva Braun or Heinrich Himmler and not diaries. Historians came to the consensus that Adolf Hitler, who hated writing and much preferred to give dictation, never actually kept a diary, and as the decades passed, researchers learned of certain troves of dictated material that might also have sparked the rumors of Hitler having left private diaries behind. The first were the Bormann Notes, transcripts of conversations had at Hitler’s dinner table, published in 1953 as Hitler’s Table Talk. Some of these notes, covering 1943 to 1944, were missing, and considering their nature, with Hitler’s long and boring monologues on whatever topic arose, these could easily have been mistaken for diaries. Finally, in the 1970s, as journalist James O’Donnell researched the mysterious ten trunks lost in the plane crash for his book, The Bunker, he came to the conclusion that the historical documents that Hitler was mourning the loss of were likely the transcripts of his war conferences, which Hitler demanded be transcribed by stenographers in order to establish for posterity what he believed to be his military genius. But one particular passage from O’Donnell’s book would be latched onto and used to resurrect the rumor of Hitler’s diaries: “[D]ocuments have a way of surviving crashes,” O’Donnell wrote. “One is left with the nagging thought that some Bavarian hayloft, chicken coop, or pigsty may well have been waterproofed and insulated with the millions of words of the Führer’s unpublished, ineffable utterances, simply hauled away at dawn as loot from a burning German transport plane.”

Previously, I introduced the character of Hugh Trevor-Roper, the historian who was tasked by British intelligence with establishing the fate of Hitler, and whose work, The Last Days of Hitler, went a long way toward establishing the historical certainty of Hitler’s demise in his air raid shelter. Go back and read the previous blog post/podcast transcript, The Specter of Hitler’s Survival, for more on that. In the decades since the 1940s, Trevor-Roper had become one of the most respected historians and essayists in the world. His expertise was actually 16th and 17th-century England, but because of his work during the war, he remained an authority on Nazi Germany. He had taken the noble title of Baron Dacre of Glanton, and served as a director of the mostly respected British Times Newspapers. In the 60s and 70s, he began to seem like something of a dinosaur, receiving staunch criticism from postcolonialist historians about some of his outmoded and frankly racist comments regarding African history. Thus, when the editor of The Times called him in 1983 to say the private diaries of Hitler had been discovered and they wanted him to authenticate them, he came to view it as a way to make himself relevant again. But at first, he thought it was a joke. It was April Fools Day, after all, and Trevor-Roper knew quite well that Hitler had stopped writing by his own hand for the last decade of his life, finding it actually painful. Thus he had always dismissed any claims of the existence of his diaries. When it became clear that the Times editor was serious, and that the paper’s new owner, the Australian newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch, was prepared to pay a large sum for English publication rights of the diaries, Trevor-Roper began to see possibilities. After all, his most popular book since The Last Days of Hitler, The Hermit of Peking, had involved the debunking of a diary as a forgery. In the book, Trevor-Roper exposed oriental scholar Sir Edmund Backhouse as a fraud and specifically discredited one of his principal sources, a supposed Chinese diary describing the Boxer Rebellion firsthand, claimed to have been recovered from a burned building. And back in the fifties, when the Bormann Notes were discovered and authenticated, he was given the opportunity of writing the introduction for them when they were published as Hitler’s Table Talk. Thus, whether or not these supposed Hitler diaries were genuine, Trevor-Roper could benefit from being involved, either by debunking them or by introducing them to the world. So what at first he took for an April Fools prank he began to view as an opportunity.

Hugh Trevor-Roper (detail of an image dedicated to public domain, courtesy Dutch National Archives)

Hugh Trevor-Roper had no love for Rupert Murdoch. As a director of the Times, he had opposed the media mogul’s acquisition of the paper, fearing he would tarnish the reputation of the Times and the Sunday Times by turning them into tabloids like his other papers, which eventually he did. Indeed, when Murdoch was negotiating the purchase of the papers, Trevor-Roper and the rest of the directors forced him to sign a pledge to preserve the integrity of the publications, though this would prove entirely toothless. Despite his dislike for Rupert Murdoch, Trevor-Roper agreed to authenticate the diaries, but only as long as he wouldn’t be rushed. He was not fluent in German, so he would have to be given the complete transcript and be given time to evaluate the diaries’ contents. Of course, he was assured, he would have all the time he needs, but a week later, before boarding a flight for Zurich to see the diaries, he was informed that Murdoch was against the clock and competing with other newspapers for the publication rights and would require Trevor-Roper’s assessment of their authenticity immediately, which was not what they had originally agreed to. Nevertheless, Trevor-Roper remained hopeful that he could take advantage of the occasion. On the plane to Zurich, he examined a transcript of a portion of the diaries that were of especial interest. These entries appeared to settle a historical mystery, indicating that Hitler did indeed know about Rudolf Hess’s secret peace mission to Britain and Hitler’s intention to disavow knowledge of the effort only if it failed. Listeners may recall me talking about Nazi Party leader Rudolf Hess and his unauthorized 1941 solo flight back in my episode on supposed psychic spies, because of Hess’s reliance on astrology and the notion that British intelligence may have gulled him into flying off to arrange peace talks using phony horoscopes. The version of events contained in the diaries caused Trevor-Roper to be even more certain that they were a fraud, since he knew of multiple accounts recording Hitler’s shocked reaction to the news of Hess’s flight, all of them contradicting the notion that he knew about it beforehand. Yet despite all these doubts, when Trevor-Roper appeared to examine the diaries at a bank in Zurich, he was taken aback to find not only a diary, but 58 volumes of a diary, along with an entire trove of Hitler’s personal things, his paintings and sketches, even the helmet he wore in the First World War. The directors and editors of the German magazine Stern, who were selling the rights to publish the diaries to the English-speaking world ahead of their own publication of them in German, assured Trevor-Roper that the diaries were genuine, telling him that three handwriting experts had authenticated the writing, that they had confirmed the provenance of the artifacts, that they had been salvaged from the plane that had crashed in 1945 in Boernersdorf, that they had confirmed the identity of the diaries’ supplier, and that the paper of the diaries had passed chemical testing to demonstrate its age. Considering all of this, as well as the reputation of the magazine Stern, and further believing that no forger would spend so much time forging so many volumes when just a few would do the trick, Trevor-Roper began to believe. He signed a non-disclosure to the effect that he wouldn’t discuss the diaries with anyone, and when the Times editor called him at his hotel room later, he said the fateful words, “I think they’re genuine.”

Later that month, Trevor-Roper observed further red flags that should have piqued his suspicions when he returned to Germany to meet the investigative journalist from Stern who had turned up the diaries. This reporter, Gerd Heidemann, was an odd fellow. He waited for Trevor-Roper at the airport, and at first, Trevor-Roper mistook the man for his driver. After this awkward start, they drove off to view Heidemann’s archive of historical artifacts that he had turned up during his investigations. As it turned out, it was a massive collection of Nazi memorabilia. The historian in Trevor-Roper was delighted by all the seemingly genuine historical objects, and he remained enthralled as Heidemann presented his further collection of Mussolini artifacts. He didn’t start to realize Heidemann had an unhealthy obsession with violent despots until his host showed him a further object: the underwear of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Still, a fanatical collector like Heidemann, called “The Bloodhound” by his colleagues, would be just the sort of person to sniff out new finds like the Hitler diaries in the illicit Nazi memorabilia market. But when Heidemann began showing him photos of a man he claimed was Martin Bormann and saying he had spoken to him, that Borman was still alive, Trevor-Roper realized that Heidemann may have been something of a gullible fellow. It was Heidemann’s own magazine, Stern, that had recently proven to the satisfaction of the world that Bormann, Hitler’s personal secretary, had never escaped Berlin. Still, though, Trevor-Roper thought that surely Stern’s editors and directors knew Heidemann was this unreliable and had properly vetted the diaries. They had assured him of the handwriting’s authentication, the confirmation of the provenance, and the supportive chemical test results. Once he’d returned home, he received a phone call from Phillip Knightley, a respected special correspondent for The Sunday Times, who voiced serious concerns about the authenticity of the diaries. Knightley had written a memo after learning of the burgeoning story, urging caution, questioning how thoroughly the diaries had been examined by experts, questioning the narrative of their provenance, and reminding everyone at the paper, and specifically Rupert Murdoch, of times when journalists had been duped by similar forgeries in the past, hopeful that The Times would not now allow themselves to be made fools of in the same way. Murdoch had ignored the memo. Finally, when The Times was about to publish breaking news of the diaries’ discovery along with Trevor-Roper’s assertion that they were genuine, Knightley called him, mostly to be reassured by the venerable historian that his anxieties were groundless. Trevor-Roper obliged, assuring Knightley that the diaries were certainly real, but when he got off the phone, all his former misgivings reoccurred to him: Hitler’s known aversion to writing, the ludicrous notion that the cunning and obstinate Hitler would have approved of Rudolf Hess’s doomed solo mission for peace, and the indication that Heidemann, the man who had brought the diaries to Stern, was a credulous fool. Suddenly, Trevor-Roper had a sinking feeling that he’d made a terrible mistake, but already papers were coming off the presses linking his reputation to the diaries forever.

Gerd Heidemann. Image credit: AP (fair use)

When news of the diaries’ discovery was trumpeted to the English-speaking world, it was met with much skepticism, but this was to be expected. Indeed, one of the loudest critical voices was that of David Irving, a Holocaust denying historian whom I discussed in my episode on Holocaust denialism, “The Wrong Side of History.” In fact, David Irving was recognized as something of an expert at uncovering and authenticating historical documents, as well as debunking forgeries, so his qualms that he was aware of these diaries and that they were fakes should have been taken more seriously. However, Irving’s reputation as a historical negationist, using specious arguments to exonerate Hitler of his war crimes, meant that his objection didn’t carry the weight it might have otherwise. Behind the scenes, though, as The Sunday Times prepared their blockbuster edition, publishing actual excerpts of the diaries, Trevor-Roper, to his credit, had begun the painful process of backpedaling. He called the editorial staff just as they were celebrating the edition going to press and indicated, to their horror, that he not only had become uncertain about the diaries’ authenticity, but that he was “doing a 180-degree turn,” as those who remember the telephone conversation put it. Editor Frank Giles, stoic in the face of a great scandal, hung up and called Rupert Murdoch to tell him that their principal authenticator, the man on whose reputation their entire story was staked, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, had changed his assessment of the diaries, and asked if they should stop the presses. Murdoch answered in his Australian accent: “Fuck Dacre. Publish.” That Sunday, as 1.4 million copies of the paper were circulated, Trevor-Roper flew to Hamburg to meet with Heidemann again and clarify some details about his discovery of the diaries. Heidemann had always insisted on keeping his source anonymous, and that in itself was understandable. Smugglers of Nazi documents might face consequences if their identities were divulged, and in the past, the sources of other finds, like the papers of Goebbels and Bormann, had remained unidentified to the public. But Trevor-Roper was further troubled when Heidemann actually changed his story about provenance and suddenly stated that the other items in the archive, the artifacts that had been displayed with the diaries and had gone a long way toward convincing Trevor-Roper of their authenticity, had come into his possession separately, from a different source. Trevor-Roper came away from the meeting even more certain that he had blundered in giving his assessment without taking the proper time to be certain. The next day, he attended a press conference at the Stern offices, and when he spoke, much to the discomfort of the magazine representatives present, he admitted that the provenance of the diaries was “shaky” and that he regretted that “the normal method of historical verification [was] sacrificed to the requirements of a journalistic scoop.” As if this admission were not explosive enough, suddenly the Holocaust denier David Irving burst into the press conference waving photocopies of the diaries that he had obtained and declaring them to be forgeries. He challenged Trevor-Roper and the editors of Stern to say whether the ink had been tested for age, a question that they could not answer. The reporters present began to chant the word: “Ink! Ink! Ink!” One can hardly imagine a more humiliating end to the career of Hugh Trevor-Roper than this, being made to look like a fool on television by a Holocaust denier.

Sure enough, the news came out shortly afterward. The diaries were a fraud, and as a further stain upon Trevor-Roper’s reputation, they weren’t even a very sophisticated fraud. The forger had apparently used regular school notebooks, the paper of which contained a whitener that proved it was not as old as it was purported to be. Moreover, it seems the forger had given the notebooks an artificial look of aging simply by dipping them in tea. But this was not the end of the obvious tells. The notebooks’ binding contained polyester and viscose, which did not exist at the time the diaries were supposedly composed, and the ink in which the entries were written, which David Irving had rightly insisted be tested, also proved to be of post-war manufacture. And numerous typed labels for volumes comprising thirteen tumultuous years had all been typed on the same typewriter. Hugh Trevor-Roper was immediately suspicious of the content of the single passage given to him in transcription, that of the Hess flight, but if he had been able to read the entire diary, the truth would have been utterly apparent. The forger clearly had no historical training, as the entries contained chronological inconsistencies throughout. As it turned out, nearly the entirety of the diaries was a first-person retelling of the events chronicled in one work, Hitler’s Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945 by Max Domarus, and reproduced the inaccuracies of that book. As for the handwriting, there is no doubt that the forger had mastered Hitler’s signature, but authentication of the handwriting by three experts was misleading. First of all, it was more like two experts, and unbelievably, these handwriting analysts had been given separate forgeries from the same source to use as comparison! Unsurprisingly, they found all these forgeries to be consistent because of course they were forged by the same hand. As the affair unraveled later, it turned out Trevor-Roper had been egregiously misled when he examined the diaries in the Zurich bank. The Stern editors told him the paper had been chemically tested, but that was not true. In fact, it was still in the process of being chemically tested, and preliminary results had shown that other items in the trove of artifacts, such as Hitler’s artwork, contained paper whitener and were thus forgeries. Indeed, this was why Heidemann had changed his story to suggest the diaries had come from a different source. And it was a further lie that the Stern editors had confirmed their provenance and the identity of their source. In truth, only Heidemann had dealt with this mystery individual, if he even existed.

The forger, Konrad Kujau. Image via Museum of Hoaxes.

When the diaries were revealed to be forgeries, Rupert Murdoch was unapologetic. He had increased the readership of his papers with an entertaining though false story, and now he could also refuse to pay Stern for the rights to the fraud. He buried an mea culpa blurb in the next edition and opted to shift all blame on Stern with a new headline, emphasizing the “Hunt for the Forger.” During the course of the Times investigation, a few conspiracist claims emerged about who was behind the diaries, many of them based on the fact that the contents of the diary tended to paint Hitler in a somewhat positive light. It was thought that the diaries were a plot by surviving Nazis to rehabilitate Hitler’s image, or that they were a plot to raise money by aging former SS soldiers who no longer had a pension, or they were a plot by East Germany to destabilize West Germany by stoking Neo-Nazism. Not to be outdone by such conspiracy speculation and always on the lookout to throw some disinformation that may color perception of their rivals, the Soviet media apparatus jumped in, insisting it was all a plot by the CIA to exonerate the Nazis. While this mudslinging went on, the disgraced editors at Stern went about the real business of tracking down the forger. Suspect number one was Gerd Heidemann himself. As Trevor-Roper suspected, his colleagues did indeed know he was a kook. He had begun his career as a photographer for the magazine, taking on the occasional dangerous assignment, but had transitioned into investigative journalism. He had a tendency to go off the rails and grow obsessive when digging into a story. For example, he previously worked on a piece about the anonymous German novelist who used the pseudonym B. Traven, and eventually came to the dubious conclusion, based on a resemblance in a photograph, that Traven was the son of Kaiser Wilhelm II. He likewise fell down the rabbit hole when he began taking an interest in Nazi memorabilia. It started when he bought Hermann Goering’s yacht, the upkeep of which proved to be very expensive, but the ownership of which put him in a peculiar position to draw out old, nostalgic Nazis and get them talking. He began hosting soirees on the yacht and recording his Nazi guests chatting over champagne, and he eventually convinced his editor that he was on to something, that he could maybe parlay this into a scoop about escaped Nazis. So he took money from the magazine, as well as from book publishers, buying memorabilia and coming to identify more and more with the Nazis he spent so much time with. Indeed, Stern’s managing editor had forbade him to continue his investigations, especially when Heidemann became so utterly convinced (again based on a dubious photograph) that Martin Bormann was alive even though Stern had proven his death. It seemed as though Heidemann had lost his mind, or that he had gone full Nazi. He’d even invited his elderly Nazi friends to his wedding, which was officiated by a couple of SS generals! Nevertheless, when Heidemann told them that he had come across the Hitler diaries during the course of his investigations into the Nazi collectibles market, one news editor in charge of historical stories secretly encouraged him and funneled more money his way. Gradually, as the affair grew larger and more money was required, other editors were taken into their confidence, until finally the magazine was entirely invested in the project despite some editors’ misgivings. And when the whole thing came apart, it was Heidemann they turned to, making it clear that he must reveal his source or it would appear that he had forged the diaries himself.

Heidemann, for his part, continued to insist on the authenticity of the diaries even despite all the evidence that they had been forged, and over the course of one grueling night, his bosses grilled him and wore him down. He claimed that he was in touch with someone who was communicating with Martin Bormann, and the elusive Nazi was going to fly to Germany from South America on a Lear jet to authenticate the diaries. But Lear jets at the time could not cross the Atlantic, and besides that, Bormann was dead, they angrily shouted at him. Obviously Heidemann was a fool who was being duped by con men. Eventually, Heidemann’s resistance began to fade and he gave them a name and address. He had received the diaries from an antiques dealer named Fischer who told him that they had come into his possession from an old villager in Boernersdorf, where the transport had crashed in 1945. In reality, this antiques dealer was an incorrigible criminal named Konrad Kujau, a deserter from the East German army and convicted counterfeiter and forger who had served time in prison for evading a jail sentence. It does seem that Kujau, who had been dutifully producing the diaries for years, undertook the forgery solely for the money, but just this year, the diaries were finally published in full, and it certainly does also appear that Kujau purposely depicted Hitler as not having planned the Holocaust. Whether he truly wanted to spread this denialist view of history or whether he simply thought it would make the forgeries more valuable, perhaps to someone like David Irving who wanted to believe such a thing, remains unknown. Kujau never spoke on this. As soon as he read in the papers that his work had been exposed as forgeries, he fled his home. But with the pressure on, and his forgery workshop having been raided, he eventually surrendered himself. Despite all the other forgeries they took out of his home, Kujau lied his face off, insisting that he was just the middleman and had no idea he was dealing forgeries. However, at one point, when his interrogators discussed the amount of money Heidemann had paid him, Kujau realized that Heidemann had been skimming off the top, embezzling from the funds that Stern had allocated to pay for the diaries. Knowing that he was on the hook for the crime while Heidemann, who also had profited, was out there free, he finally confessed. He had forged them, but, he said, intent on taking some revenge, Heidemann was in on it and knew they were forged all along.

Rupert Murdoch. Image credit: David Shankbone (CC BY 3.0)

The forgery of the Hitler diaries was perhaps the greatest hoax of modern times. Certainly it was one of the most successful forgeries in that it fooled many and was only exposed as a fraud when it achieved global attention. Stern paid nearly the equivalent of $4 million for them, which accounting for inflation would today be around $11 million, and that’s not even considering the money Stern almost earned from selling the rights to the fraud. The affair destroyed the reputation of many involved. For example, Frank Giles, editor of The Sunday Times, who boasted a long and illustrious journalistic career, died in 2019, and even though he can hardly be blamed for the scandal considering the farce of its authentication and Rupert Murdoch’s decision to publish despite rising suspicions that the diaries weren’t authentic, Giles’s obituaries were devoted almost entirely to the Hitler diaries fiasco. When he learned that the forger Kujau had implicated him, Gerd Heidemann’s first concern was for his own reputation. “I don’t want to be remembered as the man responsible for the greatest flop in newspaper history,” he confided to a friend. He and Kujau were tried together, and they both were sentenced to around four and a half years in prison, Kujau for defrauding Stern and Heidemann for his embezzlement. As for Hugh-Trevor Roper, even though it can be argued that he was lied to and forced to rush his judgment, he also suffered a grievous blow to his reputation as a shrewd and diligent historian. Indeed, his error in judgment in the Hitler diaries affair is frequently used by purveyors of the myth of Hitler’s survival as a way to somehow discredit all of his previous work investigating Hitler’s suicide. Thus the hoax had repercussions on history and misinformation far wider than one might expect. For example, while Heidemann was ruined, Kujau, the real culprit, parlayed his lies into a career. He opened a successful shop, selling his forgeries to the public as “genuine fakes,” and his forged artwork can still be found in books published after the scandal, attributing them falsely to Adolf Hitler. And worst of all, we find that Rupert Murdoch came out of the scandal entirely unscathed. He ended up losing no money on the forgeries and actually profiting from the affair, as his Times newspapers recorded a boost in circulation. One can tentatively draw a line between this affair, which seems to have taught Murdoch that entertainment trumps journalistic integrity and truth, to the propagandistic practices of Murdoch’s NewsCorp and specifically his FOX Corporation and Fox News Channel in America. The Hitler diaries showed him that he can knowingly publish falsehoods, ignore experts and science, and simply change the narrative when lies he has amplified are ultimately exposed. In his zeal for breaking news, he has broken the news. This same greed and cynicism was on full display when Fox News promoted election fraud lies even though Murdoch has said under oath that he thought such claims lacked merit. It remains to be seen whether the current defamation lawsuit in which he is embroiled will change the way he distorts reality with his media empire, but I, for one, am not holding out much hope.

Until next time, remember, if you or someone you love still clings to election fraud claims because Fox News promoted them, the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit has proven beyond doubt that neither Murdoch nor the worst of the Fox hosts, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, ever actually believed these conspiracy lies. Not that definitive proof ever swayed folks from believing nonsense.
*Deep sigh.

Breaking News: The Hitler Diaries Fiasco

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